The Ant and the Grasshopper: Aesop's Fable with Moral
Quick answer: Aesop's The Ant and the Grasshopper retold in full with its hard ending, the moral about preparing for winter, what it leaves out, and classroom questions.
All summer the ants haul grain while the grasshopper fiddles in the long grass, and when the first frost comes only one of them has a full larder. This is the original fable, older than the Maugham story of the same name that turns it inside out, and its ending is colder than most children's books admit.
The story
In the field below the hedge the ants worked the whole of the summer. They carried wheat grains twice their size along the same worn track, one behind another, from sunrise until the light went, and they stored them in dry chambers under a flat stone. The grasshopper watched from a stalk of wild oat and could not understand it.
"There is food everywhere," he called down. "The grass is sweet, the sun is out. Come and sing." An old ant paused with a grain on her back. "Sing what?" she asked. "Anything," said the grasshopper. "It is summer." The ant said nothing and walked on, and the grasshopper played until dark, and the next day, and the next, and the music was very good.
Then the light changed. The grass went yellow and then brown, the oat stalks rattled, and one morning there was ice on the puddles and nothing green left to eat. The grasshopper, thin and slow with cold, dragged himself to the flat stone and tapped on it. The old ant came out. He could see behind her the chambers heaped with grain, dry and golden, and he could smell it.
"I am starving," he said. "Give me a little. I will pay you back in the spring." The ant looked at him for a long moment. "What did you do all summer?" she asked. "I sang," he said. "Every day." "Then you have your winter's work," said the ant. "Dance." She went back under the stone, and the grasshopper stood in the frost with the wind in his wings, and the music, for once, had stopped.
The moral, and what it really means
"Prepare today for the needs of tomorrow" is the traditional moral. But the fable is also a small portrait of two temperaments that cannot understand each other, and it takes a side. Notice what the ant refuses: not only grain, but pity. Later writers, from La Fontaine to Maugham, found that refusal hard to stomach, and the argument about whether the ant is wise or merely cold is now part of the story.
Where it comes from, and why it lasts
This is Perry 373. In the Greek of Babrius the singer is a cicada rather than a grasshopper; the swap happened in later European tellings.
It lasts because the ant's last line is a joke with teeth. "Dance" turns the grasshopper's own summer against him, and a moral delivered as a sarcasm is remembered far longer than one delivered as advice.
For young readers and classrooms
Six and up. Expect disagreement, and welcome it.
Write your own
The engine is two ways of living set side by side across a season, with a reckoning at the end. Choose a pair (a saver and a spender, a planner and an improviser), give each a fair hearing in summer, and let the winter test only one of them. The ending can be as hard as Aesop's or as forgiving as you like, but it must be a choice made in the scene, not a lesson appended to it.
What writers can take from this
- For exams, name the theme of foresight and the counter-theme of compassion.
- Remember the cicada: the original singer was chosen for its summer song.
- Writers, let the idle character be genuinely good at what they do; the music should be lovely.
- Deliver the moral as a line of dialogue with an edge, never as narration.
- Read the Maugham story afterward to see the same fable argued back.
Try it yourself
Write a story set across one season in which two neighbours prepare, or fail to prepare, for the same coming hardship. End on the first day the hardship arrives, before we know who was right.
Questions
What is the moral of The Ant and the Grasshopper?
Work and plan ahead in good times so you are provided for in hard times. The grasshopper sings all summer and is left hungry when winter comes, while the ants have stored grain.
How is Aesop's fable different from Maugham's The Ant and the Grasshopper?
Aesop's fable rewards the ant. W. Somerset Maugham's 1924 short story borrows the title and deliberately reverses the outcome, letting the idle brother end up rich.
Why is it a cicada in some versions?
The ancient Greek fable features a cicada, the insect that sings in Mediterranean summers. Northern European retellings replaced it with a grasshopper, which readers there knew better.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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