The basic idea has been expressed through narrative a number of times. In one of Aesop’s fables The Fox and the Cat, the fox boasts of “hundreds of ways of escaping” while the cat has “only one”. When they hear the hounds approaching, the cat scampers up a tree while “the fox in his confusion was caught up by the hounds”. The fable ends with the moral, “Better one safe way than a hundred on which you cannot reckon”
