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Books, A to Z On 1 of the 12 ideas

Aesop’s Fables

c. 550 BCE

1 Conflicts

Ideas we have traced through this book

10

Live one day at a time

Conflicts

The fable holds the opposite: provide today for tomorrow. The one who sang all summer and stored no food must “dance supperless to bed in the winter”. Its target is idleness, not worry.

  1. 23 BCE
    “A wise deity shrouds in obscure darkness the events of the time to come, and smiles if a mortal is solicitous beyond the law of nature. Be mindful to manage duly that which is present.”

    Horace, Odes. Earliest we can find, about 530 years earlier.

  2. c. 550 BCE
    “If you were foolish enough to sing all the summer, you must dance supperless to bed in the winter.”

Full text read.

Aesop’s Fables, ‘The Ants and the Grasshopper’, tr. George Fyler Townsend (1867).

Project Gutenberg eBook #21, gutenberg.org/ebooks/21.

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