"The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is one ofAesop's Fables, numbered 210 in thePerry Index.[1] From it is derived the English idiom "to cry wolf", defined as "to give a false alarm" inBrewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable[2] and glossed by theOxford English Dictionary as meaning to make false claims, with the result that subsequent true claims are disbelieved.[3]
The tale concerns ashepherd boy who repeatedly tricks villagers into believing a wolf is attacking his flock. When a real wolf appears and the boy cries for help, the villagers dismiss it as another false alarm, allowing the wolf to devour the sheep. In a later English-language poetic version of the fable, the wolf also eats the boy. This happens inJohn Hookham Frere'sFables for Five Years Old (1830),[4] inWilliam Ellery Leonard'sAesop & Hyssop (1912),[5] and inLouis Untermeyer's 1965 poem.[6]
The moral stated at the end of the Greek version is "this shows how liars are rewarded: even if they tell the truth, no one believes them". It echoes a statement attributed toAristotle byDiogenes Laërtius in hisThe Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, in which the sage was asked what those who tell lies gain by it and he answered "that when they speak truth they are not believed".[7]William Caxton similarly closes his version with the remark that "men bileve not lyghtly hym whiche is knowen for a lyer".[8]
The story dates fromClassical times, but, since it was recorded only in Greek and not translated into Latin until the 15th century, it only began to gain currency after it appeared inHeinrich Steinhöwel's collection of the fables and so spread through the rest of Europe. For this reason, there was no agreed title for the story. Caxton titles it "Of the child whiche kepte the sheep" (1484),Hieronymus Osius "The boy who lied" ("De mendace puero", 1574),Francis Barlow "Of the herd boy and the farmers" ("De pastoris puero et agricolis", 1687),Roger L'Estrange "A boy and false alarms" (1692), andGeorge Fyler Townsend "The shepherd boy and the wolf" (1867). It was under the final title that Edward Hughes set it as the first of tenSongs from Aesop's Fables for children's voices and piano, in a poetic version by Peter Westmore (1965).[9] It also features as the second of "Aesop's Fables for narrator and band" (1999) by Scott Watson (b. 1964)[10]
While educators have long used "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" as a cautionary tale against deceit, an experiment conducted in the early 21st century revealed that children exposed to the fable were more prone to lying. In contrast, those who read aboutGeorge Washington and the cherry tree exhibited greater honesty.[11] However, when dealing with the moral behaviour of adults,Samuel Croxall asks, referencing politicalalarmism, "when we are alarmed with imaginary dangers in respect of the public, till the cry grows quite stale and threadbare, how can it be expected we should know when to guard ourselves against real ones?"[12]
Recent reports in a number of disciplines have linked the idiom derived from the fable, "crying wolf", with the phenomenon now described as "alert" or "alarm fatigue", the state referred to by Croxall above.[13][14][15]
Works related toThe Boy Who Cried Wolf at Wikisource
Media related toThe Shepherd's Boy and the Wolf at Wikimedia Commons