Note 3 — Chapter LXII

Benfey remarks that this fable was known to Plato; Cratylus, 411, A, (but the passage might refer to some story of Bacchus personating Hercules, as in the Ranæ,) and he concludes that the fable came from Greece to India. He compares Æsop, (Furia, 141, Coraes, 113,) Lucianus, Piscator, 32, Erasmus, “Asinus apud Cumanos,” Robert, Fables Inédites, I, 360. (Benfey, Vol. I, p. 463.) I cannot find the fable in Phædrus or Babrius. The skin is that of a tiger in Benfey’s translation, and also in Johnson’s translation of the Hitopadeśa, p. 74 in the original (Johnson’s edition). See also Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde, p. 119. It is No. 189 in Fausböll’s edition of the Játakas, and will be found translated in Rhys Davids’ Introduction to his Buddhist Birth Stories, p. v.