The Satyr and the Traveller

The Satyr and the Traveller (or Peasant) is one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 35 in the Perry Index. The popular idiom 'to blow hot and cold' is associated with it.

There are Greek versions and a late Latin version of the fable by Avianus. In its usual form, a satyr or faun comes across a traveller wandering in the forest in deep winter. Taking pity on him, the satyr invites him home. When the man blows on his fingers, the satyr asks him what he is doing and is impressed when told that he can warm them that way. But when the man blows on his soup and tells the satyr that this is to cool it, the honest woodland creature is appalled at such double dealing and drives the traveller from his cave. There is an alternative version in which a friendship between the two is ended by this behaviour.

The idiom 'to blow hot and cold (with the same breath)' to which the fable alludes was recorded as Ex eodem ore calidum et frigidum efflare by Erasmus in his Adagia (730, 1.8.30). Its meaning was further defined by the emblem books of the Renaissance, particularly those that focused on fables as providing lessons for moral conduct. While Hieronymus Osius tells the tale of the traveller and draws the moral that one should avoid those who are inconstant,Gabriele Faerno puts it in the context of friendship and counsels that this should be avoided with the 'double-tongued' (bilingues). In this he is followed by Giovanni Maria Verdizotti,Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder and Geoffrey Whitney. However, in Francis Barlow's edition of the fables (1687), the Latin text warns against those whose heart and tongue do not accord, while Aphra Behn comments in English verse that

following John Ogilby's slightly earlier example of giving it a political interpretation. The Wenceslas Hollar print in that edition emphasises the lesson by showing the battle in heaven and the fall of Lucifer as taking place outside the mouth of the cave in which the traveller is blowing on his broth.

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