The Wolves’ Treaty
The leader of a wolf-pack makes some sheep an offer they’d better refuse.
This little Aesop’s Fable comes from the collection of Babrius, a poet from Syria in the second century AD. It is, sadly, a story as relevant today as it ever was. The cunning wolves manage to persuade the sheep that their true enemies are the sheepdogs.
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.