The Ant and the Cicada #373
The fable concerns a cicada that has spent the summer singing while the ant worked to store up food for winter. When winter arrives, the cicada 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
This fable teaches the virtues of hard work and the perils of improvidence.
The nearly same fable also appears at #166, but it expands on the life of the ant. Where the ant is seen as the bad example of charity and love.
Or go to further interpretations where 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 an ant. Yet even though the man had changed shape, he did not change his habits and to this day goes around the fields gathering the fruits of other people’s labor, 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.
The Bayeux Tapestry – 231 feet long tells the main story of the 1066 Duke of Normandy conquest of England.
Might have been produced in England and then the fables depicted take on new meaning. While the central sections detail the Norman Conquest, the Bayeux Tapestry’s upper and lower borders are filled with mythological figures, animals and Aesop’s Fables. Four separate fables have been identified: The Fox and the Crow, The Wolf and the Crane, The Wolf and the Kid and The Wolf and the Lamb.
One interesting theory for the fables’ inclusion suggests they are subversive messages from the presumed Anglo-Saxon creators of the Tapestry, commissioned to depict the Norman Conquest but perhaps bitter about the events.
So the comment being made by the ant and cicada, depending on your interpretation is the ant’s “Vertue and Vice, in many cases, are hardly distinguishable but by the Name”.
Hailey’s Comet is depicted in the tapestry – Can you imagine the fear that appearance had on the people of 1066 (every 75 years – next be here in 2061) It was then considered an omen or a blessing, depending on the interpretation.
The Perry Index is a widely used index of “Aesop’s Fables” or “Aesopica”, the 725 fables credited to Aesop, the storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BC. The index was created by Ben Edwin Perry, a professor of classics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 1952
BC – Before Christ…. BCE Before the Common Era