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60 free Aesop's Fables trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Aesop's Fables trivia quiz starts with the stories everyone half-remembers from childhood: why the hare loses, what the crow drops, how the thirsty crow gets a drink, and which idioms ('sour grapes', 'cry wolf', 'bell the cat', 'a dog in the manger') come from which tale. The easy questions are answerable by any 8-year-old who has had the stories read to them; the medium ones test the details people forget, like the fact that the grasshopper was originally a cicada or that the frogs' first king was a log. The harder end is for classicists and pub-quiz specialists: the legendary life and death of Aesop himself, Phaedrus and Babrius, the Perry Index, Caxton's 1484 printing, Marie de France, La Fontaine and Krylov, plus a few fables that are wrongly credited to Aesop altogether. There are also questions on the fables in art and culture, from Velazquez to Disney to the IPA's favourite phonetics passage. Every question was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the individual fables, on Aesop and on the transmission of the collection, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Greek mythology, fairy tales and classic literature quizzes next.
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Q 01In the fable of the tortoise and the hare, what does the hare do midway through the race?
Takes a nap
In classical times the point was the hare's foolish over-confidence rather than the tortoise's pluck.
Q 02What English idiom comes from the fable of the shepherd boy who kept raising false alarms?
To cry wolf
Later English poetic versions have the wolf eat the boy as well as the sheep.
Q 03The expression 'sour grapes' comes from the fable about which animal?
A fox
In Scandinavian tellings the animal complains about rowanberries instead, since grapes are scarce that far north.
Q 04In the original Greek version of The Ant and the Grasshopper, the idle singing insect was actually what?
A cicada
Latin and Romance-language translations kept the cicada; the grasshopper is a later northern substitution.
Q 05How does the mouse repay the lion that spared its life?
Gnaws through the hunters' ropes
When Buddhist monks carried the story to China, the rescued animal became a tiger.
Q 06Why do the owners kill the goose that laid the golden eggs?
They expect a lump of gold inside it
Some versions, including Townsend's English one, make the bird a hen rather than a goose.
Q 07How does the thirsty crow reach the water at the bottom of the pitcher?
Drops in pebbles to raise the level
A 2009 study in Current Biology found that rooks will do exactly the same thing when given a similar puzzle.
Q 08In the fable where the wind and the sun compete over a passing traveller, what must they make him do?
Remove his cloak
The moral, that persuasion beats force, has made it one of the most-quoted fables of all.
Q 09Which fable is the International Phonetic Association's standard sample passage?
The North Wind and the Sun
The IPA Handbook renders it in the phonetic alphabet for every language it describes.
Q 10What interrupts the two mice's feast in The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse?
A cat
The 13th-century preacher Odo of Cheriton summed up the moral as 'I'd rather gnaw a bean than be gnawed by continual fear'.
Q 11Which Roman poet worked The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse into one of his Satires?
Horace
Marcus Aurelius also alludes to it in his Meditations, telling himself to think of the town mouse's alarm and trepidation.
Q 12In Belling the Cat, the mice's plan collapses because of what?
Nobody will volunteer to attach the bell
Though often credited to Aesop, the story is not recorded before the Middle Ages and sits at number 613 in the Perry Index, among the medieval additions.
Q 13'Bell the Cat' is said to have been the nickname of which 15th-century Scottish nobleman?
Q 21In The Frogs Who Desired a King, what does Zeus first send the frogs as their ruler?
A log
When the frogs complain that it does nothing, they get a water snake that eats them, replaced by a stork or heron in later tellings.
Q 22What does the runaway slave Androcles remove from the lion's paw?
A thorn
The earliest account, in Aulus Gellius's Attic Nights, has him later recognised by the same lion in the arena at Rome.
Q 23Which playwright's 1912 comedy turned Androcles into a Christian tailor?
George Bernard Shaw
The play as a whole takes a sceptical view of religion despite the saintly hero.
Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus
He earned it for his part in seizing and hanging James III's favourite Thomas Cochrane, and later led a rebellion against the king.
Q 14Which allegorical Middle English poem retells the mice's council as a parliament of rats and mice?
Piers Plowman
Langland was satirising the 1376 Parliament; Wat Tyler's revolt followed five years later.
Q 15How does the fox get the cheese away from the crow?
Flatters her into singing
In Babrius's Greek version the fox signs off: 'you have everything, Sir Crow, except brains'.
Q 16The Fox and the Crow opens Book I of whose celebrated 17th-century French verse Fables?
Jean de La Fontaine
Because it stands at the very start of the collection, generations of French schoolchildren learned it by heart.
Q 17A dog carrying meat drops it after seeing what?
Its own reflection in the water
The Aberdeen Bestiary of around 1200 repeats the tale as if it were natural history.
Q 18The 'dog in the manger' spitefully stops which animal from eating?
A horse
An alternative version in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas has oxen instead, and Lope de Vega turned the theme into a comedy, El Perro del Hortelano.
Q 19Which fable, though often credited to Aesop, does not appear in the Perry Index at all and was only attached to his name in the 18th century?
The Milkmaid and Her Pail
Its lesson survives as the proverb 'don't count your chickens before they hatch'.
Q 20The phrase 'a wolf in sheep's clothing' actually originates in which text, not in Aesop?
The Sermon on the Mount
No fable with this precise theme is recorded before the 12th century; it was grafted onto Aesop's name in modern times.
Q 24In The Oak and the Reed, why does the reed survive the storm that fells the oak?
It bends with the wind
Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde gives the earliest form of the proverb 'a reed before the wind lives on, while mighty oaks do fall'.
Q 25The Mountain in Labour groans with great expectation and finally gives birth to what?
A mouse
It was quoted in the Ars Poetica as a warning against opening an epic too grandly.
Q 26What 'reward' does the wolf give the crane that pulled a bone from its throat?
Letting it take its head out unharmed
The Buddhist Jataka version has a woodpecker doing the same job for a lion, having first propped its jaws open with a stick.
Q 27How does the stork get its revenge on the fox that served it soup in a shallow bowl?
Serves a meal in a narrow-necked vessel
Pieter Bruegel worked the pair into his 1559 painting Netherlandish Proverbs.
Q 28In The Two Pots, a clay pot and a pot made of what are swept along a river together?
Metal
The clay pot wants to keep its distance since it will be the only casualty in any collision; the moral is that the weak should avoid partnering the powerful.
Q 29In the Babrius version of The Ass in the Lion's Skin, what finally gives the donkey away?
Its bray
A second version has the ass betrayed by its ears while trying to graze undisturbed in the fields.
Q 30Aesop is traditionally said to have lived in the 6th century BCE as a slave on which Greek island?
Samos
Aristotle and Herodotus name his masters as Xanthus and then Iadmon, and say he must eventually have been freed.