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 realizing that it is his own fault. The story is recorded in both Greek and Latin sources. In the former, the farmer dies reproaching himself ‘for pitying a scoundrel’, while in the version by Phaedrus the snake says that he bit his benefactor ‘to teach the lesson not to expect a reward from the wicked’. The latter sentiment is made the moral in Medieval versions of the fable. Odo of Cheriton‘s snake answer’s the farmer’s demand for an explanation with a counter-question, ‘‘Did you not know that there is enmity and natural antipathy between your kind and mine? Did you not know that a serpent in the bosom, a mouse in a bag and fire in a barn give their hosts an ill reward?”
An illustration of La Fontaine‘s fable by Ernest Griset
There is an alternative version in which the farmer takes the snake home to revive it and is bitten there. Eustache Deschamps tells it this way in a moral ballade dating from the end of the 14th century in which the repeated refrain is ‘Evil for good is often the return’.
William Caxton amplifies this version by having the snake threaten the farmer’s wife and then strangle the farmer when he tries to intervene. In still another variation, the farmer kills the snake with an axe when it threatens his wife and children. La Fontaine tells it thus as Le villageois et le serpent (VI.13).
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’.
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.
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.
The singer Al Wilson introduced a variant telling of the fable in his song “The Snake” (1968). There it is a ‘tender woman’ who finds a dying, half-frozen snake on the side of the road and takes it home to revive it. The snake later bites her, then says as she is dying in disbelief, “Silly woman, you knew I was a snake before you brought me in!” This version is repeated in the film Natural Born Killers(1994).~~~Wikipedia