The Crow and the Pitcher is number 390 in the Perry Index of Aesop's Fables. The Perry Index is a popular index of "Aesop's Tales" or "Aesopica," the fables attributed to Aesop, the storyteller who lived between 620 and 560 BC in ancient Greece. The tale was made on the topic of a lyric by the first-century Greek poet Bianor, was included in pseudo-Dositheus' second-century fable collection, and subsequently occurs in Avianus' fourth–fifth-century Latin poetic collection.