Formica et Cicada

[Neill Payne]

Just finished reading this on Tar Heel reader with my 8 yr. old. Wow Laura, you did such a great job on the the pictures, the repetition, and the vocabulary level. I was glad to see the link at the end to the vocabulary page too. I am very excited about this resource and very thankful for wonderful teachers like you who make it available. Whole courses could be taught just using these stories and TPRS methods. By the way, we had real fun reading the story. Austin's "homework" is to memorize the moral to the story, "Sine labore non erit panis in ore." That reminds me is there a Latin word that signifies "moral of the story"?

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Neill, I am so glad you liked it! That rhyming proverb I put at the end is medieval, since the medieval were so fond of rhyme - and I am too! The ant and the grasshopper is one of those fables that is still very famous and my students all resonate with it, since college students know what it's like to have some friend who parties all the time and then asks for your class notes, ha ha.

About morals: the official rhetorical terminology is Greek - a promythium if it comes before the story, or epimythium if it comes at the end; the term paramythium refers ambivalently to either one. In my Ph.D. dissertation I tried to promote the use of the term "endomythium" to indicate the situation when a moral is spoken INSIDE the fable, as in that fable, when the ant tells the grasshopper that she'll have to dance all winter.

Each Latin collection of fables uses a different strategy for introducing the moral of the story, or not really giving it any particular label at all. I've been saying "Fabula docet" at the end of the fables I write - but Barlow's book, for example, often says "Morale docet" - some authors instead say "Moralitas," etc. If I have a free afternoon sometime, I should write up a little survey of the different ways the morals are labeled in the different Latin collections I've found.

Meanwhile, I am just so glad you liked the fable! I'll be sad when summer is over and I won't have as much time to work on that, but I am hoping lots of teachers will start using the tool as part of their teaching, and if they create readers to use with their classes this coming year, we can all benefit! Whoo-hoo!