The story of the fly that fell into the soup while it was cooking was a Greek fable recorded in both verse and prose and is numbered 167 in the

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 Un ...

. Its lesson was to meet adverse circumstances with equanimity, but it was little recorded after Classical times.

The fable

A fly falls into a soup pot and reflects before drowning, "I have eaten, I have drunk, I have taken a bath; if I die, what do I care?"

Babrius Babrius ( grc-gre, Βάβριος, ''Bábrios''; century),"Babrius" in ''Chambers's Encyclopædia''. London: George Newnes, 1961, Vol. 2, p. 21. also known as Babrias () or Gabrias (), was the author of a collection of Greek fables, many of which ...

records a variant in which it is a mouse that accepts its end in this philosophical way. Commenting on the fable, Laura Gibbs compares the dying mouse’s thoughts with a similar sentiment at the end of

Horace Quintus Horatius Flaccus (; 8 December 65 – 27 November 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace (), was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his ' ...

's ''Epistle to Florus'': "You have played enough, eaten and drunk enough, it is time for you to leave" (''Lusisti satis, edisti satis, atque bibistis: tempus abire tibi est''). In the

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas ...

, the

neo-Latin New Latin (also called Neo-Latin or Modern Latin) is the revival of Literary Latin used in original, scholarly, and scientific works since about 1500. Modern scholarly and technical nomenclature, such as in zoological and botanical taxonomy ...

poet

Gabriele Faerno The humanist scholar Gabriele Faerno, also known by his Latin name of Faernus Cremonensis, was born in Cremona about 1510 and died in Rome on 17 November, 1561. He was a scrupulous textual editor and an elegant Latin poet who is best known now for ...

included the version told of a fly in his ''Centum Fabulae'' (1563), ending on the advice to accept necessity with good grace. This assured the fable’s continuity through many reprints into the 19th century.

Charles Perrault Charles Perrault ( , also , ; 12 January 1628 – 16 May 1703) was an iconic French author and member of the Académie Française. He laid the foundations for a new literary genre, the fairy tale, with his works derived from earlier folk tales ...

translated Faerno’s work into French verse in 1699 and

Pierre de Frasnay Pierre de Frasnay (1676 in Nevers – 27 April 1753 in Nevers) was an 18th-century French writer, translator and local historian who on 15 May 1725 became baron de Neuvy-le-Barrois. Work De Frasnay worked in the finance department of local governm ...

included an independent version of the fable of the fly (''La Mouche'') in his ''Mythologie ou recueil des fables grecques, esopiques et sybaritiques'' (Orléans, 1750). Perrault’s translations, after going through several editions, were included jointly with Faerno’s originals in a London edition of 1743, while De Frasnay’s poem was included in ''Ésope en trois langues'' (Paris, 1816), where it was preceded by a Greek prose version and Faerno’s Latin. There was also a slightly earlier Latin prose version of the fable of the fly in Francesco de Furia's ''Fabulae Aesopicae'' (Florence, 1809), again preceded by its Greek version.Fable 117, pp.311, 505
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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fly in the Soup, The Aesop's Fables