The Snake and the Crab

Speaking of The Snake and the Crab in Ancient Greece was the equivalent of the modern idiom, 'Pot calling the kettle black'.

The first known mention of the snake and the crab is found in a drinking song dating from the late 6th or early 5th century BCE: Since the movement of both creatures is far from direct, this is as much as to say that the pot should not call the kettle black.

He titles it L'écrevisse et sa fille (The lobster and her daughter, XII.10)[9] but begins with a eulogy of political deviousness: before telling a fable of a mere five lines out of a total of thirty.

Vincent van Gogh's painting of Two Crabs is visually much the same, although the National Gallery speculates that it might "probably" be an imitation[10] of a Japanese woodblock print by Hokusai.

The earlier fable was also set in German by Andre Asriel as Die Schlange und der Krebs for mixed a cappella voices as part of his 6 Fabeln nach Aesop in 1972.