The Farmer and the Viper
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Farmer and the Viper is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 176 in the Perry Index. 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 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 realising that it is his own fault. In an alternative version, the farmer brings the viper home to warm by the fire. When it threatens his wife and children, he kills it with an axe. It is the latter version that Jean de la Fontaine uses in Le villageois et le serpent (Fables VI.13); this ends with the detail that the farmer cuts the snake in three and the parts struggle to re-unite themselves.
The Russian fabulist Ivan Krylov 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.
A Hausa tale from the north of Nigeria has certain details similar to Aesop in its treatment of ingratitude for favours rendered. A farmer hides a hunted snake by allowing it to creep up his anus. When the snake refuses to leave its comfortable quarters, a heron helps him to expel it. The man then asks how to neutralise the poison that the snake has left and the heron tells him to make a medicine of six white fowl. The man ties it up to make the first of his victims but his wife frees it. On leaving, the heron pecks out one of her eyes. The story-teller ends with the remark that 'if you see the dust of a fight rising, you will know that a kindness is being repaid'.
Proverbial use
Aesop's fable was widespread in Classical times and allusions to it became proverbial. One of the very earliest is in a poem by the 6th century BCE Greek poet Theognis of Megara, who refers to a friend who has betrayed him as the 'chill and wily snake that I cherished in my bosom'. In the work of Cicero it appears as In sinu viperam habere (to have a snake in the breast) and in Erasmus' 16th century collection of proverbial phrases, the Adagia, as Colubrum in sinu fovere (to nourish a serpent in one's bosom). The usual English form is 'to nourish a snake (or viper) in one's bosom', a phrase used by Geoffrey Chaucer (Merchant's Tale, line 1786), William Shakespeare (Richard II 3.2.129–31,) John Milton (Samson Agonistes, line 763) and John Dryden (All for Love 4.1.464–66), among the foremost.
Modern versions
Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Egotism or The Bosom-Serpent" (1843) reinterprets the phrase used of Delilah in Milton's dramatic poem Samson Agonistes. Milton was alluding to cherishing the proverbial 'snake in the bosom', in this case the woman who had betrayed him. In Hawthorne's story a husband separated from his wife, but still dwelling upon her, becomes inturned and mentally unstable. The obsession that is killing him (and may even have taken physical form) vanishes once the couple are reconciled.
Khushwant Singh's short-story "The Mark of Vishnu" (1950) gives the story an Eastern background. A Brahmin priest, assured in the belief that a cobra has a godly nature and will never harm others if treated courteously, is nevertheless killed by the snake when trying to heal and feed it.
In popular music, "The Snake" (1968) by Al Wilson tells of a tender-hearted woman who finds a dying, half-frozen snake on the side of the road. Taking the snake home, she revives it and hugs it. The snake later bites her, then says to her as she lies dying in disbelief, "Silly woman, you knew I was a snake before you brought me in!"
