The Ant and the Grasshopper
Dear all
It was a great pleasure to welcome our pupils to the new school year, particularly those who are new to the Senior School or indeed the School per se.. Our first assembly of the school year considered a story that dates back to Ancient Greece and the 6th Century BC.
Aesop’s Fables – or the Aesopica – is a collection of stories credited to a slave and storyteller who lived between 620 and 564 BCE. The stories were passed down through the centuries and only collated some three hundred years after Aesop’s death. They cover religious, social, and political themes, and came back into popularity during the Renaissance period when Europe sought to draw inspiration and lessons from the ancient world. In the 20th Century, an American Professor of Classics called Ben Edwin Perry listed all of the fables attributed to Aesop in what has since been regarded as the definitive collection. The fable of ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’ is numbered 373 in the Perry Index. It tells the tale of a grasshopper that spends the summer singing and dancing, while the other character in the story – the ant – diligently works to store food for the upcoming winter. When winter arrives, the grasshopper, finding itself hungry, begs the ant for food. The ant, however, rebukes the grasshopper’s idleness and rejects its appeal for help with the line ‘dance the winter away now.”
The traditional moral of this story highlights the virtues of hard work and planning for the future, and led to mantras such as ‘An idle soul shall suffer hunger’ or ‘work today to eat tomorrow.’ However, the meaning of this fable has been reinterpreted over time. There is an alternative version, also ascribed to Aesop, which portrays the ant as less of a wise character in the story. That tale tells the story of how the ant was once a man who constantly plundered his neighbours’ crops, and even after being turned into an ant, he continued to gather the fruits of others’ labour. The moral of this counter-fable is that it’s ‘easier to change in appearance than to change one’s moral nature’, or in other words, simply accumulating resources doesn’t automatically equate to virtue.
Later retellings of the fable introduced questions about compassion and charity, and how -in the Western World – the Christian duty of charity should be applied to the story, while modern interpretations further challenge the traditional moral of the tale, with the grasshopper often seen as a symbol of the artist, prompting discussions about the place of culture and creativity in society, and the extent to which poetry complement rather than clash with the need for industry, organisation and planning.
As we begin a new school year, full of fresh opportunities and challenges, it’s a perfect time to think about preparation, effort, and how we interact with those around us. To that end, we should all embrace the spirit of the ant: to work hard, be persistent, and plan ahead. But being part of a community such as ours also requires each one of us to show compassion and empathy. My message to the students yesterday was to remember that not everyone’s circumstances are the same, and different people contribute in different ways. I finished by referencing a picture I have on my office wall, which simply says ‘Work Hard and Be Nice to People’, and is, perhaps, a neat summary of the story Aesop told all those years ago.
Best wishes
Michael Bond
