The Trees and the Bramble

The Trees and the Bramble is a composite title which covers a number of fables of similar tendency, ultimately deriving from a Western Asian literary tradition of debate poems between two contenders.

[2] The story was for a long time limited to Greek sources and, though versions of a similar debate between other trees gained some currency in the 16th and 17th centuries, it soon fell out of favour again.

[3] Charles Hoole's influential Aesop's fables English and Latin (1657) included it under the title "Of the Peach-tree and the Apple-tree" with the moral that "meaner men do oftentimes settle the controversies of their betters",[4] and is followed more or less by Roger L'Estrange, who concludes that "Every thing would be thought greater in the World than it is".

[9] It also appears among Giovanni Maria Verdizotti's Cento favole morali (1570)[10] and Robert Dodsley placed it at the start of his Select fables of Esop and other fabulists (1764) with the comment at the end that 'the most worthless persons are generally the most presumptuous'.

[11] Dating from the time of Aesop in about 500 BCE, what appears to be an excerpt of an actual West Asian literary debate between a bramble and a pomegranate is inserted in the Aramaic story of Ahiqar that was only discovered at the start of the last century.