The Lion, the Bear and the Fox The Lion, the Bear and the Fox The Lion, the Bear and the Fox is one of Aesop's Fables that is numbered 147 in the Perry Index. There are similar story types of both eastern and western origin in which two disputants lose the object of their dispute to a third. There are ancient Greek versions of the fable, and it was included in the Medici Manuscript collection of Aesop's fables dating from the 1470s. However, its earliest appearance in another language is as number 60 in the collection of 150 fables in Latin verse by the Austrian poet Pantaleon
Aesop's Fables adapted to the Seychelles dialect around 1900 by Rodolphine Young (1860–1932) but these remained unpublished until 1983. Jean-Louis Robert's recent translation of Babrius into Réunion creole (2007) adds a further motive for such adaptation. Fables began as an expression of the slave culture and their background is in the simplicity of agrarian life. Creole transmits this experience with greater purity than the urbane language of the slave-owner. Fables belong essentially to the oral tradition; they survive by being remembered and then retold in one's own words. When they are written down, particularly in the dominant language of instruction, they lose