page_title: The Lion, the Bear and the Fox
section_title: Western versions and variants
hierarchical_section_title: The Lion, the Bear and the Fox / Western versions and variants
caption_attribution_description: English: Honoré Victorin Daumier: The Ass and the Two Thieves (L’Âne et les deux voleurs), plate 75 from the series Artists’ Recollections (Souvenirs d’artistes), 1863, lithograph on wove paper
context_page_description: The Lion, the Bear and the Fox is one of Aesop's Fables that is numbered 147 in the Perry Index. There are similar story types of both eastern and western origin in which two disputants lose the object of their dispute to a third.
context_section_description: There are ancient Greek versions of the fable, and it was included in the Medici Manuscript collection of Aesop's fables dating from the 1470s. However, its earliest appearance in another language is as number 60 in the collection of 150 fables in Latin verse by the Austrian poet Pantaleon Candidus (1604). Here, a lion and a bear simultaneously attack a fawn and fight over it until they collapse from fatigue. Then a fox that has been watching them snatches their prey and makes off with it. The moral Pantaleon draws at the end is Saepe alter alterius fruitur labribus (from the labours of others it is often another who profits). The story seems to have entered printed collections of Aesop's fables from this source. In his 1692 retelling, Sir Roger L'Estrange anglicizes the conclusion as 'Tis the Fate of all Gotham Quarrels, when Fools go together by the Ears, to have Knaves run away with the Stakes'.
  Earlier European versions of this type of story feature two other animals fighting over a find or their prey, only to have a third come and steal it. One of the earliest in English is referred to briefly in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Knight's Tale (1490):
  We strive as did the two hounds for the bone,
  They fought all day, and yet their part was none;
  There came a kite by, while that they were wrath,
  And bore away the bone between them both.    (CT 1177-80)
  The situation was proverbial and expressed alternatively in English as "While two dogs are fighting for a bone, a third runs away with it". Its Dutch equivalent, Als twee honden vechten om een been, loopt de derde om mee heen, was among those illustrated in Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Netherlandish Proverbs (1559).
  La Fontaine's Fables transformed the story into Les voleurs et l'âne (I.13). There two thieves fight over the question of whether to keep or sell a stolen donkey, only to have another thief ride it off while they are doing so. La Fontaine draws a political moral, likening the dispute to a contemporary war between Hungary and Turkey over the province of Transylvania. In the Walloon dialect imitation made by François Bailleux in 1851, Lès voleûrs èt l'ågne, that author likens the dispute between the thieves to two lovers fighting over a girl while a third has his way with her.
  Ambrose Bierce also reinterpreted the story in the "Old Saws with New Teeth" section of his Fantastic Fables (1899): 
  Two Thieves, having stolen a Piano and being unable to divide it fairly without a remainder, went to law about it and continued the contest as long as either one could steal a dollar to bribe the judge. When they could give no more an Honest Man came along and by a single small payment obtained a judgment and took the Piano home, where his daughter used it to develop her biceps muscles, becoming a famous pugiliste.
  Bierce takes the hint for the conduct of his 'honest man' from Samuel Croxall's Fables of Aesop and others: translated into English with instructive applications (1722 and often reissued). The 'application' for the fable of "The Lion, the Bear and the Fox" reflects on the foolishness of applying to lawyers in disputes over property: 'When people go to law about an uncertain title, and have spent their whole estates in the contest, nothing is more common than for some little pettifogging attorney to step in, and secure it to himself.' Thomas Bewick indicates the same moral in his illustrated Select Fables of Aesop (1784). There the preface to Fable 20, titled "The Lion, the Tyger and the Fox", warns that 'The intemperate rage of clients gives the lawyer an opportunity of seizing the property in dispute'.
caption: Honoré Victorin Daumier: Lithograph of La Fontaine's fable, "The Ass and the Two Thieves", 1863
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