A grey wolf.
‘Trust me. I’m a wolf.’ Aesop’s fable neatly expresses something we see so often: the bully who complains that if others just gave him what he wanted he wouldn’t have to take it by force. It’s a kind of peace, but not the kind you can enjoy.
ONCE upon a time messengers came from the Wolves, promising the Sheep certain peace so long as the Wolves could take away the Sheepdogs to face punishment; for it was the Sheepdogs, they said, that made them fight and kill.
The Sheep, silly bleating lot, were on the point of doing what the Wolves wanted when one old Ram, with a chill shiver that ran right through his shaggy fleece, cried “I never heard a treaty like it! How can you expect me to go on living here with you unprotected when even with the Sheepdogs on watch, grazing is already fraught with peril?”
[And the moral of that is, that tyrants always blame the misery they cause on those who resist them.*]
The original does not offer a moral. A similar Aesop’s fable, which does not include the tremulous Ram, draws this lesson: “If you depend on someone else for help, you will be in trouble when that help is nowhere to be found”. The Reader may like to think up his own.
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