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The Farmer and the Viper
The Farmer and the Viper is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 176 in the Perry Index.〔(Aesopica site )〕 It has the moral that kindness to the evil will be met by betrayal and is the source of the idiom 'to nourish a viper in one's bosom'. The fable is not to be confused with The Snake and the Farmer, which looks back to a situation when friendship was possible between the two.
==The story==
The story concerns a farmer who finds a viper freezing in the snow. Taking pity on it, he picks it up and places it within his coat. The viper, revived by the warmth, bites his rescuer, who dies realizing that it is his own fault. The story is recorded in both Greek and Latin sources. In the former, the farmer dies reproaching himself "for pitying a scoundrel," while in the version by Phaedrus the snake says that he bit his benefactor "to teach the lesson not to expect a reward from the wicked." The latter sentiment is made the moral in Medieval versions of the fable. Odo of Cheriton's snake answers the farmer's demand for an explanation with a counter-question, "Did you not know that there is enmity and natural antipathy between your kind and mine? Did you not know that a serpent in the bosom, a mouse in a bag and fire in a barn give their hosts an ill reward?"〔(Fable 59 )〕
There is an alternative version in which the farmer takes the snake home to revive it and is bitten there. Eustache Deschamps tells it this way in a moral ballade dating from the end of the 14th century in which the repeated refrain is "Evil for good is often the return."〔''Poésies morales et historiques d'Eustache Deschamps," Paris 1832, (pp.187-8 )〕 William Caxton amplifies this version by having the snake threaten the farmer's wife and then strangle the farmer when he tries to intervene.〔(''Fables of Esope'' 1.10 )〕 In still another variation, the farmer kills the snake with an axe when it threatens his wife and children. La Fontaine tells it thus as "Le villageois et le serpent" (VI.13).〔(An English version is on the Guttenberg site )〕
The Russian fabulist Ivan Krylov, who often used La Fontaine's fables for a variation of his own, adapts the story to address contemporary circumstances in his "The Peasant & The Snake". Written at a time when many Russian families were employing French prisoners from Napoleon I's invasion of 1812 to educate their children, he expressed his distrust of the defeated enemy. In his fable the snake seeks sanctuary in a peasant home and pleads to be employed "to embrace the kitten, caress a maid love-smitten," or to look after the young. The peasant replies that he cannot take the risk of endangering his family and kills the snake.〔"Kriloff's Fables," translated into the original metres by C.Fillingham Coxwell, London 1920, pp. 94-5 (Archived online )〕
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