The Honest Woodcutter
fable by Aesop
The Honest Woodcutter, also known as Mercury and the Woodman and The Golden Axe, is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 173 in the Perry Index. It serves as a cautionary tale on the need for cultivating honesty, even at the price of self-interest. It is also classified as Aarne-Thompson 729: The Axe falls into the Stream.
The story
The Greek version of the story tells of a woodcutter who accidentally dropped his axe into a river and, because this was his only means of livelihood, sat down and wept. Taking pity on him, the god Hermes (also known as Mercury) dived into the water and returned with a golden axe. "Was this what you had lost?", Hermes asked, but the woodcutter said it was not, and returned the same answer when a silver axe was brought to the surface. Only when his own tool is produced does he claim it. Impressed by his honesty, the god allows him to keep all three. Hearing of the man's good fortune, an envious neighbor threw his own axe into the river and wailed for its return. When Hermes appeared and offered him a golden axe, the man greedily claimed it but was denied both that and the return of his own axe.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Honest Woodcutter” is fable by Aesop. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Honest, Woodcutter and fable, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3220700. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Honest Woodcutter” 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.