The Fox and the Sick Lion is one of Aesop's Fables, well known from Classical times and numbered 142 in the Perry Index. There is also an Indian analogue. Interpretations of the story's meaning have differed widely in the course of two and a half millennia. Ancient versions A lion grown too old and weak to hunt pretended to be sick as a ruse and ate the animals that came to visit him in his cave. But the fox only greeted him from outside and, on being asked why it did not enter, replied "Because I can only see tracks going in, but none coming out". The earliest application of the fable is in an economic context in First Alcibiades, a dialogue often ascribed to Plato and dated to the 4th century BCE. There Socrates tries to dissuade a young man from following a political career and, in describing the Spartan economy, says: and as to gold and silver, there is more of them in Lacedaemon than in all the rest of Hellas, for during many generations gold has been always flowing in to them from the whole Hellenic world, and often from the barbarian also, and never going out, as in the fable of Aesop the fox said to the lion, 'The prints of the feet of those going in are distinct enough'- but who ever saw the trace of money going out of Lacedaemon? The fable is also one among several to which the Latin poet Horace alluded in his work, seeing in it the moral lesson that once tainted with vice there is no returning. Condemning the get-rich-quick culture of the Roman bankers in his first Epistle, he comments: If the people of Rome chanced to ask me why I delight in the same colonnades as them, yet not the same opinions, nor follow or flee what they love or hate, I’d reply as the wary fox once responded to the sick lion: Because those tracks I can see scare me, they all lead towards your den and none lead away. There is a similar Indian incident in the Buddhist Nalapana Jataka, in which a monkey king saved his troop from destruction by a water-ogre by reconnoitering a jungle pool from which they wished to drink and reporting that “all the footprints led down into the water, but none came back." Reasons for caution The moral drawn