I have often contemplated the Aesop fable of the ant and the grasshopper. The fable concerns a grasshopper that has spent the warm months singing while the ant worked to store up food for winter. When that season arrives, the grasshopper finds itself dying of hunger and begs the ant for food. To its reply when asked that it had sung all summer, it is rebuked for its idleness and advised to dance during the winter. (I have seen this in contemporary PC children books - where the ant takes in the grasshopper - what does this tell about us when we cannot even teach a lesson without adding our own idea of charity to all). 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 Idleness brings want, To work today is to eat tomorrow. Nevertheless, there is an alternative tradition in which the ant was seen as a bad example. This was expressed as a counter-fable in Greek Aesops. It relates that the ant was once a man who was always busy farming. Not satisfied with the results of his own labor, he plundered his neighbors 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 still goes around the fields gathering the fruits of other peoples labor, storing them up for himself. The moral of the fable is that it is easier to change in appearance than to change ones moral nature. I wonder what part the spectrum in political ideology could be attributed to one which the ant takes the most for himself and leaves very little for others. As the grasshopper observes why bother even trying to work, when the fruit of your labor will not be shared equally. Of course this poem has nothing to do with the fables - but it struck a chord with me since earlier I watched an 1937 movie called Double Marriage in which the main protagonist William Powell is called the Grasshopper, since he likes to play and fiddle all day long.
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 00:48:17 +0000
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