The cautionary tale of The Mouse and the Oyster is rarely mentioned in Classical literature but is counted as one of Aesop's Fables and numbered 454 in the Perry Index.^[1] It has been variously interpreted, either as a warning against gluttony or as a caution against unwary behaviour.

The earliest mention of the fable is in a Greek Anthology poem of the 1st century CE by Antiphilus of Byzantium.^[2] A house-mouse comes across an oyster and tries eating it, only for the shell to snap shut, bringing him at once both death and a tomb. In the following century, the orator Aelius Aristides gives the story a political interpretation as a warning to avoid entrapment in dangerous situations.^[3]

A flowery Latin version of the Greek poem was made by Andrea Alciato for his book of emblems(1531), where it figures as a picture of greed.^[4] He was followed in this interpretation by the English emblematist Geoffrey Whitney, who turns it into a health warning:

The Gluttons fatte, that daintie fare devoure,

And seeke about, to satisfie theire taste:

And what they like, into theire bellies poure,

This justlie blames, for surfettes come in haste:

And biddes them feare, their sweete, and dulcet meates,

For oftentimes, the same are deadlie baites.^[5]

The Frome physician Samuel Bowden reads the same lesson into it in his mock-heroic poem 'occasion'd by a Mouse caught in an Oyster-Shell' (1736) that concludes with the lines

Instructed thus – let Epicures beware,

Warn'd of their fate – nor seek luxurious fare.^[6]

Bowden's poem was a popular one and anthologised for a century afterwards. By that time, however, translations of La Fontaine's Fables were offering an alternative moral. The French author's mouse is a naive creature who knows the world only from books and comes to grief not simply through greed but for lack of experience.^[7] In this lively poem, one of La Fontaine's images recalls Alciato's emblem. Arriving at the sea, where 'The tide had left the oysters bare/ He thought these shells the ships must be'. In some of the illustrations to Alciato's work there is indeed a similarity between the pattern on the shell that has closed on the mouse and the boat under sail on the sea.^[8]

• Book illustrations from the 16th–20th centuries