The Ant and The Grasshopper – Fable and Counter-fable
The Ant and the Grasshopper, alternatively titled The Grasshopper and the Ant (or Ants), is one of Aesop’s Fables, numbered 373 in the Perry Index. The fable describes how a hungry grasshopper begs for food from an ant when winter comes and is refused. The situation sums up moral lessons about the virtues of hard work and planning for the future. Ben Edwin Perry (1965). Babrius and Phaedrus. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 487, no. 373. ISBN 0-674-99480-9. Brewer’s Concise Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, London reprint 1992, p.36
Even in Classical times, however, the advice was mistrusted by some and an alternative story represented the ant’s industry as mean and self-serving. Jean de la Fontaine‘s delicately ironic retelling in French later widened the debate to cover the themes of compassion and charity. Since the 18th century the grasshopper has been seen as the type of the artist and the question of the place of culture in society has also been included. Argument over the fable’s ambivalent meaning has generally been conducted through adaptation or reinterpretation of the fable in literature, arts, and music.
The fable concerns a grasshopper (in the original, a cicada) that has spent the summer singing and dancing while the ant (or ants in some versions) worked to store up food for winter. When winter arrives, the grasshopper finds itself dying of hunger and begs the ant for food. However, the ant rebukes its idleness and tells it to dance the winter away now. Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, History of the Graeco-Latin fable III, Leiden NL 2003, p.146
Versions of the fable are found in the verse collections of Babrius (140) and Avianus (34), and in several prose collections including those attributed to Syntipas and Aphthonius of Antioch. The fable’s Greek original cicada is kept in the Latin and Romance translations.
A variant fable, separately numbered 112 in the Perry Index, features a dung beetle as the improvident insect which finds that the winter rains wash away the dung on which it feeds. “Aesopica website”. Mythfolklore.net. Retrieved 2012-04-04.
The fable is found in a large number of mediaeval Latin sources and also figures as a moral ballade among the poems of Eustache Deschamps under the title of La fourmi et le céraseron. From the start it assumes prior knowledge of the fable and presents human examples of provident and improvident behaviour as typified by the insects. As well as appearing in vernacular collections of Aesop’s fables in Renaissance times, a number of Neo-Latin poets used it as a subject, including Gabriele Faerno (1563), Hieronymus Osius (1564) and Candidus Pantaleon (1604). Poésie Morale, Paris 1832, pp.191-2 Faerno, Gabriello (1743). Fable 7. Retrieved 2013-08-18. “Fable 88”. Uni-mannheim.de. Retrieved 2013-08-18. “Fable 145”. Uni-mannheim.de. Retrieved 2013-08-18.
The story has been used to teach the virtues of hard work and the perils of improvidence. Some versions state a moral at the end along the lines of “An idle soul shall suffer hunger”, “Work today to eat tomorrow”, and “July is follow’d by December”. In La Fontaine’s Fables no final judgment is made, although it has been argued that the author is there making sly fun of his own notoriously improvident ways. But the point of view in most retellings of the fable is supportive of the ant. The Sunday School Teacher: A Monthly Magazine, Chicago 1866, p.335 Debra J. Housel, The Grasshopper and the Ants–Reader’s Theater Script & Fluency Lesson, 2014, p.9 Isaac Bickerstaffe’s version, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 26 November 1768, reprinted in The Dramatic Cobbler: The Life and Works of Isaac Bickerstaff, Bucknell University 1972, pp.272-3 Jean de La Fontaine. “Original text and translation”. Bewilderingstories.com. Retrieved 2013-08-18. Andrew Calder, The Fables of La Fontaine: Wisdom Brought Down to Earth, Geneva CH 2001, pp.18-24
It is also influenced by the commendation in the biblical Book of Proverbs, which mentions the ant twice. The first proverb admonishes, “Go to the ant, you sluggard! Consider her ways and be wise, which having no captain, overseer or ruler, provides her supplies in the summer, and gathers her food in the harvest” (6.6-8). Later, in a parallel saying of Agur, the insects figure among the ‘four things that are little upon the earth but they are exceeding wise. The ants are a people not strong, yet they provide their food in the summer.’ (30.24-5)
There was, nevertheless, an alternative tradition also ascribed to Aesop in which the ant was seen as a bad example. This appears as a counter-fable and is numbered 166 in the Perry Index. It relates that the ant was once a man who was always busy farming. Not satisfied with the results of his own labour, he plundered his neighbours’ crops at night. This angered the king of the gods, who turned him into what is now an ant. Yet even though the man had changed his shape, he did not change his habits and to this day goes around the fields gathering the fruits of other people’s labour, storing them up for himself. The moral given the fable in old Greek sources was that it is easier to change in appearance than to change one’s moral nature. It has rarely been noticed since Classical times. Among the few prominent collectors of fables who recorded it later were Gabriele Faerno (1564), and Roger L’Estrange (1692). The latter’s comment is that the ant’s “Vertue and Vice, in many Cases, are hardly Distinguishable but by the Name”. “Zeus and the Ant”, “Mythfolklore.net”. Mythfolklore.net. Retrieved 2012-04-04. Faerno, Gabriello (1743). Fable LXXXIII, available online. Retrieved 2012-04-04. “Fable 188”. Mythfolklore.net. Retrieved 2012-04-04.
