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Aesop's Fables, translated by Laura Gibbs (2002)

541. SOCRATES AND THE SLAVE
Perry 554 (Phaedrus App. 27)

Socrates was being rudely addressed by a slave who had actually seduced his master's wife, a fact which Socrates knew to be familiar to the people who were present. Socrates therefore said to the slave, 'You are pleased with yourself because you are pleasing to someone whom you ought not to please, but don't think you will escape unpunished, because you are not pleasing the person whom you really ought to please!'

Note: There is a promythium appended to the fable in Perotti's Appendix: 'No curse weighs more heavily than a guilty conscience.' For another fable about Socrates in Phaedrus, see Fable 94.


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.