The contrasting worlds of Aesop and Charlie Mackesy 

Charlie Mackesy’s bestselling and Oscar-winning stories about a boy, a mole, a fox and a horse deal in aperçus such as ‘Nothing beats kindness. It sits quietly behind all things’; ‘always remember, you’re enough, just as you are’. The ancient Greek Aesop – whoever and whenever he was (6th century bc?) – is the West’s inventor of animal fables, and his creations are rather more challenging.

The c. 350 fables credited to him mostly feature stereotyped animals – the mighty lion, tricky fox, ravenous wolf and so on. Some examples: a fox and donkey agreed to hunt together. But a lion appeared and the fox, hoping to save himself, said he would entrap the donkey for the lion to eat. The lion agreed, and the fox led the donkey into a hunting pit. Seeing the donkey secure, the lion ate the fox, saving the donkey for later. A young lamb hid from a wolf in a temple. The wolf told it to come out because it would be sacrificed to a god. The lamb replied it would prefer that to being eaten by a wolf.

An aged lion, no longer able to hunt, pretended to be ill, welcomed visitors and ate them. When he invited in a fox, the fox refused, pointing out that all the footsteps led into the cave, but none out. A gnat kept biting a lion which could not kill it. The gnat flew off, boasting of his triumph, only to become entangled in a spider’s web. He cried: ‘I defeated the strongest of all creatures, to be destroyed by a mere spider.’ A vixen criticised a lioness for only ever bearing one child. ‘Only one,’ she said, ‘but a lion.’

This is a world in which survival is the bottom line and everyone acts, as they think, in their own self-interest, while the winner takes all.