The Snake in the Thorn Bush is a rare fable of Greek origin with a

West Asia Western Asia, West Asia, or Southwest Asia, is the westernmost subregion of the larger geographical region of Asia, as defined by some academics, UN bodies and other institutions. It is almost entirely a part of the Middle East, and includes Ana ...

n analogue. It is numbered 96 among

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 ...

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 ...

. In Greek sources, a snake entwined in a thorn hedge is swept away by a flood and mocked by a fox with the words 'A wicked ship, and worthy of its sailor!' The moral drawn is that the evil come to grief from the company they keep. The West Asian variant occurs in the story of Ahikar, where the sage reproaches his adopted nephew for treacherously returning evil for good: 'Thou hast been to me as a snake that wound itself round a bramble and fell into a river. A wolf saw it and said: Lo the evil is mounted on the evil, and evil that which drives them along.'The Story of Ahikar, Cambridge 1889
p. 54
/ref> In later, less reliable versions, the snake rebukes the wolf for the animals that it has snatched, making it a fable of

the pot calling the kettle black "The pot calling the kettle black" is a proverbial idiom that may be of Spanish origin, of which English versions began to appear in the first half of the 17th century. It means a situation in which somebody accuses someone else of a fault which ...

type.

References

{{Aesop Snake in the Thorn Bush Snake in the Thorn Bush