The story
Aesop, the storyteller of ancient Greece, told of a hare who teased a tortoise for being slow. The tortoise challenged him to a race.
The hare dashed far ahead, felt sure of winning and lay down for a nap. The tortoise kept plodding. When the hare woke, the tortoise was nearly at the finish, and no burst of speed could catch him.
Old English versions often closed with a moral like “The race is not always to the swift.” That older moral echoes the Bible’s Book of Ecclesiastes. The snappier wording came in 1762, when the English poet Robert Lloyd retold the fable in rhyme. His tortoise tells the hare: “You may deride my awkward pace, / But slow and steady wins the race.”
Lloyd’s line was easy to remember and easy to say, and it outlasted almost everything else he wrote. It is now the moral most people attach to the story.
