The tale of the crab and the fox is of Greek origin and is counted as one of

Aesop's fables Aesop's Fables, or the Aesopica, is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a Slavery in ancient Greece, slave and storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 Before the Common Era, BCE. Of varied and unclear origins, the stor ...

; it is numbered 116 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 U ...

. The moral is that one comes to grief through not sticking to one's allotted role in life

The fable

The Greek version of the story (Καρκῖνος καὶ Ἀλώπηξ) is pithily told and concerns a crab that abandons the seashore and crawls into a neighbouring meadow where it is eaten by a fox. The comment there is that "this fable shows that people are bound to fail when they abandon their familiar pursuits and take up a business they know nothing about". The fable appeared in the Medici manuscript in the 15th century and later among those recorded by

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 King ...

(1692). In Victorian times the story appeared in

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 (priest), George Townsend and was educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge ...

's new translation with the moral "Contentment with our lot is an element of happiness".''Aesop's Fables''
1867

Natural history

Crabs are not a natural food for foxes but anciently they were confused with crayfish and there is a freshwater species of crayfish that is eaten by foxes in the Balkan Danube region. There is in addition a South American

Crab-eating Fox The crab-eating fox (''Cerdocyon thous''), also known as the forest dog, wood fox, bushfox (not to be confused with the bush dog) or maikong, is an extant species of medium-sized canid endemic to the central part of South America since at least ...

about which Aesop could not have known.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Crab and the Fox, The Crab and the Fox Fictional crabs Literature featuring anthropomorphic foxes