A warning to the unwary
The earliest mention of the fable is in a Greek Anthology poem of the 1st century CE by Antiphilus of Byzantium.[2] A house-mouse comes across an oyster and tries eating it, only for the shell to snap shut, bringing him at once both death and a tomb. In the following century, the orator Aelius Aristides gives the story a political interpretation as a warning to avoid entrapment in dangerous situations.[3]
A flowery Latin version of the Greek poem was made by Andrea Alciato for his book of emblems(1531), where it figures as a picture of greed.[4] He was followed in this interpretation by the English emblematist Geoffrey Whitney, who turns it into a health warning:
- The Gluttons fatte, that daintie fare devoure,
- And seeke about, to satisfie theire taste:
- And what they like, into theire bellies poure,
- This justlie blames, for surfettes come in haste:
- And biddes them feare, their sweete, and dulcet meates,
- For oftentimes, the same are deadlie baites.[5]
The Frome physician Samuel Bowden reads the same lesson into it in his mock-heroic poem 'occasion'd by a Mouse caught in an Oyster-Shell' (1736) that concludes with the lines
- Instructed thus — let Epicures beware,
- Warn'd of their fate — nor seek luxurious fare.[6]
Bowden's poem was a popular one and anthologised for a century afterwards. By that time, however, translations of La Fontaine's Fables were offering an alternative moral. The French author's mouse is a naive creature who knows the world only from books and comes to grief not simply through greed but for lack of experience.[7] In this lively poem, one of La Fontaine's images recalls Alciato's emblem. Arriving at the sea, where 'The tide had left the oysters bare/ He thought these shells the ships must be'. In some of the illustrations to Alciato's work there is indeed a similarity between the pattern on the shell that has closed on the mouse and the boat under sail on the sea.[8]
