The Ant and the Grasshopper

12 moments from the tale.

1. 
   Scene 1The Summer Fieldwarm

   June, from the top of a stalk

   The grasshopper picks the tallest dry stalk in the field, because the sound carries better from up there, and starts singing. He goes on singing through the hot part of the afternoon, when nothing else can be bothered to move.

   He had a good voice. He knew it.

2. 
   Scene 2The Summer Fieldindustrious

   The line below

   All summer the ants pass underneath in a line. Every one of them carries something, and the something is always heavier than the ant carrying it. A whole dried pea takes four of them and most of an afternoon.

   Grain, mostly. Once, a whole dried pea.

3. 
   Scene 3The Summer Fieldwry

   The best month of the year

   The grasshopper watches the work from above and finds it restful. One day he calls down to say that they are working very hard, and that it is the best month of the year. The ant answers without stopping.

   He calls down a compliment. She does not take it as one.

4. 
   Scene 4The Summer Fieldwry

   You can see the whole field from here

   He invites her up. From the stalk you can see the whole field, which he thinks is a thing worth having. She says she has seen the field, and goes on.

   An invitation, offered from the top of a stalk.

5. 
   Scene 5The Summer Fieldcontemplative

   The number of days

   The ant is not being rude. She has a great deal to carry and a limited number of days to carry it in, and she settled the sum some time ago. The grasshopper has not worked out anything, and is not sure how long a field lasts.

   She had worked out exactly how many. He had never seen a field end.

6. 
   Scene 6The Summer Fieldbleak

   Then the field ended

   The green goes out of the grass and the stalks turn grey and light. The seed heads that had been everywhere are suddenly not anywhere. It takes about nine days.

   It took about nine days.

7. 
   Scene 7The Summer Fieldbleak

   The whole field was wind

   The mornings start arriving with a white crust on them. He wakes up cold, which has never happened before, and spends most of that first morning understanding that it is not going to stop happening. He looks for shelter and finds that there is none.

   He looked for food. There was none.

8. 
   Scene 8The Door in the Banktense

   A small round door

   On the ninth day he walks, because he can no longer jump, to a small round door in the side of the bank where the ants live. There is a light behind it. He can hear them in there, moving grain about.

   There was a light behind it. He knocked.

9. 
   Scene 9The Door in the Banktense

   With what?

   The ant opens the door a little way. Warm air comes out, and the smell of dry seed. Behind her a younger ant stops with a grain in her arms and stands watching while he asks for a little and promises to pay it back.

   He offers to pay her back. She asks the obvious question.

10. 
    Scene 10The Door in the Banksolemn

    I was singing

    She asks what he was doing all summer. He tells her. She looks at him for a moment and is not surprised, having watched him do it from underneath every day for four months while carrying things.

    She had watched him do it from underneath, every day, for four months.

11. 
    Scene 11The Door in the Bankcold

    Then dance

    She gives him the two words the fable is remembered for, and shuts the door. The warm air stops. He is left on the step in the dark.

    Two words, and the warm air stops.

12. 
    Scene 12The Door in the Bankunresolved

    That is what enough means

    The younger ant is still standing there with the grain in her arms. She says the thing she is thinking, and it does not come out as a question. The ant takes the grain, puts it on the pile where it belongs and counts the pile again, which she does every evening.

    It did not come out as a question.

Folk tales are not owned by whoever wrote them down first.

• La cigale et la fourmi

  France, 1668

  La Fontaine's version, placed first in his whole collection. He gives it no moral. The grasshopper does not beg: she asks for a loan and promises to repay it with interest before the harvest. The ant's only stated fault is that she was not a lender.

• The Grasshopper

  Russia, 1782

  Ivan Chemnitzer's version keeps the cruel last line but adds that the ant only said it to teach the grasshopper a lesson, and then really did feed him out of pity.

• An Ant Formerly a Man

  Greece, Classical, Perry 166

  The counter-fable. The ant was once a man who farmed all day and stole from his neighbours' fields at night, and the king of the gods turned him into an ant. He kept the habit. The moral is that it is easier to change your shape than your nature.

• The Grasshopper and the Ant

  United States, 1899

  Ambrose Bierce's inversion, from Fantastic Fables. Asked why he stored nothing, the grasshopper answers that he did store food, and that the ants broke in and carried it all away.

Most children meet a screen version first. Here is what those changed.

• Strekoza i muravej

  book, Ivan Krylov, 1808

  The best-known Russian version, in verse. It follows La Fontaine closely, but the singer is a strekoza, an old word that could mean a grasshopper and today means a dragonfly. It was later set to music by Anton Rubinstein and by Dmitri Shostakovich.

• Cigale

  ballet, Jules Massenet, 1904

  Reverses the roles. In this two-act ballet, first performed at the Opera-Comique in Paris, the cicada is the charitable one who takes in a poor creature called La Pauvrette. La Pauvrette turns out to be rude and heartless when the situation is reversed, and Cigale is left to die in the snow at the close.

• La cigale et la fourmi

  opera, Edmond Audran, 1886

  Expanded the two-minute fable into a three-act comic opera. First performed in Paris in 1886, it reached London in 1890 and New York in 1891. An earlier one-act comic opera of the same title by Ferdinand Poise had appeared in 1870.