The Ass in the Lion's Skin facts for kids
The Ass in the Lion's Skin is one of Aesop's Fables, of which there are two distinct versions. There are also several Eastern variants, and the story's interpretation varies accordingly.
Fables
Of the two Greek versions of this story, the one catalogued as 188 in the Perry Index concerns an Ass that puts on a lion's skin and amuses himself by terrifying all the foolish animals. At last coming upon a Fox, he tried to frighten him also, but the Fox no sooner heard the sound of his voice than he exclaimed, "I might possibly have been frightened myself, if I had not heard your bray." The moral of the story is often quoted as Clothes may disguise a fool, but his words will give him away. It is this version which appears as Fable 56 in the collection by Babrius.
The second version is listed as 358 in the Perry Index. In this the ass puts on the skin in order to be able to graze undisturbed in the fields but is given away by its ears and is chastised. As well as Greek versions, there is a later 5th century Latin version by Avianus which was taken up by William Caxton. The moral here cautions against presumption. Literary allusions were frequent from Classical times and into the Renaissance, when there were references to it in William Shakespeare's King John. La Fontaine's Fable 5.21 (1668) also follows this version. The moral La Fontaine draws is not to trust to appearances and that clothes do not make the man, while in the musical interpretation given it on David P. Shortland's Australian recording, Aesop Go HipHop (2012), the sung chorus after the hip hop narration emphasises the message, "Be yourself, don’t hide behind a disguise".
Later allusions
In American political culture, the ass in the lion's skin was one of several fables by Aesop that was put to use by cartoonist Thomas Nast when it was rumoured in 1874 that the Republican President Ulysses S. Grant would attempt to run for an unprecedented third term in two years' time. Around that time, there was also a false report that the animals had escaped from Central Park Zoo and were roaming the city. Nast combined the two items in a cartoon for the 7 November Harpers Weekly; titled "Third Term Panic", it depicts a donkey in a lion's skin (labelled Caesarism) scattering animals that stand for various interests.
The fable was also put to literary use in the 20th century by C.S. Lewis. In The Last Battle, the final volume of The Chronicles of Narnia, a donkey named Puzzle is tricked into wearing a lion's skin, and then manipulated so as to deceive the simple-minded into believing that Aslan the lion has returned to Narnia. Kathryn Lindskoog identifies the Avianus version as the source of this episode.
15th-20th century illustrations from books on flikr
