Fables and Parables Fables and Parables Fables and Parables ("Bajki i przypowieści", 1779), by Ignacy Krasicki (1735–1801), is a work in a long international tradition of fable-writing that reaches back to antiquity. They have been described as being, "[l]ike LaFontaine's [fables]... amongst the best ever written, while in colour they are distinctly original, because Polish." They are, according to Czesław Miłosz, "the most durable among Krasicki's poems." Emulating the fables of the ancient Greek Aesop, the Macedonian-Roman Phaedrus, the Polish Biernat of Lublin, and the Frenchman Jean de La Fontaine, and anticipating Russia's Ivan Krylov, the Pole Krasicki populates his fables with anthropomorphized
There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip his comment on the Latin phrase "inter os atque offam" (between the mouth and the morsel) used by Marcus Cato. The Greek verse is attributed to Palladas in "The Greek Anthology" (X, 32), but that is manifestly erroneous, since Palladas lived two centuries "after" Aulus Gellius. The Loeb Classical Library edition of the Anthology says that the verse is "a very ancient proverb, by some attributed to Homer". There is a reference to the many things that can intervene between cup and lip already in an iambic verse by Lycophron (3rd century B.C.) quoted by Erasmus. According to a story