Some Notes on “The Golden Ass” of Apuleius of Madauros
Is there any day that is not sad for many millions of miserable people in the world at any age? (David Gilmour)
Lucius Apuleius (2nd c. A.D.) presented in The Golden Ass (also called Metamorphoses) many examples, vignettes and scenes to convince this reader that a major theme of the author was concerned about humans’ inhumanity towards his fellow man or woman. For us readers in the Retired Men’s Book Club of Tacoma who remember another selection (Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger), the Mediterranean world in the early Roman Empire is not unlike Balram’s rooster coop metaphor where the poor and unfortunate folk get pecked to death willy-nilly by their mean-spirited friends and wealthy superiors.
Apuleius, being Apuleius Madaurensis, his official title of bibliographical identification, i.e. of Madauros in Numidia, the present day area near Algeria, also wanted to have his audience feel the prick of pain to emphasize how much punishment, torture, and sadism was inflicted upon animals, mostly through our protagonist Donkey, Lucius the Ass, but also with views of sympathy for other creatures which were killed in bloody butchery by gladiators as Colosseum performances and desirable entertainments. Certain classes of enslaved human beings in those ancient days were treated as of no value, even lower in purpose than beasts of burden. In the narrative’s vulgar appeal to the sadism of his audience, Apuleius depicts scenes of gross murder and debauchery, it may be considered his denunciation of corrupt moral values of the times.
Animal Rights and Protection from Cruelty
Peter Singer’s appendix in the Finkelpearl abridged translation (2021)* speaks to the evocation of issues about animal-human ethics and against animal cruelty. The resolution or perhaps the salvation of Lucius’ being worthy of transformation from a hairy donkey to a new-born convert to Isis, complete with a baby-smooth shaved head, marks his new life, preventing him from falling back into indulgent and curious interests, whether in learning magical practices or engaging in rollicking, libidinous hedonism of instant sex, with either a vulnerable, young, slave wench or an avaricious, seasoned tiger-woman. This transformation from donkey into an improved human being means a radical development and a changed station in life. It brings to mind St. Augustine, who himself lived a dissolute, libidinously hedonistic existence in his youth in North Africa. He gave up the wastrel life for Christian asceticism, or for enforcing celibacy in him among an intellectual culture of Church readers and writers as a cure for his testeronic addiction to the ecstatic joys of the flesh. Let’s face it: once you’re crowned Pope, all the good times are behind you.
What Degree of Interpretation is Possible?
Otherwise, the critic’s question comes up for interesting approaches to theme: how do we know Apuleius intended everything in his book to have an effect on his audience as we might interpret it today, given our differences in society and type of culture from that of the ancient world? I ask myself something like this when I’m reading poetry: Do I really know in this poem what the writer is pushing as a main thought or what effect does she expect in her listener or reader? It is about subjective interpretation, what each reader or listener sees imaginatively or feels in all manner of senses, and judging whether the words say clearly what they mean or are they bent, warped from common meaning and, as Dickinson advised poets, said “slant.” Since The Golden Ass is the only whole, and intact ancient “novel,” so called, we have to infer much from this single exemplar. The main plot of Apuleius’ novel is roughly half the length of the work, and another half is made up of longish short stories that may tax the patience of a young reader. However, the Ass story, whole or in part, folk-tale or fairy-tale, still appeared good enough as attractive literature in translation for many modern publishing houses to issue a version, and many versions there were. The translations in the 20th century alone appear to be about a dozen, right up to Sarah Ruden’s modern-voiced 2011 translation, in a loose colloquial style of expression, and Finkelpearl’s abridged version, cutting out stories considered too long and uninteresting. (The Singer-Finkelpearl omission of the Cupid and Psyche story, however, is a major mistake in my view.)
The Milesian Story Genre
(Milesian: a main plot interspersed with ribald, entertaining short stories, from Aristedes of Miletus, who wrote in a florid, “Orientalizing” style, not the high Attic Greek style of dignified literature. Likewise Apuleius’ tale is written in a modern hybrid Latin style, poetic and fancy, with much newfangled diction, composed in uncomplicated syntax, unlike the fine prose of Cicero and the “greats.” [N.B. Such information with few miserable fragmentary examples comes from the many survey volumes on Classical literature.)
Those intermingled accounts, added narratives or conversations, typical of the so-called Milesian type of storytelling, do ask the knowing reader to think what the “side-stories” are all about and what good do they add to the overall plot. Such considerations may be a stretch for the present generation’s attention span and unwillingness to consider intrinsic connections of character types and motifs to the overall theme. Similar patterns of interlarded stories show up in extended novelistic forms, whether in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. It has been noticed by even the seasoned classic modern-novel reader how some of Cervantes’ interludes of overlong tales in Don Quixote can become tiresome. Even the various essays and stylistic naval- and whale-oriented data used by Hermann Melville in the construction of Moby-Dick were a test for the mid-19th-century reader or audience. And in modern times, Melville’s tome is still more accessible by older, scholarly readers than by the young, innocent budding student. Our digital culture and society, opting for the shortest version of an idea, may be beyond the kind of study some novels of other ages require for a knowing, working and memorable comprehension.
Many Modern Translations
Studying The Golden Ass of Apuleius is a rich endeavor, for there are many differently worded translations that have been written as explications of the Latin text. To have so many translations, even in English, is indicative of a serious interest by Latinist translators. Each of them must think he/she can once and for all get the right narrative, in mood and tone, diction and composition, the right pitch and twist of the figures of speech, etc. to truly represent the work and the attitude of the author, ancient and strange from our thoughts and sensibilities as Apuleius must have been. The author knew Greek and Punic, perhaps another North African dialect of Tripoli, and then he learned, by himself, untutored, Latin, and chose to write his novel in his newly acquired, exotic tongue, once so elegantly styled by many distinguished authors of a Golden Age of creative literature.
The “Golden” in The Golden Ass is not coined because of Lucius’ donkey as golden in its hair color, but it is “golden” because it is the best, most distinguished, newly created work of the Ass-tale stories that had been developed over many centuries of time. The attractiveness of the metamorphosis as a story-telling hook was obviously great in ancient times, from Homeric Circe’s changing Odysseus’s men into animals, from Ovid’s mythological omnibus, entitled Metamorphoses, based on mythic personages’ transformations into rocks, plants, and animals. Still popular in comedies and time-warp movies today, on and on it has developed through folktale, fantasy, fairy-tale and science-fiction.
Character Development
Since there is no other work, complete work, to compare and contrast Apuleius’ creation with, the only next best opportunity is to consider fragments of Petronius’ Menippean satire, entitled Satyricon. One thing apparent to me is that the characters of Petronius’ novel, the picaresque trio of Encolpius, Giton, and Aescultus, do not undergo much development or change throughout their adventures. They are the same rascals from beginning to end. The importance of character development for modern literature has become an expected feature of commentaries; what humans do and what judgments they make will affect some ameliorative or deleterious change as the narrative plot goes on. These are interior changes of psychology and sensibilities affecting behavior and viewpoint, which are exhibited mostly it would seem in the complex literature of modern times. In Don Quixote, for example, the reader expected to see an awakening to some other reality than the knightly romance in the crack-brained, antiquated noble, a recognition either comic or pathetically sad, and a realization in the finale that wayward knight-errantry with Sancho Pansa was filled with important, life-enhancing adventures because of the friendship, companionship and trust. Hero and sidekick made a wonderful team.
Franz Kafka’s Characters
In the loner—or outsider—fiction of Franz Kafka, the protagonist does not seem to change from beginning to end in development of character, not earning a shred of success for all his efforts and strategies. In the story The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa has already, from the opening sentence, page one, become the huge cockroach, and he does not change back into a human being again. He changes from being alive to being dead. Also the protagonist of Kafka’s The Trial, he doesn’t learn his guilt as a normally reasoned fault; he dies by capital punishment not knowing why. The same for the miserable pursuit of K. to enter The Castle, no successful ascent made as the unfinished story stands, but Kafka said later of his work that K. would get admission upon his death. For all their efforts, Kafka’s characters have little success and no redemption. This inability to develop the character through experiential transformation is thought by some to be a failure of what literature is meant for: to help people learn what works, how to surmount obstacles, and how one can improve the living experience of being a decent moral human being. It’s rather like John Gardner’s concept of Moral Fiction as the purpose of fine literature.
Edmund Wilson says in his early criticism of Franz Kafka’s stories: “The denationalized, discouraged, disaffected, disabled Kafka, though for the moment he may frighten or amuse us, can in the end only let us down.” Is it enough to describe impotent, neurotic and disabled pathetic characters who cannot surmount their depressions and mental dis-ease, and besides seem to live in a society that is neither emotionally socialized nor loving. Is no realization of how to break from the stain, the stigma, the crippling weakness, or the shyness, so as to live more fully? Perhaps Wilson was a little harsh on Kafka’s worth as teacher or healer, but the American Wilson in those early days had not lived under a cruel, discriminating, controlling totalitarian regime. He says of Kafka: “He is quite true to his time and place, but it is surely a time and place in which few of us will want to linger—whether as stunned or hypnotized helots of totalitarian states or as citizens of freer societies, who have relapsed into taking Kafka’s stories as evidence that God’s law and man’s purpose are conceived in terms so different that we may as well give up hope of ever identifying the one with the other.”** (See below)
Well, the time has come when many Americans are feeling a Kafkaesque twist of nature. We are approaching a time in which falsehoods are passed off as truths. Stigmatizing and scapegoating are being practiced by people promoting destructive ideologies and using punitive classism against the poor. Leaders promoting malevolent policies seem to be marshalling armies of militaristic brands against an internal enemy of opponents or resisters, whether against ideologically different people or refugees castigated as miserable, impotent “illegal” human beings as though they were useless serfs. Kafka showed us characters who don’t discover the resources to strengthen one’s best efforts and surmount obstacles. They submit as if straitjacketed by social laws and imprisoned by a superior’s peremptory whims. Wilson evidently believed artistic literature had a purpose to be a moral guide, an example of filling a vacant soul and heart with courage to go on to a better life and to improve society.
Lucius’ Transformation
Lucius, his Latin name meaning “man of light,” in The Golden Ass does find a way to reform his habits of unpropitious curiosity to know all. He says to the first travelers he meets:
Sititor alioquin novitatis, “Immo vero,’ inquam, ‘impertite sermone non quidem curiosum sed velim scire vel cuncta vel certe plurima.” (Metamorphoses, Bk I, section 3)***
“My thirst for novelty, such as it is, I said, ‘Please do share with me your conversation, not that I wish to be nosey, but I am one who likes to know all things or at least as many as I can.’ ” (David Gilmour translation)
The danger of too great curiosity is a marked theme. And then there was his avid desire to acquire magic skills for whatever power one might gain from them, not thinking he could himself great harm. Furthermore, his curiosity and uncontrollable libido brought Lucius into the metamorphosed fix of being an unreasonably punished donkey, on the verge of death in several crises. So, luckily his transformation back into his human self is not by “black magic” but by a spiritual conversion that. He is promised in dreams and by the priest that if he practices the rites of Isis and Osiris, they will protect him from the sordidness of sensual animalistic escapades and other deceitful, devious practices, like hocus-pocus wizardry. The recognition of committing to a loving, creative faith, Isis’s and Osiris’s powers, was a means to heal his burdened soul. No more drive for cunning knowledge or salacious assailing of vulnerable women, whether lovely slaves, like Photis (Also meaning “bright one” in Greek) or seasoned nymphomaniacs, no more currying favor by false virtues of class distinction.
Before his unfortunate metamorphosis into a donkey, Lucius though his practice of the magical arts would be a boon for him. In the early passage of deciding how he might exploit Photis and encourage her to gain her mistress’s magical ointment:
Quod bonum felix et faustum itaque, licet salutare non erit. Photis illa temptetur. (Meta. Bk. II, section 6.) “The [ruse] may be a prosperous benefit and favorable, even though it may not prove to be salutary. Let that Photis wench be assaulted.” (David Gilmour translator)****
Notice from this early passage, the repetition of the key words, felix, faustum, and salutare in the final declaration of the benefit of Lucius’ conversion.**** His transformation is a reversal of low-life character; to thrive as an Isis devotee, as a clean-living man, will do him good, says the priest:
“Quod felix itaque aut faustum salutareque tibi sit, animo gaudiari rursum sacris initiare deis magnis auctoribus.” (Meta. Bk. XI, section 29)
“This should make you a prosperous man and allow you good fortune and salutary life; so, again, be initiated with a joyous heart through the powers of these great divinities.”(David Gilmour translation)
This denouement through faith is not much different from perverse Raskolnikov’s salvation through his faithful, loving Sonia in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. She, the Bible-reading prostitute, was also turned into a healing mother figure, “Little Mother Sonia.” Her devoted spirit, divinely inspired, turned Raskolnikov from his wayward criminal nature into a human being, aware of consequences of wrongdoing, especially killing people out of avarice for one’s own benefit. Perhaps Edmund Wilson would have credited both Apuleius and Dostoevsky with skill of storytelling through character development aimed at moral guidance.
My Denouement: Am I changed?
Probably not wholly converted to the good life through faith, but I was convinced enough by Apuleius that I donated a sizable charitable gift at year’s end to a Donkey Rescue farm in Texas. After all is said and the lessons learned from Lucius’ trials as a human and then a donkey and back into a better human self again, something has tinged already my reading of cruelty to animals and put an edge on my thinking. Over the last months, for “auspicious and salutary advice,” I have been reading an anthology of diarists, called The Assassin’s Cloak, and one example, coinciding with my study of The Golden Ass, showed my eyes were open to a bad imagination and prejudice in someone whom I revered and thought surely would be above such nasty behavior. I will excerpt the whole paragraph of September 23rd, from 1878, written in Cévennes:
“Blessed be the man who invented goads! Blessed the innkeeper of Bouchet Saint-Nicolas who introduced me to their use! Thenceforward, Modestine [his donkey] was my slave, my chattel, my most obedient, humble servant. A prick and she passed the most inviting stable door! A prick and she broke out into a gallant little trotlet that devoured the mile! It was not a remarkable speed when all is said; we took four hours to cover ten miles at the best of it; but what a heavenly change since yesterday! No more wielding of the ugly cudgel, no more flailing with an aching arm; no more broadsword exercise, but a discreet and gentlemanly fence. But what although now and then a spot of blood should appear on Modestine’s mouse-coloured, wedge-like rump? Should I have preferred it otherwise? Indeed, but yesterday’s exploits had purged my heart of all humanity. The perverse little devil, if she would not be taken with kindness, must even go with pricking.”***** (See below.)
The nasty-minded donkey-racer, the happy whipster of his animal servant, is none other than Robert Louis Stevenson, the lovely man who wrote “A Child’s Garden of Verses.” And yet here we have him extolling the virtues of a donkey-whip. Could he not put himself in the place of the poor beast that had been taught she’d better obey when whipped? And what’s a drop of blood from a backside, but a sign that one’s pricking has made a wound. But how do you get a slave to do well without a good whipping? That mentality is what we much regret in our human nature today after a two centuries or more of home-grown oppression of a people. Can’t we apply it to animals, too? “Blessed be the man who invented goads!” sounds as benevolent to me as “Blessed be the man who invented leaf-blowers!” today.
* The Golden Ass / Apuleius; edited and abbreviated by Peter Singer; translated by Ellen Finkelpearl; with illustrations by Anna and Varvara Kendel. (New York: Liveright Publishing Corp.; 2021.
**From Edmund Wilson, A Literary Chronicle: 1920-1950. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Books, 1952), p. 397.
*** Text from Apuleius: Metamorphoses, edited and translated by J. Arthur Hanson (Loeb Classical Library). Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, U.K.: St Edmundsbury Press, 1989)
**** Hanson suggests, on p. 70, note 2, that language spoken in jesting ways becomes serious description of character at the conclusion. See BK. II, section 6 and Bk. XI, section 29.
***** From The Assassins Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists, edited by Irene and Alan Taylor (Edinburgh, Scotland: Cannonsgate Books, 2000), p. 468.
(David Gilmour, March 9, 2025)
Pertinent Voices 