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The North Wind and the Sun is one of Aesop's Fables (Perry Index 46). It is type 298 (Wind and Sun) in the Aarne-Thompson folktale classification.〔D. L. Ashliman, ''(Wind and Sun: fables of Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 298 in which the wind and the sun dispute about which of them is more powerful plus a related African-American tale )''〕 The moral it teaches about the superiority of persuasion over force has made the story widely known. It is also known for being a chosen text for phonetic transcriptions. ==The story and its application== The story concerns a competition between the North wind and the Sun to decide which is the stronger of the two. The challenge was to make a passing traveler remove his cloak. However hard the North Wind blew, the traveler only wrapped his cloak tighter to keep warm, but when the Sun shone, the traveler was overcome with heat and soon took his cloak off. The fable was well known in Ancient Greece; Athenaeus recorded that Hieronymus of Rhodes, in his ''Historical Notes'', quotes an epigram of Sophocles against Euripides which parodies the story of Helios and Boreas. It relates how Sophocles had his cloak stolen by a boy to whom he had made love. Euripides joked that he had had that boy too and it did not cost him anything. Sophocles' reply satirises the adulteries of Euripides: "It was the Sun, and not a boy, whose heat stripped me naked; as for you, Euripides, when you were kissing someone else's wife the North Wind screwed ''you''. You are unwise, you who sow in another's field, to accuse Eros of being a snatch-thief." The Latin version of the fable first appears centuries later in Avianus as ''De Vento et Sole'' (Of the wind and the sun, Fable 4); early versions in English and Johann Gottfried Herder's poetic version in German (''Wind und Sonne'') also give it as such. It is only in mid-Victorian times that the title "The North Wind and the Sun" begins to be used. In fact the Avianus poem refers to the characters as Boreas and Phoebus, the gods of the north wind and the sun, and it is under the title ''Phébus et Borée'' that it appears in La Fontaine's Fables (VI.3). Victorian versions give the moral as "Persuasion is better than force", but it has been put in different ways at other times. In the Barlow edition of 1667, Aphra Behn teaches the Stoic lesson that there should be moderation in everything: "In every passion moderation choose,/For all extremes do bad effects produce", while La Fontaine's conclusion is that "Gentleness does more than violence" (''Fables'' VI.3). In the 18th century, Herder comes to the theological conclusion that, while superior force leaves us cold, the warmth of Christ's love dispels it,〔''Gedichte V, Geschichte und Fabel 4'', quoted in the German Wikipedia〕 and Walter Crane's limerick version of 1887 gives a psychological interpretation, "True strength is not bluster". Most of these examples draw a moral lesson, but La Fontaine hints at the political application that is present also in Avianus' conclusion: "They cannot win who start with threats". There is evidence that this reading has had an explicit influence on the diplomacy of modern times: in South Korea's Sunshine Policy, for instance, or Japanese relations with the military regime in Burma. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The North Wind and the Sun」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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