The Dog And Its Reflection

Aesop's fable

The fable as portrayed in a mediaeval bestiary

The Dog and Its Reflection (or Shadow in later translations) is one of Aesop'south Fables and is numbered 133 in the Perry Index.^[one] The Greek language original was retold in Latin and in this way was spread across Europe, instruction the lesson to be contented with what i has and non to relinquish substance for shadow. At that place also be Indian variants of the story. The morals at the end of the fable have provided both English and French with proverbs and the story has been applied to a variety of social situations.

The fable [edit]

A domestic dog that is carrying a stolen piece of meat looks down equally it is walking abreast or crossing a stream and sees its ain reflection in the h2o. Taking that for some other dog conveying something meliorate, it opens its rima oris to attack the "other" and in doing so drops what it was conveying. An indication of how old and well-known this story was is given by an allusion to it in the work of the philosopher Democritus from the fifth century BCE. Discussing the foolish human being want for more, rather than being content with what one has, he describes it as being "like the dog in Aesop'southward fable".^[2]

Many Latin versions of the fable also existed and eventually the story became incorporated into mediaeval creature lore. The Aberdeen Bestiary, written and illuminated in England effectually 1200 (meet above), asserts that "If a dog swims across a river carrying a piece of meat or anything of that sort in its oral cavity, and sees its shadow, information technology opens its oral cavity and in hastening to seize the other slice of meat, information technology loses the one it was carrying".^[3]

Versions [edit]

Although the outlines of the story remain broadly similar, sure details became modified over time. The fable was invariably referred to in Greek sources as "The dog carrying meat" later its opening words (Κύων κρέας φέρουσα), and the moral drawn there was to exist contented with what i has.^[four] Latin sources oft emphasised the fact that the canis familiaris was taken in by its own reflection (simulacrum) in the h2o, with the additional moral of not existence taken in by appearances.

Other words used to mean reflection have contributed to the culling title of the fable, "The Dog and its Shadow". In the Latin versions of Walter of England,^[5] Odo of Cheriton^[6] and Heinrich Steinhöwel's Aesop,^[7] for example, the word umbra is used. At that time it could mean both reflection and shadow, and information technology was the latter word that was preferred by William Caxton, who used Steinhöwel'due south as the footing of his own 1384 collection of the fables.^[eight] All the same, John Lydgate, in his retelling of the fable earlier in the century, had used "reflexion" instead.^[9] In his French version of the story, La Fontaine gave it the title Le chien qui lâche sa proie cascade l'ombre (The dog who relinquished his casualty for its shadow VI.17),^[10] where ombre has the same ambiguity of pregnant.

Thereafter, and specially during the 19th century, the English language preference was to use the word shadow in the fable's title. By this time, too, the dog is pictured as catching sight of himself in the water as he crosses a bridge. He is and so represented in the painting by Paul de Vos in the Museo del Prado, dating from 1638/40,^[xi] and that by Edwin Henry Landseer, which is titled "The Domestic dog and the Shadow" (1822), in the Victoria and Albert Museum.^[12] ^[13] Critics of La Fontaine had pointed out that the domestic dog could not have seen its reflection if it had been paddling or pond across the stream, as described in before sources, so crossing by a bridge would have been necessary for information technology to do so.^[14] However, a span had already been introduced into the twelfth-century Norman-French account of Marie de France^[15] and Lydgate was later to follow her in providing that item. Both besides followed a version in which information technology is a slice of cheese rather than meat that the dog carries.

Indian analogues [edit]

A story shut to Aesop's is inserted into the Buddhist scriptures as the Calladhanuggaha Jataka, where a jackal bearing a slice of flesh walks along a river bank and plunges in after the fish information technology sees swimming there. On returning from its unsuccessful hunt, the jackal finds a vulture has carried off its other prey.^[xvi] A variation deriving from this is Bidpai's story of "The Play a trick on and the Piece of Meat".^[17] There a fox is on its way home with the meat when information technology catches sight of some chickens and decides to hunt ane of them down; it is a kite that flies off with the meat it had left behind in this version.

Proverbial morals [edit]

In his retelling of the story, Lydgate had fatigued the lesson that the one "Who all coveteth, frequently he loseth all",^[18] He stated as well that this was "an olde proverb"^[nineteen] which, indeed, in the form "All covet, all lose", was later on to be quoted as the fable's moral by Roger L'Estrange.^[20]

Jean de la Fontaine prefaced his version of the legend with the moral information technology illustrates before proceeding to a cursory relation of the story. The point is not to be taken in by appearances, like the canis familiaris who attacks his reflection and falls into the water. As he struggles to swim to shore, he relaxes his grip on his plunder and loses "shadow and substance both".^[21] An allusive proverb developed from the title: Lâcher sa proie pour l'ombre (giving up the prey for the shadow).

When this idiom was glossed in a dictionary of gallicisms, withal, it was given the English language translation, "to sacrifice the substance for the shadow",^[22] which is based on the every bit proverbial opposition between shadow and substance found in English versions of the fable. Aphra Behn, in summing upward Francis Barlow's 1687 illustrated version of "The Dog and Piece of Flesh", coalesced the aboriginal proverb with the new:

The wishing Curr growne covetous of all.

To catch the Shadow letts the Substance fall.^[23]

In Roger L'Estrange'south relation of "The Dog and a Shadow", "He Chops at the Shadow and Loses the Substance"; Brooke Boothby, in his translation of the fables of Phaedrus, closes the poem of "The Canis familiaris and his Shadow" with the line "And shade and substance both were flown".^[24] The allusive proverb is glossed as "Grab not at shadows and lose the substance" in a contempo lexicon.^[25]

One other writer, Walter Pope in his Moral and political fables, aboriginal and modern (1698), suggested that the alternative maxim, "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush-league", could exist applied to the dog'south poor judgment.^[26]

Culling applications [edit]

16th-century emblem books used illustrations in order to teach moral lessons through the moving picture alone, merely sometimes found pictorial allusions to fables useful in providing a hint of their pregnant. So in his Book of Emblemes (1586), the English poet Geoffrey Whitney gives to his analogy of the legend the Latin title Mediocribus utere partis (Make employ of moderate possessions) and comments in the course of his accompanying poem,

Whome fortune heare allottes a meane estate,

Yet gives enowghe eache wante for to suffise:

That wavering wighte, that hopes for better fate,

And not content, his cawlinge doth despise,

Maie vainlie clime, but likelie still to autumn,

And live at lengthe with losse of maine and all.^[27]

Others as well treated the subject of existence content with what ane already has in an allegorical way. They include Latin versions of the fable by Gabriele Faerno, whose De Canis & Caro warns not to prefer the uncertain to the sure (Ne incerta certis anteponantur);^[28] Hieronymus Osius, with his annotate that the more some folk accept, the more they desire (Sunt, qui possideant cum plurima, plura requirunt);^[29] and Arnold Freitag, who points out the stupidity of irresolute the sure for the uncertain (Stulta certi per incertum commutatio).^[thirty] At a later on appointment the fiscal implications of "throwing good money later on bad" for uncertain gain were to exist summed up in the English phrase "It was the story of the dog and the shadow".^[31]

The fable was besides capable of political applications equally well. John Matthews adapted the fable into an assail on "the brain-sick Demagogues" of the French Revolution in pursuit of the illusion of freedom.^[32] In a British context, during the agitation running up to the 1832 Reform Human action, a pseudonymous 'Peter Pilpay' wrote a set of Fables from ancient authors, or former saws with modern instances in which appeared a topical retelling of "The Dog and the Shadow". Dedicated "to those who have something", it turned the fable's moral into a conservative appeal to stick to the old ways.^[33] And in the post-obit decade, a fellow member of parliament who had given up his place in social club to stand unsuccessfully for a more than prestigious constituency was lampooned in the press as "virtually appropriately represented as the dog in the legend who, snatching at the shadow, lost the substance".^[34]

More recently, the fable has been used to teach a psychological lesson by the Korean choreographer Hong Sung-yup. In his ballet "The Canis familiaris and the Shadow" (2013) the lost meat represents the accumulated memories which shape the personality.^[35] That same yr, the fable figured as the tertiary movement of five in the young Australian composer Alice Chance'south "Aesop's Fables Suite" for viola da gamba.^[36]

References [edit]

^ See online
^ Geert van Dijk, Ainoi, logoi, mythoi: fables in archaic, classical, and Hellenistic Greek, Brill NL 1997, p.320
^ Aberdeen University Library MS 24, Folio 19v. The citation and accompanying illustration is bachelor online
^ Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, History of the Graeco-latin Fable 3, pp.174-viii
^ Fable five
^ Legend 61
^ Aesop p.50
^ Fable i.five
^ Isopes Fabules (1310), stanza 135
^ WikiSource
^ Wiki Commons
^ Five&A site
^ F.G. Stephens, Memoirs of Sir Edwin Landseer a Sketch of the Life of the Artist, London 1874, pp.76-7
^ Rue des fables
^ Mary Lou Martin, The Fables of Marie de France: An English Translation, "De cane et umbra", pp.44-5
^ Joseph Jacobs, The fables of Æsop, selected, told anew and their history traced, London, 1894, p.199
^ Maude Barrows Dutton, The Tortoise and the Geese and Other Fables of Bidpai, New York 1908, p.30
^ legend VII, line three
^ The Oxford Dictionary Of English Proverbs (1949), p.36
^ Aesop'south Fables (1689), "A Dog and a Shadow", p.five
^ Norman Shapiro, The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine, Fable Half dozen.17, p.146
^ Elisabeth Pradez, Dictionnaire des Gallicismes, Paris 1914, p.191
^ p.161
^ Fables and Satires (Edinburgh 1809), vol.i, p.7
^ Martin H. Manser, The Facts on File Lexicon of Proverbs, Infobase Publishing, 2007, p.416
^ "The Dog and Shadow", Legend xiv
^ Emblem 39
^ Centum fabulae (1563), Legend 53
^ Fabulae Aesopi carmine elegiaco redditae (1564), verse form five
^ Mythologia Ethica (1579) pp.112-113
^ Brewer'due south Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1868), p.366-7
^ Fables from La Fontaine, in English poesy (1820), p.253
^ The Ten Pounder 1, Edinburgh 1832, pp.87-8
^ An Illustrative Cardinal to the Political Sketches of H.B. (London, 1841), item 484, p.335
^ Korea Herald, 12 June 2013
^ Carolyn McDowall, "Alice, a Young Composer – Taking a Hazard on a Musical Life", The cultural concept circle, 29 May 2013