The Sick Kite is one of

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 ...

and is numbered 324 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 ...

Versions

Greek versions of this fable are told of the raven (κοραξ) while it is called a

kite A kite is a tethered heavier-than-air or lighter-than-air craft with wing surfaces that react against the air to create lift and drag forces. A kite consists of wings, tethers and anchors. Kites often have a bridle and tail to guide the fac ...

(''milvus'') in Mediaeval Latin sources. The bird is ill and asks its grieving mother to pray in the temples on its behalf. The mother replies that since it was a robber of the sacrifices there, religious observance would now be of no use. The fable appears in the collection of

William Caxton William Caxton ( – ) was an English merchant, diplomat and writer. He is thought to be the first person to introduce a printing press into England, in 1476, and as a printer to be the first English retailer of printed books. His parentage a ...

and in many others, generally with a reflection on the uselessness of death-bed repentance. In the 1546 edition of the ''Emblemata'' by

Andrea Alciato Andrea Alciato (8 May 149212 January 1550), commonly known as Alciati (Andreas Alciatus), was an Italian jurist and writer. He is regarded as the founder of the French school of legal humanists. Biography Alciati was born in Alzate Brianza, n ...

the story is modified. There the bird vomits and is told by its parent that it is losing nothing of its own, since all it has eaten was stolen. The fable is used to illustrate the Latin proverb ''male parta, male dilabuntur'' (ill-gotten, ill-spent). A sceptical variation on the theme directed against religious observance later appeared in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's collection of prose fables (1759). 'The fox, observing that the raven plundered the altars of the gods, and that he supported himself from their sacrifices, said to himself: I should like to know whether the raven partakes of their sacrifices because he is a prophetical bird; or whether he is deemed a prophetical bird because he is so insolent as to partake of the sacrifices?'''Fables and epigrams from the German of Lessing'', London 1825
p.43
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References

External links

Book illustrations from th
16th-19th centuries
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sick Kite, The Sick Kite, The Emblem books Fictional birds