The Mountain in Labour
Encyclopedia
The Mountain in Labour is one of Aesop's Fables
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...

 and appears as number 520 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...

. It was often cited in Classical times and applied to a variety of situations. It refers to speech acts which promise much but deliver little.

The Fable and its interpretation

The earliest surviving version of the tale is in the first two and a half lines of a four-line Latin poem by Phaedrus. 'A mountain had gone into labour and was groaning terribly. Such rumours excited great expectations all over the country. In the end, however, the mountain gave birth to a mouse.' Phaedrus then goes on to say that this applies to those who make serious but empty threats. Walter of England and William Caxton
William Caxton
William Caxton was an English merchant, diplomat, writer and printer. As far as is known, he was the first English person to work as a printer and the first to introduce a printing press into England...

 were eventually to follow him in this, but that such an interpretation is too narrowly focused is suggested by the many other Classical allusions to what was clearly a popular proverb.

The most well-known mention of the fable appears in Horace
Horace
Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...

's epistle on The Art of Poetry. Discussing what to avoid in a poem's opening, he recommends
And don’t start like the old writer of epic cycles:
‘Of Priam’s fate I’ll sing, and the greatest of Wars.’
What could he produce to match his opening promise?
Mountains will labour: what’s born? A ridiculous mouse!
(Ep.II.3, 136–9)

When the English poet Lord Byron updated the work in his Hints from Horace, he substituted a reference to a contemporary writer of bad epics, Robert Southey
Robert Southey
Robert Southey was an English poet of the Romantic school, one of the so-called "Lake Poets", and Poet Laureate for 30 years from 1813 to his death in 1843...

, ' Whose epic mountains never fail in mice' (line 198). 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...

's treatment of the tale also followed Horace in applying it to literary criticism (Fables V.10).

A number of writers of Greek origin mention the fable, although only these allusions have survived in Greek. Commenting on the ruler Agesilaus in his Parallel Lives
Parallel Lives
Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, commonly called Parallel Lives or Plutarch's Lives, is a series of biographies of famous men, arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings, written in the late 1st century...

, the 1st century historian 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...

 writes that 'the old proverb was now made good: The mountain had brought forth a mouse'. In the 2nd century the poet Lucian
Lucian
Lucian of Samosata was a rhetorician and satirist who wrote in the Greek language. He is noted for his witty and scoffing nature.His ethnicity is disputed and is attributed as Assyrian according to Frye and Parpola, and Syrian according to Joseph....

 makes only a fragmentary allusion, while in the 3rd century the rhetorician Porphyry
Porphyry (philosopher)
Porphyry of Tyre , Porphyrios, AD 234–c. 305) was a Neoplatonic philosopher who was born in Tyre. He edited and published the Enneads, the only collection of the work of his teacher Plotinus. He also wrote many works himself on a wide variety of topics...

 claims that it is a Greek proverb that Horace was quoting.

The line from Horace's poem (Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus) is reproduced word for word in a mediaeval compilation of fables, the Ysopet-Avionnet. In this instance, however, it is in connection with the fable about Belling the cat
Belling the cat
Belling the Cat is a fable also known under the titles The Bell and the Cat and The Mice in Council. Although often attributed to Aesop, it was not recorded before the Middle Ages and has been confused with the quite different fable of Classical origin titled The Cat and the Mice. In the...

 where the author comments on the ineffectiveness of political dialogue. In his prose retelling (The Mountains in Labour, Fable 26), Samuel Croxall
Samuel Croxall
Samuel Croxall was an Anglican churchman, writer and translator, particularly noted for his edition of Aesop's Fables.-Early career:...

 also draws from it a warning against the promises of politicians and cites 'Great cry and little wool' as a parallel English proverb that fits the situation. In the 19th century it was also given a political application under the title 'The Mountain of Horace' in an American political cartoon by Thomas Nast
Thomas Nast
Thomas Nast was a German-born American caricaturist and editorial cartoonist who is considered to be the "Father of the American Cartoon". He was the scourge of Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall machine...

 satirising the supporters of Horace Greeley
Horace Greeley
Horace Greeley was an American newspaper editor, a founder of the Liberal Republican Party, a reformer, a politician, and an outspoken opponent of slavery...

 in the presidential election of 1872. It depicts Greeley as a mouse emerging from a pile of mud labeled "Liberal Mountain."

Though it has been less popular in more modern times, the brevity of narration leading to the fable's satirical pay-off, which recommended it also to La Fontaine, is underlined by the setting given it by the musician Bob Chilcott
Bob Chilcott
Robert "Bob" Chilcott is a British choral composer, conductor, and singer, based in Oxford, England.Born in Plymouth, Chilcott sang in the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, both as a boy and as a university student. He performed the Pie Jesu of Fauré's Requiem on the 1967 recording. In 1985 he...

in his Aesop's Fables for piano and choir (2008).

External links

  • 15th-20th century book illustrations online
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