‘The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs’ is a well-known phrase, derived from one of the classical writer Aesop’s best-known fables. A fable, of course, is a short story with a moral, and the story usually involves animals. ‘The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs’ fits all of these criteria. […]
‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ is one of the most famous fables attributed to the classical writer Aesop: it gave us the popular idiom to cry wolf, meaning to raise a false alarm. But although the moral meaning of the fable is fairly clear, the story’s effectiveness as a moral […]
The story of Theseus and the Minotaur is one of the most famous and enduring myths of ancient Greece. Among other things, the tale helped to inspire the central premise of one of the most popular series of dystopian novels and films of the twenty-first century (of which more below).
The story of Echo and Narcissus is one of the most famous in all of classical mythology. But really, what we’re dealing with is a case of several different myths being put together. Narcissus has become synonymous with self-love, with the adjective ‘narcissistic’ and the noun ‘narcissism’ being coined to […]
The Sirens were half-woman and half-bird, although they are sometimes wrongly associated with mermaids (so half-woman and half-fish), probably because of their proximity to the sea (although they were strictly land-based, they tended to hang about down on the shore so they could attract the passing boats full of hapless […]