In Greek versions of the story, a lean and hungry fox finds food left by shepherds in the hollow of a tree but is unable to get out again because it has eaten so much. Another fox hears its cries of distress and advises it that it will have to remain there until it becomes as thin as when it entered. Because there were no Latin sources, the fable remained unknown to other European countries until the revival of Greek learning in the
Renaissance. The Greek story spread both eastwards and westwards. It reappears in the
Babylonian Talmud as a story about a single fox that can only enter a vineyard through a small hole in the fence and has to starve itself to manage this. Once inside, it gorges itself but then cannot get out until it is as thin as when it entered. The sage Geniba recounts this in a meditation on the text "As a man came out of his mother's womb naked, so shall he go forth as he came" (
Ecclesiastes 5:15). As in the tale, one can take nothing of the world's goods into death. A different version of the Greek story was known in
Rome, although no fable collection in which it figured has survived. However, it was perpetuated in one of
Horace's poetical epistles to
Maecenas (I.7, lines 29–35): It was this version which was to influence most of those that came later, although there are a variety of them, depending on the country where they are told. But, as in the context of Horace's poem, all teach the lesson of moderating one's ambitions since superfluity only brings trouble. One of the earliest appearances in English sources was in
John Ogilby's editions of Aesop's fables in which a fox becomes trapped in a larder and is advised by a weasel that is also present there. In
Sir Roger L'Estrange's retelling only a few decades later, the fox is trapped in a hen-roost and receives the advice from a weasel that is passing outside.
Samuel Croxall tells his moralised story of 'a little starveling, thin-gutted rogue of a mouse' who, rather more plausibly than Horace's fox, creeps into a corn basket and attracts a weasel with its cries for help when it cannot get out. More or less the same story was told at the start of the following century by
Brooke Boothby in verse and
Thomas Bewick in prose. In French versions it is a weasel that becomes trapped in a
granary. In
La Fontaine's Fables, the advice to slim is given by a rat within the building while in
Edmé Boursault's drama
Esope à la ville the advice comes from a passing fox. The English playwright
John Vanbrugh based his comedy of
Aesop on the latter (1697) but unaccountably makes yet another animal the protagonist. His Aesop relates that a famished goat squeezes into a well-stocked barn and realises without any intermediary that fasting is its only chance of getting back out. Nevertheless, Boursault's version was sufficiently known in England as to figure five years later in
Thomas Yalden's pamphlet of political verses,
Aesop at Court. ==Adaptations==