A certain house was overrun with Mice. A Cat, discovering this, made her way into it and began to catch and eat them one by one. Fearing for their lives, the Mice kept themselves close in their holes. The Cat was no longer able to get at them and perceived that she must tempt them forth by some device. For this purpose she jumped upon a peg, and suspending herself from it, pretended to be dead. One of the Mice, peeping stealthily out, saw her and said, “Ah, my good madam, even though you should turn into a meal-bag, we will not come near you.”
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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. "The Cat and the Mice" is a particularly compact example of his craft, distilling the moral of hard-won wariness into a single sharp exchange between predator and prey.
