The Second Moral

Cry wolf. Two words, packed with instantly recognizable and unmistakable meaning. Two words, synonymous with the moral to a story as old as the hills.

This cautionary tale about the danger of false alarms and the importance of truth telling was one of Aesop’s Fables, told by a slave and storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BC. For more than a millennium and a half, the story was recorded only in Greek. Finally translated into Latin in the 15th Century, it began to spread through the rest of Europe. Over the next few centuries, its reach became truly global, to the point of even being set to verse by an American poet in 1965 and made into a song that same year.

In the story, a shepherd boy amuses himself by repeatedly fooling villagers into thinking a wolf is menacing his town’s flock when no such attacks are happening. He cries wolf so often that when a wolf actually appears, the boy’s calls for help are ignored, and the wolf kills the sheep.

The phrase “crying wol…