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Perry's Index to the Aesopica

Fables exist in many versions; here is one version in English:

THE EAGLE AND THE FARMER

An eagle was caught by a farmer but the farmer let him go when he realized what he had caught. The eagle did not forget this good deed, and when he saw the farmer sitting under a wall that was on the verge of collapsing, he snatched the bandana from the man's head, wanting to rouse the man from his seat and make him stand up. After the man set off in pursuit, the kindly eagle dropped what he had snatched and thus fully repaid the man's good deed: the man would have been crushed by the wall's collapse if he had stayed there any longer. After a while the man came back to where he had been sitting and found that the upright section of the wall had fallen to the ground.
This fable shows that if anyone does you a favour you must repay them in kind.

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.


Perry 296: Gibbs (Oxford) 73 [English]
Perry 296: Townsend 148 [English]
Perry 296: Chambry 79 [Greek]


You can find a compilation of Perry's index to the Aesopica in the gigantic appendix to his edition of Babrius and Phaedrus for the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1965). This book is an absolute must for anyone interested in the Aesopic fable tradition. Invaluable.