A Man came into a forest and asked the Trees to provide him a handle for his axe. The Trees consented to his request and gave him a young ash-tree. No sooner had the man fitted a new handle to his axe from it, than he began to use it and quickly felled with his strokes the noblest giants of the forest. An old oak, lamenting when too late the destruction of his companions, said to a neighboring cedar, “The first step has lost us all. If we had not given up the rights of the ash, we might yet have retained our own privileges and have stood for ages.”
Credits
Aesop was an ancient Greek storyteller, believed to have lived around the 6th century BCE, whose fables have shaped moral literature across cultures for over two millennia. "The Trees and the Axe" is one of his many nature-based fables that uses the plant and animal world to deliver sharp political and social warnings. Though Aesop himself may be a legendary figure, the wisdom in his stories has been preserved and retold across countless languages and generations.
