Lion and Counselors
One day the lion woke in a particularly surly mood. He called in his counselors. First came a sheep. "Sheep!", the lion demanded. "Does my breath smell bad?"
"Oh, yes, your majesty, it reeks like something crawled into your mouth and died---" was as far as the sheep could get before the lion leaped upon him and tore him to shreds.
Next to arrive was the goat. "Goat!", the lion demanded. "Does my breath smell bad?"
The goat, noting the remains of the sheep, composed himself. "Not at all, Great Sire. Your breath is like the sweet flowers of May, which---"
"Flatterer!" roared the lion as he leaped upon the goat and tore him to shreds.
The third to arrive was the fox. "FOX!", demanded the lion. "Does my breath smell bad?"
The fox, noting the remains of the sheep and goat, answered: "I'm sorry, your Majesty, but a cold has robbed me of my sense of smell, and I can offer no judgment."
Hence it is said: In tempora periculosa, sapiens dicet nihil.
Notes
In a fit of drunken madness (i.e., after two glasses of wine), I decided to make a serious effort for Bardic Champions (see The Duke and the Yeoman for more details). It was pointed out that I lacked short pieces. After some thought, I decided that Aesopic stories would be appropriate for William's person (Shakespeare certainly refers to enough of them); moreover, a lot of them involve social commentary, which of course makes them irresistable...besides, they offer lots of opportunity to play characters. After some thought, I decided to include a moral, but to avoid being overly didactic (or perhaps to be even more didactic...) I translated it into Latin. Because I'm me, the Latin translations are chosen so that they are, if you know any other Romance language (or, for that matter, have a good vocabulary), you will understand them even if you don't speak Latin. (When I performed this, it was suggested that I include a translation, after the Latin version)
I did run into a bit of a problem: I distinctly remembered this story as being Aesopic, but when I searched for it, I couldn't find it, though I could find India and Thai versions of the story. At least, not under the expected titles ("The Lion With Bad Breath", for example). Finding collections of Aesop's fables is easy, and I eventually found this one. Going through it page by page I found the above title for the story.
Of course, many Aesopic fables are well-known: sour grapes; the boy who cried wolf; the ant and the grasshopper. Telling a well-known story is somewhat risky, as your audience might anticipate you (and if it's something like sour grapes or the boy who cried wolf, you're in the position of telling them a moralistic fable that they've heard many, many times before). So picking the right Aesopic story is challenging. Fortunately, there are something like 300 of them. Watch this space...
One important feature of Aesopic fables is the moral at the end. Of course, we moderns don't like being told the morals (it's either we're more sophisticated, and we get it...or we don't like being told how to live). In either case, I felt it was important to include the moral. At the same time, I wanted to do something different from "And the moral of this story is..." I hit on the device of giving the moral...in Latin.
Why Latin? One of the things I feel the SCA should have (but doesn't, for a variety of practical reasons) is linguistic variety. So whenever possible, I try to include foreign languages and phrases. Now, this is possible because I happen to be able to mangle six or seven languages (sometimes simultaneously), but the real problem is that unless you run into somebody else who speaks your language, you might as well be speaking gibberish. The gold standard (defined as "what I've done") is to write or speak something in a foreign language which a "reasonably educated" non-speaker can figure out with some prompting. Since the SCA is Eurocentric, we can make a rough definition of "reasonably educated" as follows: It is someone who has a good English vocabulary, or someone who has studied at least one other romance language.
So consider the moral. If you have a good English vocabulary, you should recognize "tempora" (a type of fried food...er, that is, "time") and "periculosa" (perilous), so the beginning clause is something like "In dangerous times". "Sapiens" is a little more obscure, but remember "Homo Sapiens" ("wise guys") and "nihil" should be obvious. The only word that is somewhat difficult is "dicet", but think "dictate."