![]() ![]() This world of ours is full of foolish creatures too – Commoners want to build chateaux Each princeling wants his royal retinue Each count his squires. The folly of trying to keep up with the Joneses is the conclusion drawn by La Fontaine's Fables from the Phaedrus version of the tale, applying it to the artistocratic times in which La Fontaine lived ("The frog that wished to be as big as the ox", Fables I.3): ![]() Ī 19th-century meat extract trade card with the first two lines of the La Fontaine's version. His telling follows the Babrius version in which an ox has stepped on a brood of young frogs and the father tries equaling the beast in size when told of it. Horace places a different version of the story towards the end of a long conversation on the demented behaviour of mankind (Satires II.3) where Damasippus accuses the poet of trying to keep up with his rich patron Maecenas. It is to this that Martial alludes in a short epigram (X.79) about two citizens trying to outdo each other by building in the suburbs. ![]() The story related by Phaedrus has a frog motivated by envy of the ox, illustrating the moral that 'the needy man, while affecting to imitate the powerful, comes to ruin'. In some sources, the frog sees the ox and tries to equal it in size in others the frog is only told of an enormous beast by another and keeps swelling, asking at intervals, 'Was it as big as this?'īoth Martial and Horace are among the Latin satiric poets who made use of the fable of the frog and the ox, although they refer to different versions of it. One by Walter of England is in verse and was followed in Renaissance times by a Neo-Latin poem by Hieronymus Osius. There are Classical versions of the story in both Greek and Latin, as well as several Latin retellings in Mediaeval times. It has usually been applied to socio-economic relations. The story concerns a frog that tries to inflate itself to the size of an ox, but bursts in the attempt. The Frog and the Ox appears among Aesop's Fables and is numbered 376 in the Perry Index.
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