The Travellers and the Plane Tree

The historian Plutarch quotes Themistocles as applying the fable to himself, saying 'that the Athenians did not honour him or admire him, but made, as it were, a sort of plane-tree of him; sheltered themselves under him in bad weather, and as soon as it was fine, plucked his leaves and cut his branches.

One of the first to do so in French was Baron Goswin de Stassart, who included it in his collection of fables, published in 1818 and many times reprinted.

A similar story from Ancient China about the survival of a useless tree is told by the 4th century BCE Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu.

[5] A similar theme reappears in the Hecatomythium of Laurentius Abstemius as Fable 12, De arboribus pulchris et deformibus (Trees fair and crooked).

[6] Two hundred years later Roger L'Estrange included the story in his Fables of Aesop and Other Eminent Mythologists (1692) and was followed shortly afterwards by Edmund Arwaker in his verse collection, Truth in Fiction (1708).