<P> The Ant and the Grasshopper, alternatively titled The Grasshopper and the Ant (or Ants), is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 373 in the Perry Index . The fable describes how a hungry grasshopper begs for food from an ant when winter comes and is refused . The situation sums up moral lessons about the virtues of hard work and planning for the future . </P> <P> Even in Classical times, however, the advice was mistrusted and an alternative story represented the ant's industry as mean and self - serving . Jean de la Fontaine's delicately ironical retelling in French later widened the debate to cover the themes of compassion and charity . Since the 18th century the grasshopper has been seen as the type of the artist and the question of the place of culture in society has also been included . Argument over the fable's ambivalent meaning has generally been conducted through adaptation or reinterpretation of the fable in literature, arts, and music . </P> <P> The fable concerns a grasshopper (in the original, a cicada) that has spent the summer singing while the ant (or ants in some versions) worked to store up food for winter . When that season arrives, the grasshopper 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 . Versions of the fable are found in the verse collections of Babrius (140) and Avianus (34), and in several prose collections including those attributed to Syntipas and Aphthonius of Antioch . The fable's Greek original cicada is kept in the Latin and Romance translations . A variant fable, separately numbered 112 in the Perry Index, features a dung beetle as the improvident insect which finds that the winter rains wash away the dung on which it feeds . </P> <P> The fable is found in a large number of mediaeval Latin sources and also figures as a moral ballade among the poems of Eustache Deschamps under the title of La fourmi et le céraseron . From the start it assumes prior knowledge of the fable and presents human examples of provident and improvident behaviour as typified by the insects . As well as appearing in vernacular collections of Aesop's fables in Renaissance times, a number of Neo-Latin poets used it as a subject, including Gabriele Faerno (1563), Hieronymus Osius (1564) and Candidus Pantaleon (1604). </P>

What is the difference between the ant and the grasshopper in the tale
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