The City Rat and the Country Rat

This is another fable that can be applied to crypto and investment in general: do not take too many risks, as you cannot recover from complete ruin.

In the first edition of his Fables, Jean de La Fontaine wrote the life of Aesop, the greek fabulist he borrowed most of his fables stories from. This life is mostly legendary, as La Fontaine says so himself.

First Fable: The Circada and the Ant

Previous fable: The Wolf and the Dog

Next fable: The Wolf and the Lamb

The Life of Aesop, by Jean de La Fontaine - part 1

We know nothing specific concerning the birth of Homer and Aesop: we hardly know what happened to them. This is surprising since history does not reject things less pleasant and less necessary than this. So many destroyers of nations, so many princes without merit have found people who have taught us even the smallest peculiarities of their lives; and we ignore the most important things about Aesop and Homer, that is, about the two personages who best deserved the following centuries. Homer is not only the father of the gods, but he is also the father of good poets. As for Aesop, it seems to me that he should be numbered among the sages of whom Greece has so much boasted, he who taught true wisdom, and who taught it with much more art than those who give definitions and rules. The lives of these two great men have truly been collected; but most scholars consider them both fabulous, particularly the one that Planudes wrote. As for me, I did not want to engage in this criticism. As Planudes lived in a century when the memory of things that happened to Aesop was not yet extinguished, I believed that he knew by tradition what he left behind. In this belief, I followed him, without taking away from what he said of Aesop anything that seemed to me too childish, or in any way deviated from propriety.

Aesop was a Phrygian, from a town called Amorium. He was born around the fifty-seventh Olympiad, some two hundred years after the founding of Rome. Whether he had cause to thank Nature or to complain of her, we cannot say; for, by endowing him with a very fine mind, she gave birth to him deformed and ugly in appearance, barely having the appearance of a man, to the point of almost entirely refusing him the use of speech. With these faults, if he had not been able to be a slave, he could not fail to become one. For the rest, his soul remained always free and independent of fortune.