The Ass (sometimes 'donkey') and his Masters is a fable that has also gone by the alternative titles The ass and the gardener and Jupiter and the ass. Included among Aesop's Fables, it is numbered 179 in the Perry Index. The fable The fable only appears in Greek sources in classical times. In it, an ass in the employ of a gardener complains to the king of the gods that he is not fed adequately and asks for a change of master. He is transferred to a potter and prays for another change because the loads are so heavy. Now he passes to a tanner and regrets leaving his first employer. At a time when slavery was common, the fable was applied to the dissatisfaction felt by slaves. In Renaissance times two Neo-Latin poets contributed to making the story better known. Gabriele Faerno as Asinus dominus mutans, with the moral that a change of master only brings worse; and Hieronymus Osius as Asinus et olitor (The ass and the gardener), with the comment that habitual dissatisfaction always brings a desire for change. Jean de la Fontaine also added the story to his Fables with the even harsher comment that providence has better things to do than listen to those who are never satisfied. In Britain the fable was generally known under the title "The ass and Jupiter" and appears as such in the prose collections of Samuel Croxall, Thomas Bewick,<ref>The Fables of Aesop p.79</ref> and the poetical version of Brooke Boothby. The Dutch painter Dirck Stoop also made an etching of the fable under that title in 1655. Change is never for the better Laurentius Abstemius told a different version of the fable in his Hecatomythium (1490). In this the ass, tired of cold and only straw to eat, pines for the end of winter. In spring there is so much work that he wishes for summer, and then for autumn, under the burdens each season brings him, and in the end 'his last Prayer is for Winter again; and that he may but take up his Rest where he began his Complaint'. Phaedrus, who was a freed slave, did not record the fable about the discontented ass, but a similar moral appears at the end of his version of The Frogs Who Desired a King. The citizens of Athens are grumbling at their new ruler and Aesop advises them,