 |
 |
Aesop's Fables, translated by Laura Gibbs (2002)247. THE LION AND THE ELEPHANT The lion often found fault with the way he had been designed by Prometheus.
Admittedly, Prometheus had made the lion very large and handsome, supplying
him with sharp fangs in his jaw and arming him with claws on his feet;
in short he had made the lion more powerful than all the other animals.
'Yet great though I may be,' said the lion, 'I am terribly afraid of roosters!'
Prometheus replied, 'Why waste your time blaming me? You have every good
quality that I was able to create, and you are afraid of absolutely nothing,
except for roosters.' The lion kept on lamenting his condition, criticizing
himself for being a coward until finally he just wanted to die. It was
when he was in this frame of mind that the lion ran into the elephant.
The lion greeted the elephant, and stopped to converse with him. When
he saw that the elephant kept on flapping his ears, the lion inquired,
'What's the matter with you? Why do you keep on flapping your ears like
that?' As the elephant began to speak, a gnat came whizzing by and the
elephant said, 'Do you see this little thing, this little buzzing thing?
If it gets inside my ear, I'm doomed.' 'Well then,' the lion concluded,
'why should I die of shame? I am an excellent creature indeed, and in
much better shape than this elephant: roosters are more formidable than
gnats, after all!'
 Source:
Aesop's Fables. A new translation by Laura
Gibbs.
Oxford University Press (World's Classics): Oxford, 2002. NOTE: New cover, with new ISBN, published in 2008; contents of book unchanged.
|
