Another in a series of stories for liberal religious kids. This story is one of Aesop’s Fables, ancient Greek tales dating from about 500 BCE. Aesop’s Fables typically get modernized, with morals that are borrowed either from Poor Richard’s Almanac, or from greeting cards or fortune cookies. Instead of completely modernizing this fable, I’ve tried to retain at least a little of the ancient Greek sensibility — so I left off the obvious moral, “Honesty is the best policy,” and instead used a more literal translation of the original moral. I also like the fact that this myth includes an actual Greek god.
A Woodman was chopping wood alongside a river, when his axe flew out of his hands and and was carried away by the swift current. The Woodman sat down on the riverbank and began to weep; for he earned his living with his axe, and what was he to do without it?
Hermes, the messenger of the gods, and himself the god of trade, merchants, roads, and many other things, saw the Woodman weeping, and took pity on him. The god’s winged sandals carried him to the riverbank, and he appeared before the Woodman. “Why are you crying, Woodman?” he said.
“I have dropped my axe in the river, and the swift current has carried it away,” said the Woodman.
Hermes went into the river, and emerged holding an axe made out of solid gold. “Is this your axe?” he asked. But the Woodman said it was not his. Hermes went into the river again, and this time brought up an axe made of solid silver. But again, the Woodman said it was not his.
Once more, Hermes went into the river, and this time brought up the Woodman’s axe. This time, the Woodman recognized his axe. Hermes rewarded the Woodman’s honesty by giving to him, not just his own axe, but the gold and silver axes, too.
When the Woodman told this story to his friends, one of them grew jealous. He decided to do the same thing as the Woodman. The jealous friend went to the riverbank, began chopping wood, and then let his axe fall into the river, where it was carried away by the swift current. He sat down and began weeping.
The god Hermes appeared and asked what had happened, and the man said that he had lost his axe in the river. Hermes went into the river and brought up an axe made of solid gold. Hermes asked if this was the axe he had lost. The man said happily, “Yes, this is it.” Hermes hated such shameless greed. The god kept both the golden axe, and also the axe the jealous man had dropped into the river.
This fable shows that the divine is in agreement with people who are just, and the divine is opposed to people who are unjust.
Sources: V. S. Vernon Jones, Aesop’s Fables: A New Translation (1912); Laura Gibbs, Aesop’s Fables: A New Translation, Oxford University Press (2002); and a machine translation of the ancient Greek text from the Chambry edition (no. 253).