I’m having trouble finding the original source of the phrase “stoop to conquer” or possibly “They stoop to conquer”. Google reveals it turns up in a surprisingly varied set of different circumstances but where was it first used?
“Stoop to Conquer” is put forth as the moral of Aesop’s fable “The Oak and the Reeds”.
Don’t know if that helps, but there you go.
“She Stoops to Conquer” is the name of an 18th-century farce by Oliver Goldsmith, about an upper-class guy who is nervous to talk to women of his own class, but he likes to mess around with lower-class women, so an upper-class woman who is interested in him pretends to be lower-class so he’ll fall in love with her. I always sort of figured that was where it came from, but I guess I never really looked into it…
Not finding the specific phrase in Bartlett’s or several other sources, my guess would be that that particular phrase comes from Goldsmith’s play, She Stoops to Conquer. The title is a pun, which uses the techical term (from falconry) stoop–meaning to fall from the sky like a plunging hawk to sieze its prey unaware–contrasted to the main female protagonist’s “stooping” by dressing beneath her station while luring the hero to fall in love with her.
I have only seen “stoop to conquer” given in one translation of that fable: the translation (retelling?) by George Fyler Townsend who was born a bit more than forty years after Goldsmith’s play premiered. (The play was originally called Mistakes of a Night, but I’m pretty sure it picked up its alternative (and now better known) title soon after its first production rather than late enough for Townsend’s version of Aesop to have influenced it.)