"The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse" is one of Aesop's Fables. It is number 352 in the Perry Index and type 112 in Aarne–Thompson's folk tale index. Like several other elements in Aesop's fables, 'town mouse and country mouse' has become an English idiom.
Story
In the original tale, a proud town mouse visits his cousin in the country. The country mouse offers the city mouse a meal of simple country cuisine, at which the visitor scoffs and invites the country mouse back to the city for a taste of the "fine life" and the two cousins dine on white bread and other fine foods. But their rich feast is interrupted by a cat which forces the rodent cousins to abandon their meal and retreat back into their mouse hole for safety. The town mouse tells the country mouse that the cat killed his mother and father and that he is frequently the target of attacks. After hearing this, the country mouse decides to return home, preferring security to opulence or, as the 13th-century preacher Odo of Cheriton phrased it, "I'd rather gnaw a bean than be gnawed by continual fear".
Spread
The story was widespread in Classical times and there is an early Greek version by Babrius (Fable 108). Horace included it as part of one of his satires (II.6), ending on this story in a poem comparing town living unfavorable to life in the country. Marcus Aurelius alludes to it in his Meditations, Book 11.22; "Think of the country mouse and of the town mouse, and of the alarm and trepidation of the town mouse".
However, it seems to have been the 12th century Anglo-Norman writer Walter of England who contributed most to the spread of the fable throughout medieval Europe. His Latin version (or that of Odo of Cheriton) has been credited as the source of the fable that appeared in the Spanish Libro de Buen Amor of Juan Ruiz in the first half of the 14th century. Walter was also the source for several manuscript collections of Aesop's fables in Italian and equally of the popular Esopi fabulas by , the first printed collection of Aesop's fables in that language (Verona, 1479), in which the story of the town mouse and the country mouse appears as fable 12. This consists of two sonnets, the first of which tells the story and the second contains a moral reflection.
British variations
British poetical treatments of the story vary widely. The Scottish Henryson's The Taill of the Uponlandis Mous and the Burges Mous makes the two mice sisters. The one in the country envies her sister's rich living and pays her a visit, only to be chased by a cat and return home, contented with her own lot. Four final stanzas (lines 190–221) draw out the moral that it is better to limit one's ambition and one's appetites, warning those who make the belly their god that "The cat cummis and to the mous hes ee".
Henryson attributes the story to Esope, myne author where Sir Thomas Wyatt makes it a song sung by "My mothers maydes when they did sowe and spynne" in the second of his satires. This is more in accord with Horace's description of it as "an old wives' tale" but Wyatt's retelling otherwise echoes Henryson's: an impoverished country mouse visits her sister in town but is caught by the cat. In the second half of the poem (lines 70–112) Wyatt addresses his interlocutor John Poynz on the vanity of human wishes. Horace, on the other hand, had discussed his own theme at great length before closing on the story.
By contrast, the adaptation in La Fontaine's Fables, Le rat de ville et le rat des champs (I.9), is simply told. There it is the town rat that invites the country rat home, only to have the meal disturbed by dogs (as in Horace); the country rat then departs, reflecting, as in Aesop, that peace is preferable to fearful plenty.
Adaptations dating from Britain's "Augustan Age" concentrate upon the Horatian version of the fable. The reference is direct in The hind and the panther transvers'd to the story of the country-mouse and the city mouse, written by Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax and Matthew Prior in 1687. This was a satire directed against a piece of pro-Stuart propaganda and portrays the poet John Dryden (under the name of Bayes) proposing to elevate Horace's 'dry naked History' into a religious allegory (page 4ff).