The Fox and the Woodman
Aesop's fable
The Fox and the Woodman is a cautionary story against hypocrisy included among Aesop's Fables and is numbered 22 in the Perry Index. Although the same basic plot recurs, different versions have included a variety of participants.
The fable's history
There are both Greek and Latin sources for the fable. They tell of a hunted animal that asks a man to hide it. When the hunters enquire if he has seen their quarry, he says he has not but indicates the hiding place by pointing to it or looking at it. The hunters take him at his word, however, and ride off. When the animal emerges, it reproaches the man for his double-dealing. Most Greek accounts make the animal a fox who appeals to a woodman. In the Latin poem of Phaedrus the hunted animal is a hare (lepus) who appeals to a herdsman. Later Latin versions mistake the name and make the animal a wolf (lupus).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Fox and the Woodman” is aesop's fable. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Woodman, Aesop's and fable, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 7, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q7735109. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Fox and the Woodman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.