Jean de la Fontaine's delicately ironic retelling in French later widened the debate to cover the themes of compassion and charity.

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.

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),[6] Hieronymus Osius (1564)[7] and Candidus Pantaleon (1604).

Some versions state a moral at the end along the lines of "An idle soul shall suffer hunger",[9] "Work today to eat tomorrow",[10] and "July is follow'd by December".

[citation needed] Another with the same title, alternatively known as "Girl with a Mandolin" (1890), was painted by Edouard Bisson (1856–1939) and depicts a gypsy musician in a sleeveless dress shivering in the falling snow.

[18] Also so-named is the painting by Henrietta Rae (a student of Lefebvre's) of a naked girl with a mandolin slung over her back who is cowering among the falling leaves at the root of a tree.

Picturing the grasshopper as a musician, generally carrying a mandolin or guitar, was a convention that grew up when the insect was portrayed as a human being, since singers accompanied themselves on those instruments.

The sculptor and painter Ignaz Stern (1679–1748) also has the grasshopper thinly clad and shivering in the paired statues he produced under the title of the fable, while the jovial ant is more warmly dressed.

For a long time, the illustrators of fable books had tended to concentrate on picturing winter landscapes, with the encounter between the insects occupying only the lower foreground.

Kajita Hanko's treatment of the story takes place in a typical snowy landscape with the cricket approaching a thatched cottage, watched through a window by the robed ant.

[24] An earlier Chinese treatment, commissioned mid-century by Baron Félix-Sébastien Feuillet de Conches through his diplomatic contacts, uses human figures to depict the situation.

La Fontaine's portrayal of the Ant as a flawed character, reinforced by the ambivalence of the alternative fable, led to that insect too being viewed as anything but an example of virtue.

Jules Massenet's two-act ballet Cigale, first performed at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1904, portrays the cicada as a charitable woman who takes pity on "La Pauvrette" (the poor little one).

In Joseph Autran's Réhabilitation de la fourmi, the ant, while only having straw to eat himself, agrees to share his stocks with the cicada, so long as she sings him a song that would remind them of the summer, which, to him, will be more than worth the price.

One, Fred Barrow, lives a conservative, restrained existence; the other, Carlyle Lothrop, spends his money profligately, especially on joint vacations for the two men's families, even as he becomes financially insolvent.

[43] In Dmitry Bykov's poem "Fable" (Басня) the grasshopper is perishing from cold and dreams that in Heaven the ant will someday ask her to let him share in her dance, to which she'll answer "Go and work!

[63] Ivan Krylov's variant of the fable was set for voice and piano by Anton Rubinstein in 1851; a German version (Der Ameise und die Libelle) was later published in Leipzig in 1864 as part of his Fünf Fabeln (Op.64).

In the following century the Russian text was again set by Dmitri Shostakovich in Two Fables of Krylov for mezzo-soprano, female chorus and chamber orchestra (op.4, 1922).

[64] A Hungarian translation of the fable by Dezső Kosztolányi was also set for mezzo-soprano, four-part mixed chorus and 4 guitars or piano by Ferenc Farkas in 1977.

[69] La Fontaine follows ancient sources in his 17th-century retelling of the fable, where the ant suggests at the end that since the grasshopper has sung all summer she should now dance for its entertainment.

Her tireless industry is indicated by the fact that she continues knitting but, in a country where the knitting-women (les tricoteuses) had jeered at the victims of the guillotine during the French Revolution, this activity would also have been associated with lack of pity.

The Grasshopper's irresponsibility is underlined by his song "The World Owes us a Living", which later that year became a Shirley Temple hit,[74] rewritten to encase the story of the earlier cartoon.

He agrees to this arrangement, finally learning that he needs to make himself useful, and 'changes his tune' to Oh I owe the world a living....You ants were right the time you saidYou've got to work for all you get.

[75]In recent times, the fable has again been put to political use by both sides in the social debate between the enterprise culture and those who consider the advantaged have a responsibility towards the disadvantaged.

A modern satirical version of the story, originally written in 1994, has the grasshopper calling a press conference at the beginning of the winter to complain about socio-economic inequity, and being given the ant's house.

This version was written by Pittsburgh talk show guru Jim Quinn[76] as an attack on the Clinton administration's social programme in the USA.

But the commentary at the end of an Indian reworking[78] explains such social conflict as the result of selective media presentation that exploits envy and fear.

In Marie de France's mediaeval version the grasshopper had pleaded that its work was 'to sing and bring pleasure to all creatures, but I find none who will now return the same to me.'

In the early decades of the 20th century, the Romanian poet George Topîrceanu was to make the case for pure artistic creation in "The ballad of a small grasshopper" (Balada unui greier mic),[83] although more in the telling than by outright moralising.

An earlier improvisation on the story that involves art and its value was written by the Silesian artist Janosch under the title "Die Fiedelgrille und der Maulwurf" (The fiddling cricket and the mole), originally published in 1982 and in English translation in 1983.