Zeus and the Tortoise
Zeus and the Tortoise appears among Aesop’s Fables and explains how the tortoise got her shell. It is numbered 106 in the Perry Index. From it derives the proverbial sentiment that ‘There’s no place like home’.
Home is best
The fable tells how the king of the gods invited all the animals to his wedding but the tortoise never arrived. When asked why, her excuse was that she preferred her own home, so Zeus made her carry her house about forever after.
That excuse in Greek was Οἶκος φίλος, οἶκος ἄριστος, literally ‘the home you love is the best’. The fabulist then goes on to comment that ‘most people prefer to live simply at home than to live lavishly at someone else's’. [1] The saying became proverbial and was noticed as connected with the fable by Erasmus in his Adagia.[2] The earliest English version of such a proverb, emerging in the 16th century, echoes the comment on the fable: “Home is home, though it’s never so homely”.[3] The sentiment was eventually used as the second line in the popular song, “Home! Sweet Home!” (1823), which also features the equally proverbial “There’s no place like home” in the chorus.
The first recorder of the fable was Cercidas some time in the 3rd century BCE.[4] During the Renaissance it was retold in a Neo-Latin poem by Pantaleon Candidus in 1604[5] and later appeared in idiomatic English in Roger L'Estrange’s Fables of Aesop (1692).[6] In the meanwhile, an alternative version of the story had been mentioned by the late 4th century CE author Servius in his commentary on Virgil's Aeneid. There it is a mountain nymph called Chelone (Χελώνη, the Greek for tortoise) who did not deign to be present at the wedding. The divine messenger Hermes then threw her and her house into the river, where she was changed into the animal which now bears her name.[7]
References
External links
Illustrations in old books