King Solomon — master of seventy languages, including the speech of birds and insects (1 Kings 4:33) — was boasting. He had spent an afternoon detailing to his court the strength of his armies, the size of his fleet, the reach of his treasuries. He had concluded by declaring himself the greatest king who had ever lived.
The Holy One heard him. And the Holy One sent him an invitation — from an ant.
The Feast in the Anthill
A tiny ant arrived at the palace and invited Solomon and his army to a feast lasting seven days and seven nights. She also requested the loan of a hundred servants to help her with preparations.
Solomon, amused but intrigued, accepted. His hundred servants were dispatched. The armies followed. They arrived at what appeared to be an ordinary anthill — and underneath it found immense subterranean storehouses, piled with food enough to feed thousands of men.
They feasted for seven days and seven nights. At the end of the week, the ant approached the king.
She bowed and said: "I notice that throughout the week you never once asked after my welfare, nor did you ask how I, a small ant, came to possess such treasures."
Solomon, embarrassed, apologized. He asked her now.
The Ant's Reckoning
She answered: "King Solomon, you are the smallest and most insignificant of many kings who lived before you. Every item of food you have eaten this week I collected from the abandoned packs of dead kings — kings who once waged wars against each other, believing themselves the greatest on earth, and whose corpses lay on my fields. I gather what they leave behind. You are simply the latest guest at a table I have been laying for centuries."
Solomon, the exempla says, was greatly humbled. He returned to Jerusalem no longer describing himself as the greatest king who ever lived.
The story, preserved in Codex Gaster 66 and woven into the rich medieval Solomoniad cycle, uses the smallest creature in creation to deliver the largest correction. If even an ant can outlive a king, what is a king really? Whatever Solomon had boasted about that morning, he ate it that week from the pantry of men who had boasted the same way before him.