The Hawk and the Nightingale is one of the earliest fables recorded in

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

and there have been many variations on the story since Classical times. The original version is numbered 4 in the

Perry Index The Perry Index is a widely used index of "Aesop's Fables" or "Aesopica", the fables credited to Aesop, the storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BC. The index was created by Ben Edwin Perry, a professor of classics at the Un ...

and the later

Aesop Aesop ( or ; , ; c. 620–564 BCE) was a Greek fabulist and storyteller credited with a number of fables now collectively known as ''Aesop's Fables''. Although his existence remains unclear and no writings by him survive, numerous tales c ...

version, sometimes going under the title "The Hawk, the Nightingale and the Birdcatcher", is numbered 567. The stories began as a reflection on the arbitrary use of power and eventually shifted to being a lesson in the wise use of resources.

The Fables

The original fable appeared in

Hesiod Hesiod (; grc-gre, Ἡσίοδος ''Hēsíodos'') was an ancient Greek poet generally thought to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. He is generally regarded by western authors as 'the first written poet ...

's poem ''

Works and Days ''Works and Days'' ( grc, Ἔργα καὶ Ἡμέραι, Érga kaì Hēmérai)The ''Works and Days'' is sometimes called by the Latin translation of the title, ''Opera et Dies''. Common abbreviations are ''WD'' and ''Op''. for ''Opera''. is a ...

'', a work dating from some seven centuries before the

Common Era Common Era (CE) and Before the Common Era (BCE) are year notations for the Gregorian calendar (and its predecessor, the Julian calendar), the world's most widely used calendar era. Common Era and Before the Common Era are alternatives to the o ...

and thus long before

's traditional dates. It is used to illustrate Hesiod's account of man's fall from the

Golden Age The term Golden Age comes from Greek mythology, particularly the '' Works and Days'' of Hesiod, and is part of the description of temporal decline of the state of peoples through five Ages, Gold being the first and the one during which the G ...

of innocence to the corrupted Age of Iron. As an example of its violent and arbitrary character, the story is told of a hawk that seizes a nightingale; when the songbird cries in pain, the hawk addresses it: 'Miserable thing, why do you cry out? One far stronger than you now holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you. And if I please I will make my meal of you, or else let you go. He is a fool who tries to withstand the stronger, for he does not get the mastery and suffers pain besides his shame.' The fable later ascribed to

is not recorded in any surviving Classical document but began to appear in the early Middle Ages. Some versions extend the picture of violence by having the bird of prey attack the nightingale's nestlings. It agrees to spare them if the nightingale will sing to it, but since the mother bird is consumed with grief, her song sounds forced and shrill. The disappointed hawk then kills one of the chicks but is in turn captured by a fowler. In

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history The history of Europe is traditionally divided into four time periods: prehistoric Europe (prior to about 800 BC), classical antiquity (800 BC to AD ...

times a number of

Neo-Latin New Latin (also called Neo-Latin or Modern Latin) is the revival of Literary Latin used in original, scholarly, and scientific works since about 1500. Modern scholarly and technical nomenclature, such as in zoological and botanical taxonomy ...

authors record alternative versions of the fable with quite different interpretations. They include

Laurentius Abstemius Laurentius Abstemius (c. 1440–1508) was an Italian writer and professor of philology, born at Macerata in Ancona. His learned name plays on his family name of Bevilaqua (Drinkwater), and he was also known by the Italian name Lorenzo Astemio. A ...

' ''Accipiter et Luscinia cantum pollicens'' in the late 15th century,

Hieronymus Osius Hieronymus Osius was a German Neo-Latin poet and academic about whom there are few biographical details. He was born about 1530 in Schlotheim and murdered in 1575 in Graz. After studying first at the university of Erfurt, he gained his master's ...

' poem ''De Accipitre et Luscinia'' (1574) and three poems by

Pantaleon Candidus Pantaleon Candidus was a theologian of the Reformed Church and a Neo-Latin author. He was born on 7 October 1540 in Ybbs an der Donau and died on 3 February 1608 in Zweibrücken. Life and works Pantaleon Weiss was born the 14th child of a landown ...

in his ''150 Fabulae'' (1604). In these fables, the nightgale offers to reward the hawk for its clemency by singing to it. But the hawk answers pragmatically that 'I prefer that you soothe my stomach, for I can live without your songs, but I cannot live without food.' This is the version that

La Fontaine Jean de La Fontaine (, , ; 8 July 162113 April 1695) was a French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his '' Fables'', which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Eu ...

transformed into ''Le milan et le rossignol'' (the kite and nightingale, ''Fables'' IX.17), which ends on the common proverb 'An empty stomach has no ear'. The bird had offered a song based on Classical myth for being spared, a reward that the kite rejects as inedible. The episode makes of the fable as much a statement against the intangibility of art as a lesson in practicality. The proverb dates from Classical times, being noted by

Erasmus Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (; ; English: Erasmus of Rotterdam or Erasmus;''Erasmus'' was his baptismal name, given after St. Erasmus of Formiae. ''Desiderius'' was an adopted additional name, which he used from 1496. The ''Roterodamus'' w ...

in his ''Adagia'' as originating in

Plutarch Plutarch (; grc-gre, Πλούταρχος, ''Ploútarchos''; ; – after AD 119) was a Greek Middle Platonist philosopher, historian, biographer, essayist, and priest at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. He is known primarily for hi ...

's "Life of Cato”. The same point of view underlies other fables of Aesop dealing with the tyrannical use of power, such as

The Wolf and the Lamb The Wolf and the Lamb is a well-known fable of Aesop and is numbered 155 in the Perry Index. There are several variant stories of tyrannical injustice in which a victim is falsely accused and killed despite a reasonable defence. The fable and i ...

, in which sophistry is rejected in the face of hunger. Still another of Aesop's fables, The fisherman and the little fish, draws much the same conclusion as later European variants of "The Hawk and the Nightingale". The little fish pleads with the angler who has caught it to wait until it is more fully grown, but he prefers not to let go of what he has in hope of some uncertain future gain. By the

Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...

that sentiment had been encapsulated in the proverb 'A bird in the hand is worth two in the woods', which is translated in a 13th-century Latin work dealing with current proverbs. Other versions have 'ten in the wood', 'three in the sky' and 'two in the bush'. The conclusion of "The fisherman and the little fish" then appears to have been transferred to "The Hawk and the Nightingale" as if it were illustrating the popular proverb with its references to birds. It is for this reason that

Roger L'Estrange Sir Roger L'Estrange (17 December 1616 – 11 December 1704) was an English pamphleteer, author, courtier, and press censor. Throughout his life L'Estrange was frequently mired in controversy and acted as a staunch ideological defender of Kin ...

closes his rendering of Abstemius' fable by quoting the proverb, where Abstemius had only remarked that useful things are to be preferred to pleasant ones. In this he was followed by the Victorian editor

George Fyler Townsend George Fyler Townsend (1814–1900) was the British translator of the standard English edition of ''Aesop's Fables''. He was the son of George Townsend and was educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge -DCL 1876. He was Vicar ...

. The sentiment is stated more generally also at the end of the first of Pantaleon's poetic meditations on the fable (133). There the hawk's reply to the nightingale's plea to let it go in preference for larger prey, since it is too small to satisfy the hawk's appetite, echoes Plutarch's comment in the course of quite another anecdote: 'He is a fool who leaves things close at hand to follow what is out of reach'. The shift of focus, from the predator's conduct towards its victim in the original telling to its reason for rejecting the victim's appeal for mercy in the later version, radically alters the fable's interpretation. Where the reader's sympathy for the nightingale was appealed to by Hesiod, it is now the hawk whose behaviour is approved, even by so liberal a commentator as

Samuel Croxall Samuel Croxall (c. 1690 – 1752) was an Anglican churchman, writer and translator, particularly noted for his edition of Aesop's Fables. Early career Samuel Croxall was born in Walton on Thames, where his father (also called Samuel) was vicar ...

. For, in his opinion, ''They who neglect the Opportunity of reaping a small Advantage in Hopes they shall obtain a better, are far from acting upon a reasonable and well advised Foundation.'' The condemnation of arbitrary power originally implicit in the fable was not entirely lost, however. Illustrations of La Fontaine's more nuanced telling by

Carle Vernet Antoine Charles Horace Vernet, better known as Carle Vernet (14 August 175827 November 1836), was a French painter, the youngest child of Claude Joseph Vernet and the father of Horace Vernet. Biography Vernet was born in Bordeaux. At the age o ...

and Auguste Delierre (1829-1890) underline the violence of the scene. At the centre of a calm and beautiful landscape, the bird of prey rips up the tiny songbird's breast. The Russian fabulist

Ivan Krylov Ivan Andreyevich Krylov (russian: Ива́н Андре́евич Крыло́в; 13 February 1769 – 21 November 1844) is Russia's best-known fabulist and probably the most epigrammatic of all Russian authors. Formerly a dramatist and journali ...

carries that violence over into his adaptation of the story as “The cat and the nightingale”.W.R.S.Ralston, ''Krilof and his Fables'', London 1883
pp.167/8
/ref> There the cat captures a nightingale in what it claims is a friendly spirit and begs to hear its famous song. When the bird gives only a shrill cry of distress, the cat devours it, bones and all. Written in 1824, the story satirised the strict literary censorship of the time in Russia.

References

External links

15th-19th century book illustrations online
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hawk and the Nightingale, The Fables by Laurentius Abstemius Fables Proverbs Fictional birds Literary duos