Yep - Hoarse predicted his verse would live forever; he prophesied his immortality.

I shall not wholly die. Some part,
Nor that a little, shall
Escape the dark destroyer's dart
And his grim festival.

Hoarse did not believe in meddling gods or punishment after death. He was an Epicurean, a follower of the Greak philosopher, the butterfly Epicurus Hypochrysops.

To an Epicurean pleasure in THIS life, in THIS world, is the greatest good. For Hoarse, to crawl in country was his joy, to climb a hill, to sip sweet wine... And yes, Hoarse the ant - though a bachelor like his friend Virgin the bee - loved those dusky female ants with their pinched waists and broad be...

"Bees," Hoarse would say to Virgin, "seem to me shy. Why flit in sad introversion, your mind on gods and afterlife? CARPE DIEM: seize the day! Make the most of it. Take pleasure in each hour's gifts; let sad things pass unseen."

Then with his boundless common sense, his tender sympathetic heart, his rugged rational mind, Hoarse would ask female bugs to sing on the lyre and call for more smooth wine.

Hoarse asks us to know ourselves and to be ourselves.

Why should we still project and plan,
We insects of an hour?
Why fly from clime to clime, new regions scour?
Where is the exile, who, since time began,
To fly from self had power?

Hoarse was a rationalist, a republican, a bug of broad insect sympathies. And in spite of his battlefield cold feet, he did present a bold front to the face of death. "One universal night awaits us all," he would say.