A Crow in great want of food saw a Serpent asleep in a sunny nook, and flying down, greedily seized him. The Serpent, turning about, bit the Crow with a mortal wound. In the agony of death, the bird exclaimed: “O unhappy me! who have found in that which I deemed a happy windfall the source of my destruction.”
Credits
Aesop was an ancient Greek storyteller, believed to have lived around 620–564 BCE, whose fables have been retold across cultures for over two millennia. His stories typically feature animals whose behavior illustrates sharp moral lessons about human nature. "The Crow and the Serpent" is one of his briefest fables, yet its warning about the dangers of acting on impulse without weighing the consequences carries a weight well beyond its few sentences.
