The phrase "the mountain gave birth to a mouse" is pronounced in different situations. When huge efforts have yielded scanty results, or when great hopes have not come true. So they say about many people who promise, but do few people. The expression is often used in an ironic manner.
Who is the author of the phraseological unit
The authorship of the winged expression is traditionally attributed to Aesop, an ancient Greek slave fabulist who lived several centuries BC. The works of Aesop himself have not reached us. And historians deeply doubt the reality of its existence. All of Aesop's fables are known to have been transcribed by other authors. Likewise, the fable “The mountain, conceived to give birth” (“Mons parturiens”), is familiar to modern people in the revision of Guy Julius Fedra.
Phaedrus is another legendary fabulist slave, only this time from ancient Rome. According to legend, he lived during the reign of the emperors Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius, that is, at the turn of the old and new era. It is believed that Phaedrus was the first Latin writer to begin to translate Aesop's instructive prose tales into verse.
In the most ancient Rome, according to the "Literary Encyclopedia", Phaedrus's fables were very little known. Anyway, the fable genre was not held in high esteem there. In the middle, the name of Phaedrus was forgotten, and his works were lost. In the Middle Ages, only prosaic fables attributed to a certain Romulus were known.
The French lawyer, scientist and writer Pierre Pitu, who in 1596 published a collection of his fables in the French city of Troyes, introduced the world to the work of Phaedrus. The collection became a stepping stone to the creation of the genre of a new European fable. Plots from it were used by Lafontaine, Krylov and other remarkable fabulists. About the same place where Pitu got hold of the manuscripts of a little-known poet who lived fifteen hundred years before his birth, history is modestly silent.
Other versions of origin
The expression "the mountains give birth, and the funny mouse will be born" is found in Horace's treatise "The Art of Poetry" ("Ars poetica"). With these words, he ridicules the weak rhyme-makers who begin their verses with high-flown expressions. Porphyrion, the commentator for Horace, argued that the phrase was a Greek proverb.
As an ancient Greek proverb, Plutarch mentions an expression in his "Lives". In this work, Plutarch gives a story about a certain Spartan king who came with his soldiers to Egypt to help the local ruler. Many people who came to meet the famous hero expected to see the mighty hero. But they saw a tired, puny old man.
In the Russian language, the expression, apparently, was introduced into everyday life by Vasily Kirillovich Trediakovsky. In the introduction to his poem "Tilemakhida, or the Wandering of Tilemachus, the son of Odysseus," published in 1766, Trediakovsky wrote: "mountains are puffing up to give birth, and a funny little mouse will be born." The fable "Mountain in childbirth", with a plot about a mountain giving birth to a mouse, was written in 1806 by the well-known writer Alexander Efimovich Izmailov at the beginning of the 19th century.
