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The Tortoise and the Hare
"The Tortoise and the Hare" is one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 226 in the Perry Index. The account of a race between unequal partners has attracted conflicting interpretations. 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 story concerns a Hare who ridicules a slow-moving Tortoise. Tired of the Hare's arrogant behaviour, the Tortoise challenges him to a race. The hare soon leaves the tortoise behind and, confident of winning, takes a nap midway through the race. When the Hare awakes, however, he finds that his competitor, crawling slowly but steadily, has arrived before him. The later version of the story in La Fontaine's Fables (VI.10), while more long-winded, differs little from Aesop's.
As in several other fables by Aesop, the lesson it is teaching appears ambiguous. 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. 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".
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. 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).
In the 19th century, the fable was given satirical interpretations. In the social commentary of Charles H. 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. Lord Dunsany brings out another view in his "The True History of the Tortoise and the Hare" (1915). There, the hare realises the stupidity of the challenge and refuses to proceed any further. The obstinate tortoise continues to the finishing line and is proclaimed the swiftest by his backers. But, continues Dunsany,
A century later, Vikram Seth broadened the satire in his verse retelling of the fable in Beastly Tales (1991) and had it both ways. There is nothing to recommend in the behaviour of either protagonist by way of a moral. While the Tortoise's victory bolsters its joyless self-righteousness, the hare-brained loser is taken up by the media and "pampered rotten/ And the tortoise was forgotten".
In Classical times, a variation of the story was annexed to a philosophical problem by Zeno of Elea in one of many demonstrations that movement is impossible to define satisfactorily. The second of Zeno's paradoxes is that of Achilles and the Tortoise, in which the hero gives the Tortoise a head start in a race. The argument attempts to show that even though Achilles runs faster than the Tortoise, he will never catch up with her because, when Achilles reaches the point at which the Tortoise started, the Tortoise has advanced some distance beyond; when Achilles arrives at that forward point, the Tortoise has again moved forward. Hence Achilles can never catch the Tortoise, no matter how fast he runs, since the Tortoise will always be moving ahead.
The refutation is mathematical (an infinite series can have a finite length), and since then the name of the fable has been applied to the function described in Zeno's paradox. In mathematics and computer science, the tortoise and the hare algorithm is an alternative name for Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm.
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The Tortoise and the Hare
"The Tortoise and the Hare" is one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 226 in the Perry Index. The account of a race between unequal partners has attracted conflicting interpretations. 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 story concerns a Hare who ridicules a slow-moving Tortoise. Tired of the Hare's arrogant behaviour, the Tortoise challenges him to a race. The hare soon leaves the tortoise behind and, confident of winning, takes a nap midway through the race. When the Hare awakes, however, he finds that his competitor, crawling slowly but steadily, has arrived before him. The later version of the story in La Fontaine's Fables (VI.10), while more long-winded, differs little from Aesop's.
As in several other fables by Aesop, the lesson it is teaching appears ambiguous. 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. 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".
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. 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).
In the 19th century, the fable was given satirical interpretations. In the social commentary of Charles H. 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. Lord Dunsany brings out another view in his "The True History of the Tortoise and the Hare" (1915). There, the hare realises the stupidity of the challenge and refuses to proceed any further. The obstinate tortoise continues to the finishing line and is proclaimed the swiftest by his backers. But, continues Dunsany,
A century later, Vikram Seth broadened the satire in his verse retelling of the fable in Beastly Tales (1991) and had it both ways. There is nothing to recommend in the behaviour of either protagonist by way of a moral. While the Tortoise's victory bolsters its joyless self-righteousness, the hare-brained loser is taken up by the media and "pampered rotten/ And the tortoise was forgotten".
In Classical times, a variation of the story was annexed to a philosophical problem by Zeno of Elea in one of many demonstrations that movement is impossible to define satisfactorily. The second of Zeno's paradoxes is that of Achilles and the Tortoise, in which the hero gives the Tortoise a head start in a race. The argument attempts to show that even though Achilles runs faster than the Tortoise, he will never catch up with her because, when Achilles reaches the point at which the Tortoise started, the Tortoise has advanced some distance beyond; when Achilles arrives at that forward point, the Tortoise has again moved forward. Hence Achilles can never catch the Tortoise, no matter how fast he runs, since the Tortoise will always be moving ahead.
The refutation is mathematical (an infinite series can have a finite length), and since then the name of the fable has been applied to the function described in Zeno's paradox. In mathematics and computer science, the tortoise and the hare algorithm is an alternative name for Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm.