The obstinate tortoise continues to the finishing line and is proclaimed the swiftest by his backers. There the hare realises the stupidity of the challenge and refuses to proceed any further. Lord Dunsany brings out another view in his "The True History of the Tortoise and the Hare" (1915).
Bennett's The Fables of Aesop translated into Human Nature (1857), the hare is changed to a thoughtful craftsman prostrate under the foot of a capitalist entrepreneur. In the 19th century the fable was given satirical interpretations. There the infant figure of Eros is shown passing through a landscape and pointing to the tortoise as it overtakes the sleeping hare under the motto "perseverance winneth." Later interpreters too have asserted that the fable's moral is the proverbial 'the more haste, the worse speed' ( Samuel Croxall) or have applied to it the biblical observation that 'the race is not to the swift' (Ecclesiastes 9.11). When the fable entered the European emblem tradition, the precept to 'hasten slowly' ( festina lente) was recommended to lovers by Otto van Veen in his Emblemata Amorum (1608), using a relation of the story. An old Greek source comments that 'many people have good natural abilities which are ruined by idleness on the other hand, sobriety, zeal and perseverance can prevail over indolence'. In Classical times it was not the Tortoise's plucky conduct in taking on a bully that was emphasised but the Hare's foolish over-confidence. Īs in several other fables by Aesop, the lesson it is teaching appears ambiguous. The later version of the story in La Fontaine's Fables (VI.10), while more long-winded, differs hardly at all from Aesop's. When the Hare awakes, however, he finds that his competitor, crawling slowly but steadily, has arrived before him. The hare soon leaves the tortoise behind and, confident of winning, takes a nap midway through the race. Tired of the Hare's arrogant behaviour, the Tortoise challenges him to a race.
The story concerns a Hare who ridicules a slow-moving Tortoise. The fable itself is a variant of a common folktale theme in which ingenuity and trickery (rather than doggedness) are employed to overcome a stronger opponent. The account of a race between unequal partners has attracted conflicting interpretations. " The Tortoise and the Hare" is one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 226 in the Perry Index. "The Tortoise and the Hare", from an edition of Aesop's Fables illustrated by Arthur Rackham, 1912
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