in a 1919 Aesop anthology The story concerns a competition between the
North wind and the
Sun to decide which is the strongest. The challenge was to make a passing traveler remove his cloak. However hard the wind blew, the traveler only wrapped his cloak tighter to keep warm, but when the Sun shone, the traveler was overcome with heat and soon took his cloak off. The fable was well known in
Ancient Greece;
Athenaeus records that
Hieronymus of Rhodes, in his
Historical Notes, quoted an epigram of
Sophocles against
Euripides that parodied the story of
Helios and
Boreas. The Latin version of the fable first appeared centuries later in
Avianus, as
De Vento et Sole (Of the Wind and the Sun, Fable 4); early versions in English and
Johann Gottfried Herder's poetic version in German (
Wind und Sonne) named it similarly. It was only in mid-Victorian times that the title "The North Wind and the Sun" began to be used. In fact, the Avianus poem refers to the characters as
Boreas and
Phoebus, the divinities of the north wind and the Sun, and it was under the title
Phébus et Borée that it appeared in
La Fontaine's Fables (VI.3).
Gilles Corrozet, who had compiled a fable collection in French verse earlier than La Fontaine, twice featured the contest between the sun and the wind in his
emblem books. In
Hecatomgraphie (1540), the first of these, the story is told in a quatrain, accompanied by a woodcut in which a man holds close a fur cloak under the wintry blast while on the other side he strips naked beneath the sun's rays. It is titled with the moral "More by gentleness than strength" (
Plus par doulceur que par force). The same illustration was used to accompany another poem in Corrozet's later
Emblemes (1543), which counsels taking enjoyment and being careful as necessity demands, wisely adapting oneself to circumstances in the same way as one dresses differently for winter than for summer. Victorian versions of the fable give the moral as "Persuasion is better than force", but it had been put in different ways at other times. In the Barlow edition of 1667,
Aphra Behn taught the
Stoic lesson that there should be moderation in everything: "In every passion moderation choose, For all extremes do bad effects produce". In the 18th century, Herder came to the theological conclusion that, while superior force leaves us cold, the warmth of Christ's love dispels it, and Walter Crane's limerick version of 1887 gives a psychological interpretation, "True strength is not bluster". But for
Guy Wetmore Carryl in his humorous rewriting of the fable, "The Impetuous Breeze and the Diplomatic Sun", tact is the lesson to be learned. There the competition is between the man and the wind; the sun only demonstrates the right way of achieving one's end. While most examples draw a moral lesson, La Fontaine's "Mildness more than violence achieves" (
Fables VI.3) hints at the political application that was present also in Avianus' conclusion: "They cannot win who start with threats". There is evidence that this reading has had an explicit influence on the diplomacy of modern times: in South Korea's
Sunshine Policy, for instance, or Japanese relations with the
military regime in Myanmar. ==The fable in the arts==