The Ass And The Grasshoppers

The moral is "The laws of nature are unchangeable" — meaning you cannot transform yourself into something you are not by imitating surface behaviors. The Donkey tries to acquire the Grasshoppers’ beautiful voices by copying their diet of dew, but what sustains a tiny insect starves a large animal. Aesop warns that blind imitation without understanding your own nature leads to self-destruction. The fable teaches that admiring others is natural, but abandoning who you are to become someone else is foolish and dangerous.

The Ass and the Grasshoppers is a short fable by Aesop about a Donkey who hears Grasshoppers singing beautifully in a field and desperately wants to sing like them. When he asks what gives them their lovely voices, the Grasshoppers — enjoying a joke at his expense — tell him it is the dew they drink. The Donkey believes them and refuses to eat or drink anything but dew. He soon starves to death. The fable illustrates the danger of blindly imitating others without understanding your own nature and needs.

The central theme is the danger of blind imitation. The Donkey admires the Grasshoppers’ singing and assumes he can acquire their talent by copying what they eat. This reflects a common human mistake: confusing correlation with causation and believing that mimicking successful people’s habits will produce the same results. A secondary theme is self-knowledge — the Donkey fails because he doesn’t accept his own nature. He has his own strengths (endurance, carrying ability), but ignores them in pursuit of a gift that was never meant to be his. The fable also touches on gullibility, since the Grasshoppers deliberately mislead him as a joke.

The Ass and the Grasshoppers is classified as Perry Index 184 in Ben Edwin Perry’s standard catalogue of Aesop’s fables. The fable is also known as "The Ass and the Cicadas" because in the original Greek versions, the singing insects were cicadas, not grasshoppers. Cicadas held special cultural significance in ancient Greece as symbols of music, poetry, and even immortality — Plato’s Phaedrus describes cicadas as humans who were so enchanted by the Muses’ songs that they forgot to eat and were transformed into insects. This context makes the Donkey’s desire to emulate them even more absurd.

Despite both featuring grasshoppers, these two fables teach completely different lessons. In The Ant and the Grasshopper (Perry 373), the Grasshopper is the foolish character who sings all summer instead of storing food and suffers in winter — the moral is about planning and hard work. In The Ass and the Grasshoppers (Perry 184), the Grasshoppers are clever tricksters, and the Donkey is the fool who imitates them blindly and dies. One fable warns against laziness; the other warns against blind imitation. The Grasshoppers play opposite roles in each story — lazy singers in one, cunning jokers in the other.

The Grasshoppers represent those who give careless or malicious advice without concern for its consequences. They are described as being "very fond of a joke" and tell the Donkey to live on dew knowing full well it will harm him. In a broader reading, they symbolize people whose success comes from their innate nature — their singing is effortless because they are grasshoppers. They cannot transfer that ability to others any more than the Donkey can will himself into being an insect. The fable suggests that not all advice is given in good faith, and that what works naturally for one person may be impossible — or even fatal — for another.

For young readers, the fable teaches three important lessons. First, be yourself — the Donkey dies because he tries to become something he is not, instead of appreciating his own abilities. Second, think critically about advice — just because someone tells you to do something does not mean it is good for you, especially if they are joking or do not have your best interests at heart. Third, understand that different creatures have different needs — what is food for a grasshopper is not food for a donkey. These lessons translate directly to everyday life: don’t copy someone else’s path blindly, question advice before following it, and recognize your own unique strengths.

If you enjoyed The Ass and the Grasshoppers, here are more of Aesop’s fables with related themes:

• The Wolf and His Shadow — A Wolf mistakes the size of his shadow for his true strength, with fatal consequences.
• The Leap at Rhodes — A boastful traveler claims he once made a great leap at Rhodes, and is told to prove it right here and now.
• The Gnat and the Bull — A Gnat dramatically announces his departure from a Bull’s horn, only to learn the Bull never noticed him at all.
• The Cat, the Cock, and the Young Mouse — A young Mouse misjudges two strangers by their appearances, nearly trusting the wrong one.