Aesop’s fable of the town mouse and the country mouse is widely known and influential, standing out amongst his other fables as one of the most popular and second only to that of Achilles and the Tortoise/The Tortoise and the Hare. The fable is delightful in its simplicity, and still holds resonance today.
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The Country Mouse’s friend, the Town Mouse, is visiting him and brags of the delights of the city, complaining of the toil and boring diet of the countryside. Enchanted by the visions of wealth, the Country Mouse decides to visit the Town Mouse to experience this luxury, only to find that the price of delicious cheese, breadcrumbs and fruits is the perils of the house and its polecat (the ancient Greeks kept polecats instead of cats to keep out pests). Thus, the Country Mouse heads home, afraid of the city and wishing he had never left his homely life of grain and barely.
The tale undoubtedly had resonance in its time. Likely written in the middle of the 6th Century, Aesop was widely circulated as a teacher of good morality, like Hesiod. Similarly to Hesiod, he shows a devotion to nature and simple living, with Hesiod writing an entire poem on farming and living rurally. Greece at this time was climbing its way up in the world, with city states like Athens starting to take the forms we recognise today. Hesiod and Aesop, while widely celebrated, clearly represented a link to a more simplistic past that was starting to fade. As Greek trade conquered the Mediterranean, city life became seen as the peak of civilisation.
![Aesop Composing His Fables Aesop Composing His Fables](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8695484-0613-4695-adef-f36cdbca9dca_1200x962.jpeg)
By the end of the 1st Century BCE, over 500 years after Aesop, one city stood towering over the Mediterranean. Rome, with its first Emperor emerging from the ashes of a series of bloody civil wars, stood alone as conqueror. Horace, a poet who lived through the last years of this turmoil and into a new age of peace (or so the Romans called it), turned to the past for some inspiration. The Country Mouse resonated with him, and so he decided to include a rewrite of the fable as one of his Satires. Doing so, he illustrated not only that the popularity of Aesop had not faded over time, but that the morals he taught had not either.
One of my biggest weaknesses in the realm of Classics is Roman Political History. I have always preferred to study the poets, but no matter what the political history is always crucial to get a true understanding, So, what are the circumstances that make Horace’s retelling so interesting? Well firstly, the Emperor Augustus. His regime stood for a return to morality and tradition. No doubt an attempt at propaganda to disguise his rise to power, it nonetheless was exactly what his people wanted. Most of them had never known a year free from infighting, war and blood spilled on Roman soil. Furthermore, most of the soldiers fighting in the civil wars had just been given farms. The people wanted peace and quiet, their leader saw this and their poets reflected this.
Virgil, a contemporary and likely a friend of Horace, is one of the best examples of the exhaustion felt by the population. His earliest work, Eclogues, makes an almost direct reference to this contempt, with two characters discussing their annoyance at having their land seized to be given to veterans, as there were too many. His Georgics, written later, takes up the mantle left by Hesiod, as he devotes the entire poem to farming and the countryside. This direct callback to a contemporary of Aesop provides a nice link to Horace’s version of the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, but also shows a reflective, nostalgic atmosphere established in the end of the civil war. The people didn’t care much for the disputes of power grabbing aristocrats, they just wanted to get out of the city that caused all this trouble. Life was becoming a bit much for them, it was time to dial it back a bit and settle to the simple consistency of living day-to-day.
![Christian Wilberg - Open Landscape in the Roman Campagnas Christian Wilberg - Open Landscape in the Roman Campagnas](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F09ac8ebd-e1ac-45c5-b000-7ed30f227590_1295x800.jpeg)
This new attitude, a sort of desire for minimalism and self-sufficiency, was bolstered by the ever-rising popularity of stoicism in the Roman Empire. No matter your thoughts on the modern version, stoicism had mass appeal to the Romans. Almost all of them had suffered mass tragedy, and the powerful people who had gotten them into the mess were commonly associated with extravagance and excess. This return to simplicity, control and tradition aligned very well with the stoic attitude. By becoming master of one’s emotion, and by freeing oneself from unnecessary indulgence, it promised a happiness and satisfaction that felt very achievable. Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher emperor, makes reference to this very fable in his Meditations, reinforcing the stoic reading. The Romans, likely helped by Horace’s retelling, turned to what Aesop had been saying all along.
The Town Mouse and Country Mouse was not written as a stoic doctrine, though the Romans show us its could certainly be read in that way. Approaching it from a modern perspective, it is impossible not to associate it with Cottagecore. This internet aesthetic celebrates a similar return to simplicity and countryside. Foraging, baking, pressing flours and growing your own food all fall under this ideal. On a surface level, it shows very strong similarities to the Roman principles. In the digital age, we often long for peace and tangibility. The online world feels so impersonal, hyper consumerist and gripping our attention, and the countryside feels so much more manageable and friendly. In a way, we echo this same ideal the Romans felt. We long to get away from the mess we find ourselves in.
It is important to remember that this is likely not what Aesop wanted us to see in his fable. Often, in the original text at least (and not in the version given to children), his tales are shows of cruelty and malice. Nonetheless, I feel this reading holds a lot of value, especially in the world we live. We do not have to become stoics, but it is lovely to glimpse a very human desire to escape to a life of peace and quiet.