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The Young Man And The Swallow
The young man and the swallow (which also has the Victorian title of "The spendthrift and the swallow") is one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 169 in the Perry Index. It is associated with the ancient proverb 'One swallow doesn't make a summer'. The fable The story appears only in Greek sources in ancient times and may have been invented to explain the proverb 'One swallow does not make a spring' (μία γὰρ χελιδὼν ἔαρ οὐ ποιεῖ), which is recorded in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (I.1098a18). Other instances of where fables appear to derive from proverbs include The Mountain in Labour, recorded by Phaedrus, and Jumping from the frying pan into the fire by Laurentius Abstemius. The fable is about a young man who spends all his money on gambling and luxurious living until he has only a cloak to keep off the weather. Seeing an unusually early swallow fly by, the man concludes that spring has come and sells his cloak so as to use the proceeds to mend h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spendthrift
A spendthrift (also profligate or prodigal) is someone who is extravagant and recklessly wasteful with money, often to a point where the spending climbs well beyond his or her means. "Spendthrift" derives from an obsolete sense of the word "thrift" to mean prosperity rather than frugality, so a "spendthrift" is one who has spent their prosperity. Historical figures who have been characterised as spendthrifts include George IV of the United Kingdom, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, and Marie Antoinette the Queen of France. The term is often used by news media as an adjective applied to governments who are thought to be wasting public money. Etymology While the pair of words may seem to imply the opposite of its meaning (as if you are thrifty in your spending), it follows the tradition of the earlier word "scattergood", the first part being an undoing of the second. In artwork William Hogarth's ''A Rake's Progress'' (1732–33) displays in a series of paintings the spiralling fortune ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Swallow
The swallows, martins, and saw-wings, or Hirundinidae, are a family of passerine songbirds found around the world on all continents, including occasionally in Antarctica. Highly adapted to aerial feeding, they have a distinctive appearance. The term "swallow" is used colloquially in Europe as a synonym for the barn swallow. Around 90 species of Hirundinidae are known, divided into 19 genus, genera, with the greatest diversity found in Africa, which is also thought to be where they evolved as hole-nesters. They also occur on a number of oceanic islands. A number of European and North American species are long-distance bird migration, migrants; by contrast, the West and South African swallows are nonmigratory. This family comprises two subfamilies: Pseudochelidoninae (the river martins of the genus ''Pseudochelidon'') and Hirundininae (all other swallows, martins, and saw-wings). In the Old World, the name "martin" tends to be used for the squarer-tailed species, and the name "swal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aesop's Fables
Aesop's Fables, or the Aesopica, is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. Of diverse origins, the stories associated with his name have descended to modern times through a number of sources and continue to be reinterpreted in different verbal registers and in popular as well as artistic media. The fables originally belonged to oral tradition and were not collected for some three centuries after Aesop's death. By that time, a variety of other stories, jokes and proverbs were being ascribed to him, although some of that material was from sources earlier than him or came from beyond the Greek cultural sphere. The process of inclusion has continued until the present, with some of the fables unrecorded before the Late Middle Ages and others arriving from outside Europe. The process is continuous and new stories are still being added to the Aesop corpus, even when they are demonstrably more ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Perry Index
The Perry Index is a widely used index of "Aesop's Fables" or "Aesopica", the fables credited to Aesop, the storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BC. The index was created by Ben Edwin Perry, a professor of classics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Modern scholarship takes the view that Aesop probably did not compose all of the fables attributed to him;D. L. Ashliman, “Introduction,” in George Stade (Consulting Editorial Director), ''Aesop’s Fables.'' New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, (2005). Produced and published in conjunction with Fine Creative Media, Inc. (New York) Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher. See pp. xiii–xv and xxv–xxvi. indeed, a few are known to have first been used before Aesop lived, while the first record we have of many others is from well over a millennium after his time. Traditionally, Aesop's fables were arranged alphabetically, which is not helpful to the reader. Perry listed them by language (Greek ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Croxall Spendthrift
Croxall is a hamlet and former civil parish in England that was historically in Derbyshire, but since 1895 has been part of Edingale parish, Staffordshire. The settlement today is mainly the Church of England parish church of St John and Croxall Hall. Population details for the 2011 census can be found under the civil parish. History In Domesday book, Croxall is mentioned as an outlying farm of Weston-on-Trent and listed among the lands given to Henry de Ferrers''Domesday Book: A Complete Translation''. London: Penguin, 2003. p. 745 by the King. The land given to HenryHenry de Ferrers held a considerable number of manors including a massive number in Derbyshire given to him by the King. These included obviously Croxall and Edingale which are now in Staffordshire but also Stretton en le Field which is now in Leicestershire. included of pasture that was valued at £4. The lordship of the manor of Croxall was held for several centuries by underlords of the Ferrers, the Curzon fa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aristotle
Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy within the Lyceum and the wider Aristotelian tradition. His writings cover many subjects including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, meteorology, geology, and government. Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him. It was above all from his teachings that the West inherited its intellectual lexicon, as well as problems and methods of inquiry. As a result, his philosophy has exerted a unique influence on almost every form of knowledge in the West and it continues to be a subject of contemporary philosophical discussion. Little is known about his life. Aristotle was born in th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nicomachean Ethics
The ''Nicomachean Ethics'' (; ; grc, Ἠθικὰ Νικομάχεια, ) is Aristotle's best-known work on ethics, the science of the good for human life, which is the goal or end at which all our actions aim. (I§2) The aim of the inquiry is political science and the master art of politics. (I§1) It consists of ten books or scrolls, understood to be based on notes from his lectures at the Lyceum. The title is often assumed to refer to his son Nicomachus, to whom the work was dedicated or who may have edited it (although his young age makes this less likely). Alternatively, the work may have been dedicated to his father, who was also called Nicomachus. The work plays a pre-eminent role in explaining Aristotelian ethics. The theme of the work is a Socratic question previously explored in the works of Plato, Aristotle's friend and teacher, about how men should best live. In his ''Metaphysics'', Aristotle describes how Socrates, the friend and teacher of Plato, had turned philos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Mountain In Labour
''The Mountain in Labour'' is one of Aesop's Fables and appears as number 520 in the Perry Index. The story became proverbial in Classical times and was applied to a variety of situations. It refers to speech acts which promise much but deliver little, especially in literary and political contexts. In more modern times the satirical intention behind the fable was given greater emphasis following Jean de la Fontaine's interpretation of it. Illustrations to the text underlined its ironical application particularly and went on to influence cartoons referring to the fable elsewhere in Europe and America. The Classical fable The earliest surviving version of the tale is in the first two and a half lines of a four-line Latin poem by Phaedrus: "A mountain had gone into labour and was groaning terribly. Such rumours excited great expectations all over the country. In the end, however, the mountain gave birth to a mouse." Phaedrus then went on to say that this applies to those who make se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phaedrus (fabulist)
Gaius Julius Phaedrus (; grc-gre, Φαῖδρος; Phaîdros) was a 1st-century CE Roman Empire, Roman fabulist and the first versifier of a collection of Aesop's fables into Latin. Few facts are known about him for certain and there was little mention of his work during late antiquity. It was not until the discovery of a few imperfect manuscripts during and following the Renaissance that his importance emerged, both as an author and in the transmission of the fables. Biography A recent statement of the few facts that past scholars have tried to deduce from autobiographical hints given by Phaedrus in his poems has summarised them as follows: He was born in Macedonia, probably in Pydna, about 15 BCE, came to Rome as a slave and was freed by Augustus. He probably had some teaching function between then and the time of Tiberius, under whom the first book of his poems appeared. Envious competitors interpreted the morals of some fables as being critical of the regime and he was trie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jumping From The Frying Pan Into The Fire
The phrase out of the frying pan into the fire is used to describe the situation of moving or getting from a bad or difficult situation to a worse one, often as the result of trying to escape from the bad or difficult one. It was the subject of a 15th-century fable that eventually entered the Aesopic canon. History of the idiom and its use The proverb and several similar European proverbs ultimately derive from a Greek saying about running from the smoke or the fire into the flame, the first recorded use of which was in a poem by Germanicus Caesar (15 BCE – 19 CE) in the Greek Anthology. There it is applied to a hare in flight from a dog that attempts to escape by jumping into the sea, only to be seized by a 'sea-dog'. The Latin equivalent was the seafaring idiom 'He runs on Scylla, wishing to avoid Charybdis' (''incidit in scyllam cupiens vitare charybdim''), a parallel pointed out by Edmund Arwaker in the moral that follows his verse treatment of the fable. The earliest rec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Laurentius Abstemius
Laurentius Abstemius (c. 1440–1508) was an Italian writer and professor of philology, born at Macerata in Ancona. His learned name plays on his family name of Bevilaqua (Drinkwater), and he was also known by the Italian name Lorenzo Astemio. A Neo-Latin writer of considerable talents at the time of the Humanist revival of letters, his first published works appeared in the 1470s and were distinguished by minute scholarship. During that decade he moved to Urbino and became ducal librarian, although he was to move between there and other parts of Italy thereafter as a teacher. The work for which he is principally remembered now is ''Hecatomythium'' (1495), a collection of a hundred fables written in Latin and largely of his own invention. However, the inclusion together with this work of the thirty-three Aesopic fables translated from the Greek by Lorenzo Valla gave the impression that his own work was of the same kind. Several of the fables of Abstemius, it is true, relate to Ae ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hieronymus Osius
Hieronymus Osius was a German Neo-Latin poet and academic about whom there are few biographical details. He was born about 1530 in Schlotheim and murdered in 1575 in Graz. After studying first at the university of Erfurt, he gained his master's degree from Wittenberg university in 1552 and later lectured on Poetics in the Philosophical faculty there. In 1558 he was crowned poet laureate in Copenhagen by King Christian III of Denmark. Thereafter he held teaching positions in Jena, Regensburg and Graz, identifying with Protestantism in the religious conflicts of the time. Osius was known as a pre-eminent poet whose works were frequently reprinted. They included his "Song on Christ’s Birth" (''Carmen de natali Christi'', 1557); an adaptation into Latin of the Homeric comic epic, the Batrachomyomachia (''Pugna ranarum et murium'', the battle of the frogs and mice); an epic of the Dithmarschen Peasants’ War (''Historia belli Ditmarsici'', 1560), which had only recently concluded an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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