<P> The proverb and several similar European proverbs ultimately derive from a Greek saying about running from the smoke or the fire into the flame, the first recorded use of which was in a poem by Germanicus Caesar (15 BCE--19 CE) in the Greek Anthology . There it is applied to a hare in flight from a dog that attempts to escape by jumping into the sea, only to be seized by a' sea - dog' . The Latin equivalent was the seafaring idiom' He runs on Scylla, wishing to avoid Charybdis' (incidit in scyllam cupiens vitare charybdim), a parallel pointed out by Edmund Arwaker in the moral that follows his verse treatment of the fable . The earliest recorded use of the English idiom was by Thomas More in the course of a pamphlet war with William Tyndale . In The Confutacyon of Tyndales Answere (1532) More asserted that his adversary' featly conuayed himself out of the frying panne fayre into the fyre' . </P> <P> The Italian author Laurentius Abstemius wrote a collection of 100 fables, the Hecatomythium, during the 1490s . This included some based on popular idioms and proverbs of the day, of which still waters run deep is another example . A previous instance of such adaptation was Phaedrus, who had done much the same to the proverb about The Mountain in Labour . Abstemius' fable 20, De piscibus e sartigine in prunas desilentibus, concerns some fish thrown live into a frying pan of boiling fat . One of them urges its fellows to save their lives by jumping out, but when they do so they fall into the burning coals and curse its bad advice . The fabulist concludes:' This fable warns us that when we are avoiding present dangers, we should not fall into even worse peril .' </P> <P> The tale was included in Latin collections of Aesop's fables from the following century onwards but the first person to adapt it into English was Roger L'Estrange in 1692 . He was followed shortly after by the anonymous author of Aesop at Oxford, in whose fable "Worse and Worse" the fish jump' Out of the Frying - Pan, into the Fire' by a collective decision . The moral it illustrates is drawn from a contemporary episode in Polish politics . Another political interpretation was given in 1898 by a cartoon in the American magazine Puck, urging American intervention in Cuba on the eve of the Spanish--American War (see above). </P>

Out of the frying pan into the oven