page_title: Insects in literature
section_title: Death and decay
hierarchical_section_title: Insects in literature / Negative qualities / Death and decay
caption_attribution_description: English: A woodprint of the fable of the fly and the mule, later colored, from the 1464 Ulm edition of Steinhöwel's collection of Aesop's Fables
context_page_description: Insects have appeared in literature from classical times to the present day, an aspect of their role in culture more generally. Insects represent both positive qualities like cooperation and hard work, and negative ones like greed.
  Among the positive qualities, ants and bees represent industry and cooperation from the Book of Proverbs and Aesop's fables to tales by Beatrix Potter. Insects including the dragonfly have symbolised harmony with nature, while the butterfly has represented happiness in springtime in Japanese Haiku, as well as the soul of a person who has died.
  Insects have equally been used for their strangeness and alien qualities, with giant wasps and intelligent ants threatening human society in science fiction stories. Locusts have represented greed, and more literally plague and destruction, while the fly has been used to indicate death and decay, and the grasshopper has indicated improvidence. The horsefly has been used from classical times to portray torment, appearing in a play by Aeschylus and again in Shakespeare's King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra; the mosquito has a similar reputation.
context_section_description: In the Biblical fourth plague of Egypt, flies represent death and decay. Myiagros was a god in Greek mythology who chased away flies during the sacrifices to Zeus and Athena; Zeus sent a fly to bite Pegasus, causing Bellerophon to fall back to Earth when he attempted to ride the winged steed to Mount Olympus.
  Emily Dickinson's 1855 poem "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died" refers to flies in the context of death. In William Golding's 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, the fly is a symbol of the children involved.
caption: A woodprint of The fly and the mule from the 1464 Ulm edition of Steinhöwel's collection of Aesop's Fables. It is one of five versions of The Impertinent Insect.
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