An old Greek source comments that "many people have good natural abilities which are ruined by idleness; on the other hand, sobriety, zeal and perseverance can prevail over indolence".
[4] When the fable entered the European emblem tradition, the precept to 'hasten slowly' (festina lente) was recommended to lovers by Otto van Veen in his Emblemata Amorum (1608), using a relation of the story.
There, the infant figure of Eros is shown passing through a landscape and pointing to the tortoise as it overtakes the sleeping hare under the motto "perseverance winneth.
"[5] Later interpreters too have asserted that the fable's moral is the proverbial "the more haste, the worse speed" (Samuel Croxall) or have applied to it the biblical observation that "the race is not to the swift" (Ecclesiastes 9.11).
In the social commentary of Charles H. Bennett's The Fables of Aesop translated into Human Nature (1857), the hare is changed to a thoughtful craftsman prostrate under the foot of a capitalist entrepreneur.
[8] In Classical times, the story was annexed to a philosophical problem by Zeno of Elea in one of many demonstrations that movement is impossible to define satisfactorily.
[14] Another departure from the ordinary in Grandville's etching is the choice of a mole (complete with dark glasses) rather than, as usual, a fox as the judge at the finishing line.
In the mid-19th century, the French animal painter Philibert Léon Couturier also devoted an oil painting to the fable in which, as in Grandville's illustration, the tortoise is shown racing upright.
In the following year a painted steel sculpture by Michael Browne and Stuart Smith was set up near the cross-country finish line at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.
[33] There have also been several verbal settings of Aesop's fable: The many other variants of the story in oral folk tradition appear worldwide and are classed as Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 275.
Broadly this is of two types: either the slower animal jumps on the other's back or tail and hops off at the end when the creature turns round to see where his challenger has got to, or else he is deceived by lookalikes substituting themselves along the course.