The Crow and the Pitcher - Project Gutenberg etext 19994

''The Crow and the Pitcher'' is 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 ...

, numbered 390 in the Perry Index. It relates ancient observation of corvid behaviour that recent scientific studies have confirmed is goal-directed and indicative of causal knowledge rather than simply being due to instrumental conditioning.

The fable and its moral

The fable is made the subject of a poem by the first-century-CE Greek poet Bianor, was included in the 2nd century fable collection of pseudo-Dositheus and later appears in the 4th–5th-century Latin verse collection by Avianus. The history of this fable in antiquity and the Middle Ages is tracked in A.E. Wright's ''Hie lert uns der meister: Latin Commentary and the Germany Fable''. The story concerns a thirsty crow that comes upon a

pitcher In baseball, the pitcher is the player who throws ("Pitch (baseball), pitches") the Baseball (ball), baseball from the pitcher's mound toward the catcher to begin each play, with the goal of out (baseball), retiring a batter (baseball), batter, ...

with water at the bottom, beyond the reach of its beak. After failing to push it over, the bird drops in pebbles one by one until the water rises to the top of the pitcher, allowing it to drink. In his telling, Avianus follows it with a

moral A moral (from Latin ''morālis'') is a message that is conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader, or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim. ...

that emphasises the

virtue A virtue () is a trait of excellence, including traits that may be morality, moral, social, or intellectual. The cultivation and refinement of virtue is held to be the "good of humanity" and thus is Value (ethics), valued as an Telos, end purpos ...

of ingenuity: "This fable shows us that thoughtfulness is superior to brute strength." Other tellers of the story stress the crow's persistence. In Francis Barlow's edition the proverb 'Necessity is the mother of invention' is applied to the story while an early 20th-century retelling quotes the proverb 'Where there's a will, there's a way'. Artistic use of the fable may go back to Roman times, since one of the mosaics that has survived is thought to have the story of the crow and the pitcher as its subject. Modern equivalents have included English tiles from the 18th and 19th centuries and an American mural by Justin C. Gruelle (1889–1978), created for a Connecticut school. These and the illustrations in books of fables had little scope for invention. The greatest diversity is in the type of vessel involved and over the centuries these have varied from a humble clay pot to elaborate Greek pitchers. The fable was later set to music by Howard J. Buss as the fourth item in his "Fables from Aesop" (2002).

The fable in science

The Roman naturalist

Pliny the Elder Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23/24 79), known in English as Pliny the Elder ( ), was a Roman Empire, Roman author, Natural history, naturalist, and naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and a friend of the Roman emperor, emperor Vesp ...

is the earliest to attest that the story reflects the behaviour of real-life corvids. In August 2009, a study published in ''

Current Biology ''Current Biology'' is a biweekly peer-reviewed scientific journal that covers all areas of biology, especially molecular biology, cell biology, genetics, neurobiology, ecology, and evolutionary biology. The journal includes research artic ...

'' revealed that rooks, a relative of crows, do just the same as the crow in the fable when presented with a similar situation.

References

External links

* 15th–20th-century illustration
from books

YouTube clip from "Inside the Animal Mind" (BBC Two Program) showing a crow solving a puzzle in order to get food.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Crow and the Pitcher, The Aesop's Fables Greek Anthology Fictional crows Short stories about birds ATU 220-249