Wolf in sheep's clothing

Fables based on the idiom, dated no earlier than the 12th century CE, have been falsely credited to ancient Greek storyteller Aesop (620–564 BCE).

The confusion arises from the similarity of themes in Aesop's Fables concerning wolves that are mistakenly trusted, with the moral that human nature eventually shows through any disguise.

The phrase originates in the Sermon on the Mount by Jesus recorded in the Christian New Testament: "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves".

A Latin proverb emerged, Pelle sub agnina latitat mens saepe lupina (Under a sheep's skin often hides a wolfish mind).

The first fable concerning a wolf that disguises itself in a sheep's skin is told by the 12th-century Greek rhetorician Nikephoros Basilakis in his Progymnasmata (rhetorical exercises).

When night fell, the shepherd shut up the wolf in the fold with the rest of the sheep and as the fence was placed across the entrance, the sheepfold was securely closed off.

[citation needed] What may be a reference to this story occurs in an anonymous poem in the Greek Anthology in which a goat laments that it is made to suckle a wolf-cub, Not by my own will but the shepherd's folly.

[9] Yet another variation on the disguise theme was included in the Cento favole morali ("100 moral fables", 1570) of the Italian poet Giovanni Maria Verdizotti.

[13] In France, the theme of the wolf disguised in shepherd's clothing is more common and Gustave Doré's 1868 print of the subject[14] was later reused in the 1977 set of postage stamps from Burundi featuring this and other fables.

[15] A number of albums are titled A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, although most are references to the idiom and the fable is not mentioned in the words of any of the songs.

[16] In politics, the Fabian Society, a British socialist organisation founded in 1884, used a wolf in sheep's clothing in its coat of arms.

[19] The idiom has in addition been applied slightly more broadly for aggressive masquerade, where the predator is disguised as a harmless object, not necessarily the prey.