The Golden Ass

views updated

The Golden Ass

by Apuleius of Madaura

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in ltaly, the Roman provinces, and Greece in the latter half of the second century ce; first published in Latin (as Metamorphoses) in the second century ce,

SYNOPSIS

Lucius, a lusty young Greek under Roman rule, is accidentally transformed into a donkey when his experimentation with magic goes awry. In animal form, he passes from owner to owner, undergoing some strange and dangerous experiences before being rescued by an Egyptian goddess.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The Novel in Focus

For More Information

Apuleius was born in the 120s ce to prosperous parents in Madaura, a city in Roman North Africa. He wrote in Latin, delivered speeches in both Greek and Latin, and probably also spoke Punic, the language of that area during the pre-Roman empire of Carthage. His birth and multilingual abilities raise some still hotly debated questions—What was his ethnicity? Was he of Italian or African descent? Did he identify with his local African origins or strive to become thoroughly Roman? Apuleius traveled widely, studying in Carthage, Athens, and Rome. Back in North Africa, he married Pudentilla, the wealthy, widowed mother of a school friend, who was considerably older than Apuleius. Suspecting his motives, her former in-laws charged him with seducing Pudentilla through magic. Apuleius, a legal advocate, was equipped to de-fend himself. He was also a skilled public speaker, a student of natural science, and a reputable philosopher in the tradition of Plato. In his spiritual life, Apuleius became an initiate of several mystery religions (Greco-Roman cults that promised a blissful afterlife) and a priest of the imperial cult (devoted to the health and the security of Roman emperors and their families). Most importantly, Apuleius wrote—mainly non-fiction. His works include philosophical treatises, the court speech in which he defended himself from Pudentilla’s in-laws (the Apologia), extracts from his public orations (the Florida), and a fictional work. Although Metamorphoses is the title on the work’s earliest surviving manu-scripts, according to the fifth-century bishop Augustine, Apuleius himself called it Asinus Aureus, or The Golden Ass (using golden to refer to excellence of character). Apuleius’ adult life coincided with the growing social and economic prominence of the provinces and elite provincial families in the Roman Empire, and The Golden Ass reflects this fact. A novel of some-times comical adventure, it focuses on life in Greece under Roman rule.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

Roman law and provincial society

The Golden Ass was written in Latin by an African about a Greek. Africa is not discussed in the novel, but Apuleius’ African provincial background likely influenced the way he depicts his main character’s Greek provincial background. By the time of Apuleius, Rome had gained control over a territory of more than 100 major and minor provinces, including much of northern Africa and all of Greece. Both had been under Roman rule for more than three centuries. Greece was divided into two administrative regions: the northern province of Macedonia, where the ad-ventures of the Greek main character begin, and the southern province of Achaea, where they end.

Rome ruled each of its provinces through a governor, whose main duties were to keep the province “peaceful,” that is, out of foreign hands and free from dissidents, insurgents, and criminals. In the words of one ancient authority, a governor “should search out persons guilty of sacrilege, brigands, kidnappers and thieves and punish them according to their offences” (Ulpian in Freeman, p. 503). The empire selected certain cities as assize towns, that is, towns where legal cases were heard. Mostly the cases involved small-scale crimes. A provincial governor would rely on local magistrates to bring the accused before him. They would cooperate with the Roman authori-ties to enforce the imperial laws. With cooperation, recognized the magistrates (and others in the local elite, including army veterans), came privileges—control of the local government, the food supply, various properties, and more.

Society in the provinces was comprised of two basic classes: the honestiores (”more honorable people”) and the humiliores (”humbler people”). Slaves were another case altogether. Not part of the humiliores, they were thought of as property rather than people. The honestiores class, made up of the local elite, received preferential treatment. In criminal cases, their hearings were the first to be conducted, and if convicted, their sentencing involved fines or, at worst, exile, not bodily punishment or death. In contrast, though nominally free and sometimes of citizen status, the criminals who were humiliores suffered penalties such as torture and crucifixion. Often the accused from this class were even condemned without a proper hearing. A governor could judge only so many cases, and, again, the rich came first. Only in fiction, says one historian, such as “The Golden Ass... would a poisoned woman get instant access to justice” (Goodman, p. 193).

The “justice” meted out to slaves was especially harsh. It is impossible to arrive at an accurate number of slaves in the whole of the Roman Empire at any period. It has been conjectured that, during the reign of Augustus (31 bce-14 ce), in the century before Apuleius, the empire had 10 million slaves in a population of roughly 50 million. In Italy itself, one in every three persons was probably a slave (Madden). These figures, while speculative, are likely not to have varied significantly by Apuleius’ time. Romans enslaved war captives, abandoned children, and the kidnapped and then put them to work in various capacities. There were slave road builders, construction workers, factory laborers, cooks, house cleaners, secretaries, miners, barbers, seamstresses, and farmhands. In some cases, the captives looked like their captors and were just as educated, but, in society’s eyes, slavery robbed them of any social or moral status, regardless of their talents and skills. Slaves were commonly subjected to floggings and sexual assaults. For a capital crime (adultery, treason, or murder) they would be crucified or burned alive. One Roman custom called for all the slaves in a household to be murdered if one of them had killed their master.

The adoption of imperial ways

The spread of Roman culture and the Latin language was mostly an urban phenomenon. As in other provinces, Roman ways became dominant in the cities of mainland Greece. Their inhabitants continued to speak Greek, but otherwise adopted Roman customs. In Greece and Asia Minor, the elite learned to speak Latin as well as Greek (in Roman North Africa, the elite learned to speak both Greek and Latin as well as their native Punic). The provinces also adopted the practice of holding Roman gladiatorial games, including those between unevenly matched opponents. Typically a helmeted, shielded swordsman fought an opponent equipped with a net and tri-dent. The games made a public spectacle of pain and injury or death. After Rome conquered the Greek city of Corinth in 146 bce, it became the first to hold gladiatorial games. This distinction fit with the city’s reputation for immorality and cruelty and made it an ideal setting for Book 10 of The Golden Ass, which puts the hero at risk of becoming the spectacle in an arena event.

Along with acceptance of Roman customs came acknowledgement of and reverence for the Roman emperor, as indicated by the spread of the imperial cult. Discouraging inhabitants from worshipping a living emperor, officials advised them to instead worship Roma (the divine spirit of Rome) and to pray for the continued good health of the living emperor. It became common after 44 bce (the murder of Julius Caesar) to conceive of the deceased emperor as joining the ranks of the gods, and the inhabitants in Asia Minor went so far as to worship the living emperor as a god. A comic episode of The Golden Ass provides a striking illustration of how revered and feared the emperor was in the provinces. After the double misfortune of being transformed into an ass and then abducted by bandits, the protagonist tries to summon bystanders in an openair market to rescue him by invoking the name of the emperor:

So when… we were passing through a largeish town with a busy market and a crowd all round us, I tried to call on the august name of Caesar in my native Greek. I did indeed produce a clear and convincing ‘O’, but the name ‘Caesar’ itself I couldn’t manage. My discordant bray was not appreciated by the robbers, who laid into my wretched hide from all sides…
(Apuleius, The Golden Ass, 3.29, p. 54)

The fact that Lucius, the protagonist, tries to rally Greek locals to his side this way is a powerful testimony to the widespread acceptance of Rome’s emperor as “an ever-present protector” (Millar, p. 66). In 77 ce, out of gratitude to the Roman emperor Vespasian, who had donated desperately needed aid after a terrible earthquake, Corinth went so far as to rename itself “the colony of Julius Flavius Augustus Corinthiensis,” honoring Vespasian by invoking his family name, Flavius, and his position as emperor, indicated by the name Augustus (means “venerable”). During reconstruction, Corinth reorganized its city center so that its major buildings could be dedicated to worship of the imperial cult, in the manner of many other cities.

COPS AND ROBBERS IN ANCIENT ROME

Bandits were a pervasive phenomenon throughout the Roman Empire, as suggested by their presence in Apuleius’ novel. The bandits in The Golden Ass however, are more imaginative than real. Simplistic stereotypes of the bandit as noble or ignoble appear in the ancient novels. In fact, even the depictions of bandits by ancient historians appear to be drawn more from imagination than from life. Who, then, were the historical bandits? The real counterparts to Aputeius’ robber gang were the latrones, a special Roman legal term. The crime of robbery committed with violence was rapina, the charge leveled against a latro. Simply committing an act of rapma, however, was not enough to make one a latro, Such a label was not conferred upon muggers. Rather the latrones were known for planning, wielding weapons, gathering into large bands, chasing plunder, and committing violent crime on a far grander scale than other outlaws. The Roman state attempted unsuccessfully to curtail the latrones, disarming civilians, building roads in rural areas to make them less convenient haunts for the outlaws, and the like, but to little avail. Conditions of extreme vulnerability (to bandits, no less than natural disasters) were the norm. No traveler anywhere in the Empire could have felt entirely safe from the threat of the latrones.

Religion, mystery cults, and Isis

The ancients generally sought favor in all their enterprises from their gods, who, it was assumed, intervened in human life. It was furthermore believed that the gods cared dearly about how much they were worshipped, and that a particular god was best contacted in shrines and temples devoted to him or her. People sought direction from the gods, who instructed their followers and reacted badly only when their instructions were ignored. It was standard in the Greco-Roman world for a city to recognize a single patron deity among the many that they honored. Individuals also might pay more attention to one god than the others, as Lucius does to Isis in The Golden Ass.

Greco-Roman religious cults that worshipped a deity through secret rites and rituals were known as mystery religions. The name comes from the Greek mysterion, or “secret thing,” a reference to the fact that these cults concentrated on explaining the mystery of life and death. The ultimate object was union with the divine and im-mortal life; thus, the cults concerned themselves with questions of personal redemption, salvation, and the afterlife. Their focus on the individual, both in this life and the hereafter, made mystery religions different from Greco-Roman paganism, which emphasized stability and prosperity for the community, and offered little hope for a happy afterlife. The possibilities of divine attention to the problems of the individual in this life and of eternal bliss in the hereafter were a strong draw.

A few mystery cults gained considerable followings in the empire, among them the cult of the Egyptian goddess, Isis, and her divine hus-band Osiris (also known as Serapis). Other popular cults were those of Orpheus, Bacchus (Greek Dionysus), and the Persian Mithra. Already ancient by Roman times, these cults spread from Asia Minor, Greece, and Egypt. Soldiers, mer-chants, slaves, and immigrants transported their beliefs to every corner of the empire. They shared a few common attributes—a set of secret practices, claims to mysterious knowledge about the universe and the gods, and a complex, sometimes very costly initiation process for followers. The time, trouble, and expenses were considered worth the privilege of entering into the cult’s higher levels, which gave followers access to di-vine secrets and greater intimacy with the divine. Since there was freedom of worship in the Roman Empire, the religious cults were allowed to flourish as long as they did not have anything to do with political insurrection. Sometimes an emperor even encouraged the spread of a cult.

In real life, Isis attracted numerous followers. By the second century ce, the cult had grown into one of the most popular religions in the Roman world. Isis was conceived of as queen of nature, of the immortals, and of the dead, as universal mother, and as single manifestation of all gods and goddesses. While Isis-worship existed throughout the empire, she had important temples dedicated to her worship in Rome and in Cenchreae, near Corinth, both of which are mentioned in The Golden Ass.

Magic versus religion

Imperial life included less visible figures whose practices were wrapped in secrecy as well. These were the magicians and witches, who cast spells, concocted potions, and performed rituals. At first, magical rites were al-most indistinguishable from religious ones. Actually magical and religious rites were not even separated until the fifth and fourth centuries bce, when Greek philosophers (Plato and Heraclitus) argued for isolating certain practices from the main body of religious activity. Whatever distinctions were made thereafter were the concerns of a philosophical elite. To what extent these concerns affected the thinking and practices of the Roman populace is debatable. In Apuleius’ day, this marginally religious and potentially illegal (depending on the goal or purpose of the magic) category of rituals and its practitioners formed part of mageia, a Greek word from the Persian for “priest.”

To the ancients, the universe was a field of di-vine forces. Some of these forces were known and could be harnessed by an established religious authority; others could only be approached by an-other kind of specialist, one with the knowledge to confront and manipulate them. What is called “magic” today was the manipulation of divine powers to attain a private goal. There were some common features between magicians and the fol-lowers of mystery cults. Magicians often used the language of the mystery rites in their spells, and their rites too involved secrecy, complex processes of initiation, and the goal of direct contact with the divine. But in other respects magic diverged.

The empire established a couple of laws against magic. The first was part of the Twelve Tables, a body of Roman laws written on bronze tablets in the mid-fifth century bce. These laws guarded against magically removing or cursing someone’s crops, in keeping with concerns of the predominantly agricultural society at the time. Magic itself was not targeted; the use of magic to commit theft (of the crops) was. In 81 bce Rome passed the second act—the Cornelian Law Concerning Stabbers and Poisoners. Poisoning was a catchall category for violence committed by means difficult or impossible to verify, including magic. In Apuleius’ own trial, the accusation that he seduced Pudentilla by means of magic was likely treated under the poisoning category of the Cornelian Law. Although physical violence was probably not involved, the accusers thought he had compelled Pudentilla to make a decision detrimental to themselves that she would not otherwise have made.

Whereas mystery cults maintained a public presence and remained highly conscious of the need for governmental approval, magicians operated quite differently. The mystery cults were ever mindful of the harsh measures imperial officials (the magistrates) might take against a group considered hostile to Rome’s security. In the first century bce, Rome had several times sup-pressed the Isis cult, perhaps most famously when Emperor Augustus was preparing for war against Cleopatra of Egypt (who considered her-self the incarnation of Isis). Magic, on the other hand, was a solitary endeavor. Mindful of com-petition and of the air of authority that secrecy lent to their art, magicians worked individually and kept their knowledge private. Part of this knowledge was the alleged ability to transform people into animals, long considered a feature of magic. Although technically a goddess, Circe in the Odyssey (eighth century bce) turned mortals into swine. Herodotus’ Histories (fifth century bce) records that magi, or Persian priests, could turn themselves into wolves. In Virgil’s Eclogues (first century bce), a male magician transforms himself into a wolf (all three works also in Classical Literature and Its Times). Subsequent works suggest that these beliefs persisted far beyond Apuleius’ day, as shown by the writings of Augustine, a Christian bishop of the fifth century who described how some of the women of Italy mixed drugs with the food that they gave travelers in order to turn them into pack animals for the performance of chores. Already in Apuleius’ era, intellectuals had begun to doubt that such a tale could actually be true, but they stopped short of ruling out the possibility altogether.

The Novel in Focus

Plot summary

Lucius is a wealthy, lustful, adventuresome youth from the famously decadent Greek city of Corinth. Fascinated by the occult, he is more than pleased to embark on a business trip to Hypata in Thessaly, a region of northern Greece notorious for witches and strange happenings. On the way, Lucius hears grotesque tales of witchcraft and, the day after his arrival, is even warned that Pamphile, the wife of his host, Milo, is a dangerous witch. Far from upsetting him, the information excites his curiosity. But his attention drifts to Photis, a young female slave to Pamphile. Lucius enters into a passionate sexual affair with the slave.

Returning late one night, a rather drunk Lucius stabs what he takes to be three would-be intruders trying to batter down the door of his host’s house. He is arrested early the next morning and put on trial for murder before the town magistrates. A strangeness settles over the trial. While Lucius does his best to speak in his own defense, the crowd keeps laughing. Then, just as he is to be handed over for torture, the trial is revealed as a giant hoax. It turns out that the murdered intruders are not humans after all, but three inflated goatskin bags that Pamphile had earlier turned into human form. The spectators erupt into general hilarity at Lucius’ expense. The town’s representatives plead with Lucius not to be angry, because everything he has just undergone has been done for an important local god. Each year the God of Laughter is honored with an improvised festival, which this year took the form of a vast practical joke on Lucius, using the slain goatskin bags as the prop. Because he has served the God of Laughter in this way, the townspeople assure Lucius, he will remain forever under Laughter’s divine protection.

Although a little shaken by events, Lucius decides to spy on Pamphile as she magically changes into an owl. Anxious to imitate her, he sends Photis to grab the ointment used in the transformation, but she grabs the wrong box and Lucius is transformed into an ass instead. Worse still, while Photis is off searching for the antidote (roses), bandits suddenly burst upon the scene and rustle all the livestock, Lucius included. In the bandits’ company, Lucius the ass hears the tale of Cupid and Psyche, a lengthy digression from the main storyline. An old woman who cooks for the robbers tells it to comfort a young bride named Charite, whom the gang has abducted.

Psyche, explains the old woman, is the youngest and most beautiful of three princesses; she is so breathtaking that others worship her as an earthly manifestation of Venus, the goddess of love. Venus suffers as a result, as worshippers neglect the rites and temples of the genuine goddess. Infuriated, she dispatches her son Cupid to punish Psyche. Meanwhile, despite her extraordinary loveliness, no suitors have sought Psyche’s hand in marriage. Her concerned father consults Apollo (God of Oracles), who directs the father to leave his daughter on a mountaintop, where she will be claimed as wife by a snakelike monster that plagues humanity.

Abandoned on the peak, Psyche passes out, and a gentle wind transports her to a beautiful house, where she spends the day with invisible servants who cater to her every wish. That night her new husband enters her room in the dark, consummates the marriage, and then departs un-seen. This pattern continues night after night, and, though she never sees him, Psyche grows to love her mysterious spouse. She conceives a child. Though elated, Psyche grieves at not being able to comfort her sisters, who mourn for her. Her husband relents, allowing them to visit, but warns her not to heed them if they urge her to investigate his identity. Despite his warnings, they convince her. She approaches him with a lamp as he sleeps only to discover that her hus-band is the beautiful, winged youth Cupid. Just then a drop of hot oil spills from her lamp and wakens him, whereupon Psyche is banished and punished by Venus, who tortures the girl, then assigns her a series of impossible tasks. During one of these tasks, Psyche falls into a coma and Cupid rushes to the rescue. After reviving her, the still-loving husband makes his way to Jupiter, King of the Gods, to beg his indulgence. A for-giving Jupiter rules the two shall be officially married and Psyche, turned into a goddess as be-fits Venus’ daughter-in-law. Cupid and the now immortal Psyche have a child, a daughter named Pleasure. At this point, the robbers return, and the story stops abruptly.

Lucius the ass and the young bride Charite are rescued by her husband, who infiltrates the gang in disguise. The reunited couple’s happiness is short-lived, however. When a jealous former suitor murders the husband, Charite avenges his death and commits suicide. Lucius the ass passes into new ownership and is put to work in a mill, tediously turning the mill wheel. As he plods along at the tiresome task, he observes the miserable slaves and animals at work in the mill: “As to the human contingent—what a crew!—their whole bodies picked out with livid weals [welts], their whip-scarred backs shaded rather than covered by their tattered rags, some with only a scanty loin-cloth by way of covering” (The Golden Ass, 9.12, p. 153). A sequence of misad-ventures lead to Lucius the ass falling into the possession of two slaves owned by a wealthy master in Lucius’ hometown of Corinth. Since his new owners, the two slaves, are a pastry cook and a chef, Lucius now has access to delicious human food. When discovered eating various choice delicacies, his owners are amused. They summon the rest of the household to join in their laughter at the ass with gourmet tastes.

The master of the house brings Lucius to the dining room to entertain his guests with his humanlike behavior. The satisfaction of Lucius’ humanlike appetites is taken still further when a wealthy lady of Corinth arranges to have secret sexual encounters with him. The master, after spying on this spectacle for his own pleasure, decides to reproduce it in the arena for the entertainment of the city at large. Since he has been awarded the highest magistracy in the city, he needs to stage an impressive event to mark the occasion, and this show promises to be a crowdpleaser. A woman, already sentenced to die in the arena by attack by a wild animal, is chosen to become the bride of the ass. Lucius learns that while he publicly rapes her, wild beasts will be released to execute her death sentence, probably killing him in the process. He manages to escape.

The final section opens as Lucius awakens by the seaside. Sensing divine power in the night air, he prays to the mother goddess, addressing her by all the holy names that come to mind. Pleading for her mercy, he falls asleep again. He awakens later to a magnificent apparition of the goddess Isis, who explains how to find the roses that will cure him and promises him her protection forever after, provided he lives chastely and obediently in her service. Following her instructions, Lucius is restored to human form and begins the rites of initiation. In Isis’ service, he journeys to Rome and, although overwhelmed by the cost of living in the imperial city, is able to cover his expenses by establishing a legal practice, the success of which he credits to Isis. The novel ends with the image of a transformed youth—his days as an ass over, Lucius has become the bald priest of Isis and a prosperous lawyer.

A world of slaves

After his transformation into an ass, Lucius’ first encounter with a human being other than Photis is with his own slave, who promptly beats him. It is a telling moment. The slave, of course, fails to recognize his master and sees only an ass trying to eat roses off the statue of a deity. Even so, the incident marks Lucius’ new place in the scheme of things. In antiquity, slaves were often associated with beasts of burden. Lucius himself makes the connection, noting that, in the form of an ass, he has been made the “fellow slave and yoke-mate” of the horse he once owned as a human (The Golden Ass, 7.3, p. 113). In truth, the beast of burden ranks even lower: until he regains his human form, Lucius becomes the slave of slaves as well as of the free.

The fictional adventure offers insight into the actual conditions of slaves and the lower economic classes under Roman rule. Tediously turning the mill wheel, Lucius the ass surveys his new surroundings, considering the human slaves first. Their heads are shaven; their foreheads, branded; and their feet, manacled. If they wear anything more than a loincloth, their clothing amounts to nothing but the barest and most tattered of rags. Their backs are scarred with welts from whippings, and the bodies of all the slaves are coated head to toe in an eerie whitish powder, a mixture of dirt and the flour ground at the mill. Next Lucius considers the animals. Constant beatings have nearly stripped the flesh from their ribs. They are underfed, the skin hangs on their bones, and their hooves have flattened and widened from the constant circular march of turning the mill wheel. The harshness of life depicted by the novel is arresting, though it seems not to trouble its main character much.

Recounting these events long after they are over, Lucius the narrator fixes on the wide variety of people and places he met as an ass rather than the suffering. He recalls but does not condemn slavery or oppression. Apuleius himself, like all men and women of property in the Greco-Roman world, owned slaves. His wealthy wife owned so many that she gave her grown children 400 slaves as an advance on their inheritance. There is no evidence from the author’s life that he considered slavery morally wrong. His novel contains no criticism of the institution, only con-cern for individual slaves and, perhaps, for how their treatment reflects on the humaneness of their owners.

Apuleius’ perspective is shaped in part by ancient philosophical debates on slavery. The Stoics argued that someone who was enslaved could be “free” in the sense that he led the life worthy of a free man. Likewise, a free man could be a slave if he lived in a manner ascribed to slaves, who were thought of as deceitful and unable to act virtuously or to master their appetites. Slaves were also considered curious to a fault; their curiosity showed a mental slavishness insofar as they allowed them-selves to be led by whatever trivia happened to absorb them. For much of the novel, Lucius demonstrates curiosity, lustfulness, and disregard for piety or reason, recalling ancient stereotypes of someone enslaved by his appetites and whims.

Sources and literary context

Although now called a novel, The Golden Ass is described by Apuleius as a “Milesian tale” (The Golden Ass, 1.1, p. 7). The name comes from Miletus, home city of the first author of such stories, the Greek writer Aristides of Miletus. This type of tale was an often erotic, low-level kind of literature, utterly at odds with the subtlety and depth of Apuleius’ writing. In labeling his novel a Milesian tale, Apuleius is most likely making a sly joke.

The first ten of The Golden Ass’s eleven “books” (chapter-sized sections) are based on a Greek novel, which was later abridged in Greek and entitled Lucius, or the Ass. The abridgement survives, but not the original. Much debate has arisen over the relationship between the three texts—the lost original, the abridgement, and Apuleius’ adaptation. Apuleius’ version is considerably more literary than the surviving Greek abridgement. Perhaps the best indicator of the difference between The Golden Ass and the abridgement, Lucius, or the Ass, is a glance at the latter’s ending.

As in Apuleius’ version, the abridgement has Lucius the ass enter into a sexual relationship with a woman shortly before he is changed back into human form. In Apuleius, we hear no more about this woman, but in the abridgement, there is further communication. Lucius imagines that she will be overjoyed to see him in his resplen-dent human shape after having loved him so passionately in spite of his animal form. All seems to go well as they meet, have dinner, and get re-acquainted. Lucius walks to the bedroom, strips off his clothing, and waits for her on the bed. When she arrives, she is not pleased with what she sees. After a barrage of insults, she clarifies the situation for the bewildered Lucius:

I wasn’t in love with you. I was in love with the donkey you were. I slept with it those times, not you. I thought you might have saved at least one thing and still have that nice big emblem of your donkeyhood trailing between your legs. You’ve gone and turned yourself from a lovely, precious beast into an ape, that’s what you’ve done.
(Lucian, p. 93)

The abridgement closes humorously, with these sentiments. It ends with the same comic irreverence that has guided the narrative throughout, not with the concern for a new life of chastity and restraint that ends Apuleius’ telling.

Reception

Ancient reactions to The Golden Ass are few, with those that are known ranging from the cautious to the hostile. Some of the novel’s earliest readers are known to have objected to the erotic and fantastic tenor of The Golden Ass. Apparently Emperor Septimius Severus (193–211 ce) accused a rival of frittering away his time reading The Golden Ass. In a similar vein, the fourth-century scholar, Macrobius, expressed shock that Apuleius, a reputable philosopher, would indulge in literary endeavors of this sort.

[These stories] beguile the listener in the same way as comedies, of the sort that Menander and his imitators produced for performance, or, again, as the plots told about the imaginary vicissitudes of lovers, in which kind of work Petronius so indulged himself, and in which Apuleius also sometimes dallied—to our astonishment.
(Macrobius in Tatum, pp. 100–101)

A century later the novel impressed the bishop Augustine (354–430), who in considering whether to give the benefit of the doubt to popular reports of magical transformation, treated The Golden Ass as Apuleius’ own autobiographical claim to have undergone a metamorphosis. A skeptical Augustine refers to Apuleius when he doubts the truth of tales about female innkeepers who transform travelers into pack animals that perform chores:

This is what Apuleius, in the work bearing the title The Golden Ass, describes as his experience, that after taking a magic potion he became an ass, while retaining his human mind. But this may be either fact or fiction. Stories of this kind are either untrue or at least so extraordinary that we are justified in withholding credence.
(Augustine, The City of God, 18.18, p. 782)

The Golden Ass then fell from view for close to a millennium. In the 1300s, Giovanni Boccaccio rediscovered it and responded to the story with such enthusiasm that he translated it into vernacular Italian and fused three of its episodes into his own masterpiece, the Decameron. The popularity of The Golden Ass was secure thereafter, as was its incorporated tale of Cupid and Psyche, which went on to have a healthy existence of its own. Translated into English by William Adlington (1566), The Golden Ass was available to Shakespeare, and probably influenced his A Midsummer’s Night Dream. More definitely, it inspired John Keats’s “Ode to Psyche” (1819) and a myriad of visual artists. European painters and sculptors from Raphael, to Orazio Gentileschi, Anthony van Dyck, Antonio Canova, Jacques-Louis David, Edward Burne-Jones, and Auguste Rodin have all turned their hands to depicting Cupid and Psyche.

—Seán Easton