The Hawk and the Nightingale
Encyclopedia
The fable of The Hawk and the Nightingale is one of the earliest recorded in Greek and there have been many variations on the story since Classical times. The original version is numbered 4 in the Perry Index
Perry Index
The Perry Index is a widely-used index of "Aesop's Fables" or "Aesopica", the fables credited to Aesop, the story-teller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BC...

 and the later Aesop
Aesop's Fables
Aesop's Fables or the Aesopica are a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and story-teller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE. The fables remain a popular choice for moral education of children today...

 version, sometimes going under the title "The Hawk, the Nightingale and the Birdcatcher", is numbered 567. The stories began as a reflection on the arbitrary use of power and eventually shifted to being a lesson in the wise use of resources.

The Fables

The original fable appeared in Hesiod
Hesiod
Hesiod was a Greek oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and...

's poem "Works and Days", a work dating from some seven centuries before the Common Era
Common Era
Common Era ,abbreviated as CE, is an alternative designation for the calendar era originally introduced by Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th century, traditionally identified with Anno Domini .Dates before the year 1 CE are indicated by the usage of BCE, short for Before the Common Era Common Era...

 and thus long before Aesop
Aesop
Aesop was a Greek writer credited with a number of popular fables. Older spellings of his name have included Esop and Isope. Although his existence remains uncertain and no writings by him survive, numerous tales credited to him were gathered across the centuries and in many languages in a...

's traditional dates. It is used to illustrate Hesiod's account of man's fall from the Golden Age
Golden Age
The term Golden Age comes from Greek mythology and legend and refers to the first in a sequence of four or five Ages of Man, in which the Golden Age is first, followed in sequence, by the Silver, Bronze, and Iron Ages, and then the present, a period of decline...

 of innocence to the corrupted Age of Iron. As an example of its violent and arbitrary character, the story is told of a hawk that seizes a nightingale; when the songbird cries in pain, the hawk addresses it: 'Miserable thing, why do you cry out? One far stronger than you now holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you. And if I please I will make my meal of you, or else let you go. He is a fool who tries to withstand the stronger, for he does not get the mastery and suffers pain besides his shame.'
The fable later ascribed to Aesop
Aesop
Aesop was a Greek writer credited with a number of popular fables. Older spellings of his name have included Esop and Isope. Although his existence remains uncertain and no writings by him survive, numerous tales credited to him were gathered across the centuries and in many languages in a...

 is not recorded in any surviving Classical document but began to appear in the early Middle Ages. Some versions extend the picture of violence by having the bird of prey attack the nightingale's nestlings. It agrees to spare them if the nightingale will sing to it, but since the mother bird is consumed with grief, her song sounds forced and shrill. The disappointed hawk then kills one of the chicks but is in turn captured by a fowler. In Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

 times a number of Neo-Latin authors record alternative versions of the fable with quite different interpretations. They include Laurentius Abstemius
Laurentius Abstemius
Laurentius Abstemius was an Italian writer, professor of Belles Lettres at Urbino, and librarian to Duke Guido Ubaldo under Pope Alexander VI. Born at Macerata in Ancona, he distinguished himself, at the time of the revival of letters, as a writer of considerable talents...

' Accipiter et Luscinia cantum pollicens in the late 15th century, Hieronymus Osius
Hieronymus Osius
Hieronymus Osius was a German Neo-Latin poet and academic about whom there are few biographical details. He was born about 1530 in Schlotheim and murdered in 1575 in Graz. After studying first at the university of Erfurt, he gained his Masters degree from Wittenberg university in 1552 and later...

' poem De Accipitre et Luscinia (1574) and three poems by Pantaleon Candidus  in his 150 Fabulae (1604).

In these fables, the nightgale offers to reward the hawk for its clemency by singing to it. But the hawk answers pragmatically that 'I prefer that you sooth my stomach, for I can live without your songs, but I cannot live without food.' This is the version that Jean de la Fontaine
Jean de La Fontaine
Jean de La Fontaine was the most famous French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, and in French regional...

 transformed into Le milan et le rossignol (the kite and nightingale, Fables IX.17), which ends on the common proverb 'An empty stomach has no ear'. The bird had offered a song based on Classical myth for being spared, a reward that the kite rejects as inedible. The episode makes of the fable as much a statement against the intangibility of art as a lesson in practicality. The proverb dates from Classical times, being noted by Erasmus in his Adagia as originating in Plutarch
Plutarch
Plutarch then named, on his becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus , c. 46 – 120 AD, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia...

's "Life of Cato”. The same point of view underlies other fables of Aesop dealing with the tyrannical use of power, such as The Wolf and the Lamb
The Wolf and the Lamb
The Wolf and the Lamb is a well known fable of Aesop and is numbered 155 in the Perry Index. There are several variant stories of tyrannical injustice in which a victim is falsely accused and killed despite a reasonable defence.-The fable and its variants:...

, in which sophistry is rejected in the face of hunger.

Still another of Aesop's fables, The fisherman and the little fish
The fisherman and the little fish
The fisherman and the little fish is one of Aesop's fables and is numbered 18 in the Perry Index. Babrius records it in Greek and Avianus in Latin. The story concerns a small fry caught by a fisherman that begs for its life on account of its size and suggests that waiting until it is larger would...

, draws much the same conclusion as later European variants of "The Hawk and the Nightingale". The little fish pleads with the angler who has caught it to wait until it is more fully grown, but he prefers not to let go of what he has in hope of some uncertain future gain. By the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

 that sentiment had been encapsulated in the proverb 'A bird in the hand is worth two in the woods', which is translated in a 13th century Latin work dealing with current proverbs. Other versions have 'ten in the wood', 'three in the sky' and 'two in the bush'. The conclusion of "The fisherman and the little fish" then appears to have been transferred to "The Hawk and the Nightingale" as if it were illustrating the popular proverb with its references to birds.

It is for this reason that Roger L'Estrange
Roger L'Estrange
Sir Roger L'Estrange was an English pamphleteer and author, and staunch defender of royalist claims. L'Estrange was involved in political controversy throughout his life...

 closes his rendering of Abstemius' fable by quoting the proverb, where Abstemius had only remarked that useful things are to be preferred to pleasant ones. In this he was followed by the Victorian editor George Fyler Townsend
George Fyler Townsend
Reverend George Fyler Townsend was the translator of the standard English edition of Aesop's Fables.Although there are more modern collections and translations, Townsend's volume of 350 fables introduced the practice of stating a succinct moral at the conclusion of each story, and continues to be...

. The sentiment is stated more generally also at the end of the first of Pantaleon's poetic meditations on the fable (133). There the hawk's reply to the nightingale's plea to let it go in preference for larger prey, since it is too small to satisfy the hawk's appetite, echoes Plutarch's comment in the course of quite another anecdote: 'He is a fool who leaves things close at hand to follow what is out of reach'. The shift of focus, from the predator's conduct towards its victim in the original telling to its reason for rejecting the victim's appeal for mercy in the later version, radically alters the fable's interpretation. Where the reader's sympathy for the nightingale was appealed to by Hesiod, it is now the hawk whose behaviour is approved, even by so liberal a commentator as Samuel Croxall
Samuel Croxall
Samuel Croxall was an Anglican churchman, writer and translator, particularly noted for his edition of Aesop's Fables.-Early career:...

. For, in his opinion, They who neglect the Opportunity of reaping a small Advatage in Hopes they shall obtain a better, are far from acting upon a reasonable and well advised Foundation.'

The condemnation of arbitrary power originally implicit in the fable was not entirely lost, however. Illustrations of La Fontaine's more nuanced telling by Carle Vernet and Auguste Delierre (1829-1890) underline the violence of the scene. At the centre of a calm and beautiful landscape, the bird of prey rips up the tiny songbird's breast. The Russian fabulist Ivan Krylov
Ivan Krylov
Ivan Andreyevich Krylov is Russia's best known fabulist. While many of his earlier fables were loosely based on Aesop and Jean de La Fontaine, later fables were original work, often satirizing the incompetent bureaucracy that was stifling social progress in his time.-Life:Ivan Krylov was born in...

carries that violence over into his adaptation of the story as “The cat and the nightingale”. There the cat captures a nightingale in what it claims is a friendly spirit and begs to hear its famous song. When the bird gives only a shrill cry of distress, the cat devours it, bones and all. Written in 1824, the story satirised the strict literary censorship of the time in Russia.

External links

15th-19th century book illustrations online
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