The Boy Who Cried Wolf

File:Boycriedwolfbarlow.jpg

Francis Barlow's illustration of the fable, 1687

"The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 210 in the Perry Index. From it is derived the English idiom "to cry wolf", defined as "to give a false alarm" in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and glossed by the Oxford English Dictionary as meaning to make false claims, with the result that subsequent true claims are disbelieved.

Fable

The tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks villagers into believing a wolf is attacking his flock. When a real wolf appears and the boy cries for help, the villagers dismiss it as another false alarm, allowing the wolf to devour the sheep. In a later English-language poetic version of the fable, the wolf also eats the boy. This happens in John Hookham Frere's Fables for Template:Not a typo (1830), in William Ellery Leonard's Aesop & Hyssop (1912), and in Louis Untermeyer's 1965 poem.

The moral stated at the end of the Greek version is "this shows how liars are rewarded: even if they tell the truth, no one believes them". It echoes a statement attributed to Aristotle by Diogenes Laërtius in his The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, in which the sage was asked what those who tell lies gain by it and he answered "that when they speak truth they are not believed". William Caxton similarly closes his version with the remark that "Template:Not a typo".

History

The story dates from Classical times, but, since it was recorded only in Greek and not translated into Latin until the 15th century, it only began to gain currency after it appeared in Heinrich Steinhöwel's collection of the fables and so spread through the rest of Europe. For this reason, there was no agreed title for the story. Caxton titles it "Template:Not a typo" (1484), Hieronymus Osius "The boy who lied" ("", 1574), Francis Barlow "Of the herd boy and the farmers" ("", 1687), Roger L'Estrange "A boy and false alarms" (1692), and George Fyler Townsend "The shepherd boy and the wolf" (1867). It was under the final title that Edward Hughes set it as the first of ten Songs from Aesop's Fables for children's voices and piano, in a poetic version by Peter Westmore (1965). It also features as the second of "Aesop's Fables for narrator and band" (1999) by Scott Watson (b. 1964)

While educators have long used "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" as a cautionary tale against deceit, an experiment conducted in the early 21st century revealed that children exposed to the fable were more prone to lying. In contrast, those who read about George Washington and the cherry tree exhibited greater honesty. The suggestibility and favourable outcome of the behaviour described, therefore, seems the key to moral instruction of the young. However, when dealing with the moral behaviour of adults, Samuel Croxall asks, referencing political alarmism, "when we are alarmed with imaginary dangers in respect of the public, till the cry grows quite stale and threadbare, how can it be expected we should know when to guard ourselves against real ones?"

Recent reports in a number of disciplines have linked the idiom derived from the fable, "crying wolf", with the phenomenon now described as "alert" or "alarm fatigue", the state referred to by Croxall above.

External links

• Template:Sister-inline
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• Laura Gibbs' gallery of 15th–20th century book illustrations of the fable
• The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf on Project Gutenberg
• The Shepherd who cried “Wolf!” in Jest on Loeb Classical Library