The Lion, the Bear and the Fox is one of Aesop's Fables

Aesop's Fables

Aesop's Fables or the Aesopica are a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and story-teller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE. The fables remain a popular choice for moral education of children today...

 that is numbered 147 in the Perry Index

Perry Index

The Perry Index is a widely-used index of "Aesop's Fables" or "Aesopica", the fables credited to Aesop, the story-teller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BC...

. There are similar story types of both eastern and western origin in which two disputants lose the object of their dispute to a third.

Western versions and variants

There are ancient Greek versions of the fable, and it was included in the Medici Manuscript collection of Aesop's fables dating from the 1470s. However, its earliest appearance in another language is as number 60 in the collection of 150 fables in Latin verse by the Austrian poet Candidus Pantaleon (1604). Here a lion and a bear simultaneously attack a fawn and fight over it until they collapse from fatigue. Then a fox that has been watching them snatches their prey and makes off with it. The moral Pantaleon draws at the end is Saepe alter alterius fruitur labribus (from the labours of others it is often another who profits). The story seems to have entered printed collections of Aesop's fables from this source. In his 1692 retelling, Sir Roger L'Estrange anglicizes the conclusion as 'Tis the Fate of all Gotham

Wise Men of Gotham

Wise Men of Gotham is the early name given to the people of the village of Gotham, Nottinghamshire, in allusion to their reputed simplicity. If tradition is to be believed, the people of Gotham were not so very simple.- Legend :...

 Quarrels, when Fools go together by the Ears, to have Knaves run away with the Stakes'.

Earlier European versions of this type of story feature two other animals fighting over a find or their prey, only to have a third come and steal it. One of the earliest in English is referred to briefly in Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer , known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey...

's The Knight's Tale

The Knight's Tale

"The Knight's Tale" is the first tale from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. The story introduces many typical aspects of knighthood such as courtly love and ethical dilemmas. The story is written in iambic pentameter end-rhymed couplets.-Story:...

(1490):

We strive as did the two hounds for the bone,

They fought all day, and yet their part was none;

There came a kite by, while that they were wrath,

And bore away the bone between them both. (CT 1177-80)

A variation on this became proverbial as "While two dogs are fighting for a bone, a third runs away with it".
The French fabulist Jean de la Fontaine

Jean de La Fontaine

Jean de La Fontaine was the most famous French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, and in French regional...

 transformed the story into his tale of Les voleurs et l'âne (I.13) in which two thieves fight over the question of whether to keep or sell a stolen donkey, only to have another thief ride it off while they are doing so. La Fontaine draws a political moral, likening the dispute to a contemporary war between Hungary and Turkey over the province of Transylvania

History of Transylvania

Transylvania is a historical region in the central part of the Romania. In ancient times it was part of the Dacian Kingdom and Roman Dacia. Since the 10th century, Transylvania became part of the Kingdom of Hungary...

. In the Walloon

Walloon language

Walloon is a Romance language which was spoken as a primary language in large portions of the Walloon Region of Belgium and some villages of Northern France until the middle of the 20th century. It belongs to the langue d'oïl language family, whose most prominent member is the French language...

 dialect imitation made by François Bailleux in 1851, Lès voleûrs èt l'ågne, that author likens the dispute between the thieves to two lovers fighting over a girl while a third has his way with her.

Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist and satirist...

 also reinterprets the story in the "Old Saws with New Teeth" section of his Fantastic Fables (1899):

Two Thieves, having stolen a Piano and being unable to divide it fairly without a remainder, went to law about it and continued the contest as long as either one could steal a dollar to bribe the judge. When they could give no more an Honest Man came along and by a single small payment obtained a judgment and took the Piano home, where his daughter used it to develop her biceps muscles, becoming a famous pugiliste.

Bierce takes the hint for the conduct of his 'honest man' from Samuel Croxall

Samuel Croxall

Samuel Croxall was an Anglican churchman, writer and translator, particularly noted for his edition of Aesop's Fables.-Early career:...

's Fables of Aesop and others: translated into English with instructive applications (1722 and often reissued). The 'application' for the fable of "The Lion, the Bear and the Fox" reflects on the foolishness of applying to lawyers in disputes over property: 'When people go to law about an uncertain title, and have spent their whole estates in the contest, nothing is more common than for some little pettifogging attorney to step in, and secure it to himself.' Thomas Bewick

Thomas Bewick

Thomas Bewick was an English wood engraver and ornithologist.- Early life and apprenticeship :Bewick was born at Cherryburn House in the village of Mickley, in the parish of Ovingham, Northumberland, England, near Newcastle upon Tyne on 12 August 1753...

 indicates the same moral in his illustrated Select Fables of Aesop (1784). There the preface to Fable 20, titled "The Lion, the Tyger and the Fox", warns that 'The intemperate rage of clients gives the lawyer an opportunity of seizing the property in dispute'.

Eastern variations

Just as the story of the dogs who lost everything while fighting over a bone became proverbial in England, the Indian proverbial equivalent is expressed as 'monkey's justice'. The story there is of two cats who fight over a piece of bread, or butter or cheese, and go before a monkey to adjudicate their shares. He cuts it into two unequal halves and has to nibble first one then the other to get them equal until the cats beg him to stop; claiming it as his fee, the monkey gobbles the remainder and leaves them nothing.

The fable involves the same distrust of lawyers as in the West and it is this parallel that is underlined when the story began to appear in European sources. One of the earliest examples is in Jean-Baptiste Perrin’s Fables Amusantes (1771) under the title "Les Deux Chats et le Singe" (The Two Cats and the Monkey). The same story reappears in poetic form in Alfred de Saint-Quentin's Guyanese creole variant, Dé Chat ké Makak (The Two Cats and the Monkey) and also makes an early appearance in England in Jefferys Taylor's Aesop in Rhyme.

A much earlier Indian variation on the story appears in the Buddhist scriptures as the Dabbhapuppha Jataka

Jataka

The Jātakas refer to a voluminous body of literature native to India concerning the previous births of the Buddha....

.. Here a jackal offers to arbitrate between two otters who are quarrelling over the division of a fish they have co-operated in bringing to land. The jackal awards them the head and tail and runs off with the bulk of their catch. The moral drawn is a political one:

Just as when strife arises among men,

They seek an arbiter: he's leader then,

Their wealth decays and the king's coffers gain.

The story has obvious affinities with the fable of the Lion's Share

Lion's Share

The lion's share is an idiomatic expression which develops from a number of fables ascribed to Aesop and is now used as their generic title, although they exist in several different versions...

 and the similar political moral drawn from it by some commentators. Gandhi drew a similar conclusion when applying the story of the cats and the monkey to the troubles arising from the partition of India

Partition of India

The Partition of India was the partition of British India on the basis of religious demographics that led to the creation of the sovereign states of the Dominion of Pakistan and the Union of India on 14 and 15...

 in 1947.

Artistic interpretations

The fable of "The Lion, the Bear and the Fox" figured as one of a series in the Copeland and Garrett period of late Spode

Spode

Spode is a well-known English brand of pottery and homewares based in Stoke-on-Trent.- The overview :Spode is a Stoke-on-Trent based pottery company that was founded by Josiah Spode in 1770...

 pottery between 1830-79. The designs for these were taken from the illustrations in the 1793 edition of the Rev. Samuel Croxall's Fables of Aesop.

Honoré Daumier

Honoré Daumier

Honoré Daumier was a French printmaker, caricaturist, painter, and sculptor, whose many works offer commentary on social and political life in France in the 19th century....

 made an oil painting of La Fontaine's fable (c.1858-60) which is on display in the Musée d'Orsay

Musée d'Orsay

The Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the left bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, an impressive Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1915, including paintings, sculptures, furniture,...

. It is based on a lithograph of street fighters which appeared in Le Charivari on 23 August 1845, the preliminary drawing for which is also in the same museum. The painter emphasises the fight between the thieves in the foreground, standing out against the over-all dark colouring, while in the background, hidden in the shadows, the flight of the third thief on the ass is roughly sketched in. Among other 19th century French artists who have treated the subject are François Chifflart and Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...

. The former features two thieves fighting in the lower foreground of a wide landscape, with the third galloping towards a path up the distant cliffs. Cézanne's later painting (1879/80) has a group of four thieves struggling in one corner of a dynamic seaside landscape over which loom cliffs and pines; the ass is peaceably wandering downhill towards two seated characters, one of whom is smoking.

External links

• 15th-20th century book illustrations of "The Lion, the Bear and the Fox" online