The Golden Ass

The Golden Ass – Apuleius

The Golden Ass, also known as Metamorphoses, is one of two Roman novels I’ve read, the other being The Satyricon by Petronius Arbiter. The Golden Ass reminds me a lot of Cervantes’ Don Quixote in terms of form and style: embedded within the framework of the story of a journey or quest are numerous entertaining tales leading up to a dramatic denouement.  There are similarities with Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury tales as well.

The basic tale is that of Lucius, a young nobleman who is on a business trip to Thessaly in Greece. There, he’s lodged by an old friend of his father’s and has a torrid affair with one of his host’s slave girls, Photis. She reveals to him that his host’s wife is a witch, who uses secret ointments to transform herself into a owl (which Lucius witnesses) and flies about town to try and enrapture young men that she desires. Lucius’ curiosity gets the best of him and he convinces his lover to filch the potion so he too can metamorphose into a bird. Trouble is, she grabs the wrong vial and after rubbing himself with it, Lucius is transformed into a donkey. Photis curses herself upon realizing her mistake, but says the remedy is simple: Lucius only has to eat roses to reemerge as his old human self.

The rest of the book relates Lucius often-hilarious misadventures as he passes across Greece from one cruel owner to another, always just a few steps away from a rose bush. As noted above, Apuleius never misses the opportunity to throw a good side-tale into the mix. They generally involve deceit, adultery, cuckoldry, retribution and scatological humor. Arguably, the best of them is that of Cupid and Psyche; like The Golden Ass itself, a cautionary tale about the dangers of curiosity with large dollops of human and divine love, jealousy and vengeance.

Lucius escapes his final captors while waiting to perform an un-natural act with a condemned and degraded murderess as part of a festival and runs off to the beach where, exhausted, he lays down to sleep. There he falls under the spell of the goddess Isis, in the guise of the moon and the rest of the book recounts her leading him to his rosy antidote, his return to human form and his initiation into the mysteries of Isis worship. From there he rises to prominence in Rome as a lawyer and priest of her cult.

Probably no novel, much less a magical and “picaresque” tale like the Golden Ass, should be read as a faithful rendering of the times it was written in, but I found several things very striking about the Roman world as portrayed by Apuleius:

1. The terrible insecurity of life. No one was safe from witches, vicious highwaymen, cheating husbands and wives, mendacious and lusty priests and, above all, jealous gods and goddesses who could easily be qualified with all of the adjectives just used for humans.
2. The baroque thicket of gods, goddesses, myths and magical tales lurking in the classical imagination.
3. The sexual urge could be satisfied by and with pretty much anyone or anything. The only shame in any of this for the male was that he be the passive partner in the act.
4. Finally, an escape from the chaos of 1-3 above was offered by initiation into a “Mystery Religion” such as those of Isis or Mithra, which demanded moral purity and self-denial and involved a direct personnel experience of the godhead. These religions flourished at about the same time as early Christianity, but were eventually eclipsed by it. Interestingly enough, Apuleius description of an Isiac initiation is the best one that has come down to us from antiquity.

In addition to being a very entertaining read, the Golden Ass is fascinating as a window into our cultural ancestor’s (fictional and real?) world. I recommend it for both reasons.