A Fisherman skilled in music took his flute and his nets to the seashore. Standing on a projecting rock, he played several tunes in the hope that the fish, attracted by his melody, would of their own accord dance into his net, which he had placed below. At last, having long waited in vain, he laid aside his flute, and casting his net into the sea, made an excellent haul of fish. When he saw them leaping about in the net upon the rock he said: “O you most perverse creatures, when I piped you would not dance, but now that I have ceased you do so merrily.”
Credits
Aesop was an ancient Greek storyteller, believed to have lived around the 6th century BCE, whose fables have shaped moral literature across the world for over two millennia. "The Fisherman Piping" is one of his shorter, sharper fables, using a single comic image — a man serenading fish — to deliver its lesson about the danger of substituting fantasy for practical action.
