Out of the frying pan into the fire
This proverb describes a situation where a person moves from one difficult or dangerous situation into another that is even worse; often as the result of trying to escape from the bad or difficult one. It was the subject of a 15th-century fable that eventually entered the Aesopic canon.
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.
The Italian author Laurentius Abstemius wrote a collection of 100 fables, the Hecatomythium, during the 1490s. 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.'
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.
