A wolf comes upon a lamb while both are drinking from a stream and, in order to justify taking its life, accuses it of various misdemeanours, all of which the lamb proves to be impossible. Losing patience, the wolf replies that the offences must have been committed by some other member of the lamb's family and that it does not propose to delay its meal by enquiring any further. There are versions of the fable in both the Greek of
Babrius and the Latin of
Phaedrus, and it was retold in Latin throughout the
Middle Ages. The morals drawn there are that the tyrant can always find an excuse for his tyranny and that the unjust will not listen to the reasoning of the innocent. 's fables on the 11th-century
Bayeux Tapestry, with
The Wolf and the Lamb at bottom In his 1692 retelling of the fable,
Roger L'Estrange used the English proverb Tis an easy Matter to find a Staff to beat a Dog" to sum up the sentiment that any arbitrary excuse will suit the powerful. At a slightly earlier date,
Jean de la Fontaine began his very similar version of the story with the moral summary of its meaning,
La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure (The strongest side always carries the argument). The line eventually became proverbial in French and was glossed with the alternative English proverb, "
Might makes right", as its equivalent.
Ivan Krylov's translation of the French was likewise close and has given the Russian language two proverbs. The first, "The stronger always blames the weaker" ("У сильного всегда бессильный виноват"), is taken from the poem's first line. The second idiomatic usage is provided by the wolf's final reply to the lamb's reasoning, "My need of food is guilt enough of yours" ("Ты виноват уж тем, что хочется мне кушать"), and is used ironically of someone casting around to find blame, no matter what justice demands. A variant story attributed to Aesop exists in Greek sources. This is the fable of the cock and the cat, which is separately numbered 16 in the Perry Index. Seeking a reasonable pretext to kill the cock, the cat accuses it of waking people early in the morning and then of incest with its sisters and daughters. In both cases, the cock answers that humanity benefits by its activities. But the cat ends the argument by remarking that it is now her breakfast time and "Cats don't live on dialogues". Underlying both these fables is a Latin proverb, variously expressed, that "an empty belly has no ears" or, as the Spanish equivalent has it,
"Lobo hambriento no tiene asiento" (a hungry wolf doesn't hang about). The fable also has Eastern analogues. One of these is the Buddhist
Dipi Jataka in which the protagonists are a panther and a goat. The goat has strayed into the presence of a panther and tries to avert its fate by greeting the predator politely. It is accused of treading on his tail and then of scaring off his prey, for which crime it is made to substitute. A similar story involving birds is found among
Bidpai's Persian fables as "The Partridge and the Hawk". The unjust accusation there is that the partridge is taking up all the shade, leaving the hawk out in the hot sun. When the partridge points out that it is midnight, it is killed by the hawk for contradicting. ==Moral applications==