In this lesson, we will study Aesop’s Fable, “The Lion Hunting with Other Beasts”.
I. THE FABLE
Read the fable below carefully. Read it aloud if you are able to do so. Then read it a second time, slowly, before you go on to the rest of the lesson. The rest of the lesson will make little sense to you unless the story itself is clear in your mind first.
A Lion, a Heifer, a Goat, and a Sheep once agreed to share whatever each might catch in hunting. A fine fat stag fell into a snare set by the Goat, who thereupon called the rest together. The Lion divided the stag into four parts. Taking the best piece for himself, he said, “This is mine of course, as I am the Lion;” taking another portion, he added, “This too is mine by right — the right, if you must know, of the strongest.” Further, putting aside the third piece,” That’s for the most valiant,” said he; “and as for the remaining part, touch it if you dare.”
II. LITERAL SENSE
Before we can ask what this fable teaches, we must be sure we understand what actually happens in it. A moral cannot be built on a story the reader has not understood. So let us go through the fable piece by piece, in order.
First, the creatures. A Lion is a large and very powerful animal that hunts and eats other animals. Among the beasts of field and forest, the lion is the strongest, and for that reason people have long called the lion the king of beasts. A Heifer is a young female cow, one that has not yet had a calf of her own. A Goat is an animal that climbs well and moves nimbly, sure-footed even on rough or steep ground. A Sheep is a gentle, plant-eating animal, known for being mild and easily frightened, and for not fighting back. Notice something important about these four animals together. Three of them, the heifer, the goat, and the sheep, are grazing animals. They eat grass and plants, and none of them is built to fight or to kill. Only the lion is a hunter by nature, with claws and teeth made for it. This difference in nature matters very much for what follows, because it means that from the very first sentence, one member of this partnership is far stronger than the other three put together.
Second, the agreement. The fable says the four animals “agreed to share whatever each might catch in hunting.” This is a kind of covenant, which means a solemn agreement in which each side promises something to the other. Here the promise is simple. Whatever any one of the four catches while hunting, all four will divide among themselves. This agreement makes sense only if we suppose that each animal brings something different to the hunt, since a heifer, a goat, and a sheep would not naturally be skilled hunters at all. Perhaps the goat is good at setting traps, as we shall see. Perhaps the lion is good at running down prey. The agreement binds them all to share alike, no matter which one of them made the catch.
Third, the snare. A snare is a trap made from a loop of rope, cord, or wire, set upon the ground or across a path where an animal is likely to walk. The loop is fixed so that when an animal steps into it or pushes against it, the loop draws tight around a leg or around the neck, and the animal cannot easily pull free. Setting a snare well takes skill and patience. It is the goat, in this fable, who has set the snare, and it is into the goat’s snare that the stag falls. A Stag is a full-grown male deer, and a “fine fat stag” means one that is large, healthy, and well fed, the best kind of catch a hunter could hope for. So notice this carefully. It is not the lion who catches the stag. It is the goat, through skill and patient work, whose snare brings down this fine prize. The goat, on catching it, calls the others together, exactly as the agreement required.
Fourth, the division. The Lion divides the stag into four parts, one part for each of the four who made the agreement. So far the lion is doing exactly what justice and the agreement require. A division into four equal shares, one for each partner, is precisely what “sharing alike” means. But watch closely what happens next, because this is the turning point of the whole fable.
The lion takes the first piece, the best piece, and says, “This is mine of course, as I am the Lion.” Then he takes a second piece and says it is his too, “by right of the strongest.” Then he sets aside a third piece and says, “That’s for the most valiant,” meaning the bravest, and takes that one as well, since he calls himself the most valiant. And as for the fourth piece, the last one, he does not even offer a reason. He simply says, “touch it if you dare.” This is a plain threat. He is telling the heifer, the goat, and the sheep that if any of them reaches for that last piece, they will suffer for it.
Let us look now at the word “valiant.” Valiant means brave, full of courage, willing to face danger. It is worth noticing that nothing in the fable has shown us the lion being especially brave in this hunt. He did not catch the stag. He did not risk anything. He is simply calling himself valiant because he wishes to keep another piece of meat.
Fifth, let us set the order of events out plainly, one following from the other. Because the four animals wished to hunt successfully, they agreed to share whatever any one of them caught. Because the goat was skilled at setting traps, her snare caught a fine stag. Because the agreement required it, the goat called the others to divide the catch. Because there were four partners, the lion divided the stag into four parts. And then, because the lion was strongest and the other three had no way to stop him, he took all four parts for himself, each time giving a different reason, and ending with a bare threat instead of a reason at all.
Here is where the fable stops. We are never told what the heifer, the goat, or the sheep said or did. We do not know whether they protested, whether they went hungry, or whether they ever hunted again with the lion. Aesop gives us the lion’s four sentences and then nothing more.
Now let us correct a mistake a young reader might easily make here. It would be easy to think the lion is offering four different, real reasons for taking four different shares, as though each reason were a fresh and separate argument. He is not. Look again at what each reason actually says. “I am the Lion” means he holds the highest rank among beasts. “The right of the strongest” means he has more power than the others. “The most valiant” means he is the boldest and least afraid. “Touch it if you dare” means he will hurt whoever tries. Every one of these four sentences, dressed in different words, says the very same single thing: I am stronger than you, and you cannot stop me. The lion is not giving four reasons. He is giving one fact four times, in four different disguises.
III. MORAL LESSON
The principal lesson of this fable is that a promise to share fairly is broken as much when the strong seize everything for themselves as when the weak steal in secret, and that strength is never, by itself, a right.
The virtue at stake here is called justice. Justice is the virtue that gives to each person, or in this case each creature, what is due to him. Let us take that definition apart. A virtue, as we have said before and should say again, is a good habit of the soul, a settled readiness to act rightly, built up in us by doing good acts again and again until they become natural to us. What is due to someone means what rightly belongs to him, what he has a claim to, whether by agreement, by law, or by nature. The heifer, the goat, and the sheep each had a claim to one quarter of the stag, because that is exactly what the agreement promised them. What was due to each of the four was one part in four. Justice would have required the lion to take his own fourth part, no more, and leave the rest.
Let us separate, as we always should, what the lion wanted from how he went about getting it. It is not wrong for the lion to want food. A lion must eat, and meat from a shared hunt is not an evil thing to desire. If the lion had simply taken his own fair share, the one part in four that belonged to him under the agreement, no fault would lie in that at all. The fault is not in his hunger. The fault is entirely in his manner of satisfying it. He used his strength to take what was not his, and he used clever words to make the taking sound like a right.
Notice how the doctrine appears in the very words of the story. Justice, we said, means giving each one his due. The lion’s third sentence, “that’s for the most valiant,” even borrows the language of a virtue, courage, to cover an act of injustice. This is worth noticing carefully, because it shows something true about the way wrongdoing often works. Wrongdoing rarely announces itself plainly. It borrows the names of good things, kingship, strength, courage, and wears them like a mask, so that the one committing the wrong can tell himself, and try to tell others, that he is only claiming what is proper to him.
Now let us name the opposite fault, so the lesson is not lopsided. Injustice can take more than one form. The fault we see fully in this fable is the fault of taking more than one’s due, of seizing by force what belongs to another. This is the vice directly opposite to justice that concerns us here. There is another kind of failure in justice, though it is not shown fully in this story, and that is failing to give another his due even when one easily could, out of stinginess or carelessness rather than open seizure. Both are failures of the same virtue, justice, though they look different on the surface. What the fable shows us clearly, however, is the first kind, taking by force what has been promised to another.
We should also ask whether this wrong, once done, could be undone. Once the stag was divided and eaten, the meat could not be given back. That particular loss was final. But there is a further question the fable quietly raises for the heifer, the goat, and the sheep. Will they hunt with the lion again? An agreement that has already been broken once gives good reason to doubt that it will be honored a second time. This teaches us something about trust and about agreements generally. A broken promise is not merely one bad afternoon. It changes what a wise creature should expect the next time the same promise is offered by the same partner.
Aesop was a pagan and did not have the faith, yet natural reason alone, without any help from revelation, sees plainly that this lion has done wrong. Any thinking person, of any time or place, can see that an agreement to share fairly is not honored by one side taking everything. The Church confirms this truth and carries it further. She teaches that justice is one of the four chief moral virtues, owed by every person to every other person, and that the strong owe it to the weak with special care, precisely because the weak have no power of their own to enforce what is due to them. A Christian is taught further still to weigh every dealing with his neighbor in light of the end of his whole life, which is God, and to remember that the powerful will answer for how they used their power over those who could not resist them.
IV. AESOP’S CHOICES
Aesop was a teacher, and every part of this fable is the deliberate work of a teacher. Let us take up the parts one at a time and ask why each was chosen.
Why a lion? Because the lion is, by nature, the strongest of beasts, feared by all others, and commonly called their king. No other animal could show us so plainly what happens when strength alone is allowed to decide what is right. If Aesop had chosen a smaller or weaker creature to play this part, the story would lose its force, because the other three animals might have had some real hope of resisting. The lion’s very nature, his size, his claws, his teeth, makes resistance from the others hopeless from the start, and this is exactly the situation the fable needs.
Why a heifer, a goat, and a sheep as the other three? Because all three are grazing animals, gentle by nature, without claws or fangs, unable to fight a lion under any circumstances. Choosing three such creatures, rather than one, shows us that even three weak parties together are still no match for one who is truly stronger, when there is no law and no judge to enforce what has been promised. This is an important detail. It is not a story about one weak animal against a strong one, where perhaps friends might join together and prevail. It is three against one, and the three still cannot get their due. Aesop wants us to see that numbers alone do not guarantee justice; only right, backed by some power to enforce it, can do that.
Why does the goat catch the stag, rather than the lion himself? Because this sharpens the injustice as much as anything in the story. The lion did not track the stag, did not set the trap, did not risk himself for this catch at all. The goat’s skill and patience won the prize. Yet the lion, taking no part in the labor, takes every part of the reward. This detail teaches us that the lion’s wrong is not merely that he wants meat, but that he claims credit and reward for work he did not do.
Why does Aesop have the lion divide the stag into four equal parts at all, if he only meant to take it all? Because the formal, fair-looking division makes the theft that follows all the sharper. If the lion had simply seized the whole stag at once, the story would show only brute violence, and brute violence teaches us little we did not already expect from a lion. But by dividing the stag properly first, as the agreement required, and only then taking every piece back one by one under a different pretended reason, Aesop shows us something more dangerous and more common: injustice that wears the outward form of fairness while robbing us of the substance of it.
Why four separate reasons instead of one? Because this is the very heart of the lesson. Each reason sounds, for a moment, like a new and different argument. Kingship, strength, courage, and finally open threat. By giving four disguises for one single fact, Aesop teaches us to see through such disguises in life, wherever we meet them.
Why end with “touch it if you dare,” and tell us nothing of what followed? Because a bare threat, with no answer given and no ending shown, leaves the full weight of the injustice resting on the listener’s own mind. We are left, as the heifer, the goat, and the sheep were left, with nothing to do but see plainly what has happened. The shortness of the fable serves this same purpose. There is no room in it for anything but one hunt, one division, and four claims. Nothing distracts us from the shape of the wrong.
Now, why does Aesop tell a story at all, rather than simply stating a rule? He might have written, “The strong often use fine-sounding words to justify taking what belongs to others.” This is a true rule, and it is also a rule that slides out of the mind almost as soon as it is heard, because it has nothing in it for the mind to hold onto.
Here is why the story succeeds where the bare rule fails. All that we know begins in the senses. We first learn by seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling particular things, one at a time. From many such particular things, the mind draws out what is true generally, and at last what is true always. A child has never seen injustice itself, because injustice is not a thing you can point to with your finger. But a child can picture a stag divided into four parts, and one lion taking piece after piece while three smaller animals stand by unable to speak. From that one clear picture, the mind can travel outward to the general truth about strength misused, wherever it appears afterward in life.
This is not a turning away from the visible world toward some higher and better world. It is the very opposite. The fable teaches through the things a child can see in his mind’s eye, because seeing in this way is the road by which human understanding travels. Man is made to learn from the particular thing first, and the stag divided among four hungry animals is exactly such a particular thing.
V. APPLICATION
Now let us bring this fable into your own days, because a lesson you cannot use is a lesson you will not keep.
Consider your words first. Suppose you and your brothers or sisters agree beforehand that whatever treat one of you is given will be shared equally among all of you. Suppose then that one of you receives a plate of cookies, and instead of dividing it fairly, begins to explain why he should keep the largest piece, because he is the oldest, and then another piece, because he found the box, and then another, because he carried it home. Notice how closely this matches the lion’s four sentences. Each reason sounds different, but each one is really just a way of saying, I want more, and I am going to keep it. The just act is to remember the agreement was to share alike, and to give each one his true share, not to hunt for new words to justify keeping more.
Consider next your work and your promises. Suppose you and a friend agree to work together on a project, perhaps building something or cleaning a yard for pay, and you agree beforehand to split whatever you are given for the work. Suppose your friend does most of the actual labor, much as the goat set the snare and caught the stag, but when the payment comes, you are tempted to claim the larger share because you are stronger, or older, or because it was your idea to begin with. The just act is to honor the agreement exactly as it was made, giving your friend the share his labor earned him, and not inventing reasons afterward to take more than was promised to you.
Consider third the things you want and cannot easily have. Suppose you are the strongest or the oldest among your friends or your brothers and sisters, and there is something all of you want, perhaps the best seat, the largest portion, or the first turn at a game. It is easy, when you are strongest, to feel that your strength itself gives you the right to take what you want, and even to think of clever reasons why you deserve it more than the others. The fable warns you plainly against this. Being strongest, or oldest, or most skilled is not the same thing as being owed more than your fair share. What is due to you is what was agreed, or what is genuinely fair between you, not whatever your strength allows you to seize.
Now here is why this fable will help you remember, long after a bare rule would have faded. A rule such as “do not take more than your share” is easy to hear and easy to forget, because it gives your mind nothing to hold onto. But a picture stays. You can see the fine fat stag lying divided into four parts. You can see the lion’s paw resting first on one piece, then reaching for the second, then the third, each time with a new pretended reason. You can hear the last cold sentence, with no reason offered at all, “touch it if you dare.”
That picture will return to you exactly when you need it, before any rule does, because this is what Aesop intended when he made the story. Someday you will be dividing something with someone weaker than you, a treat, a task, a reward, or a turn, and just as you begin to reach for more than your share, the lion and his four false reasons will come to your mind first. And that memory will help you set the extra piece back down.
Carry the lesson in one sentence: A promise to share is broken as much by the strong who seize as by the sly who steal, and strength alone gives no right to what belongs to another.
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