Add Insult to Injury

Traces to a fable by the Roman writer Phaedrus, in the 1st century AD, about a bald man swatting at a fly that had landed on his head. Missing the fly entirely, he strikes himself hard instead, prompting the fly to mock him: "You wished to kill me for a touch. What will you do to yourself since you have added insult to injury?" The fable was translated and became well known in English, with the phrase itself recorded from 1748, and the underlying image, making a bad moment worse through a clumsy overreaction, has stayed exactly intact ever since.