One Additional Note on the Translation of The Golden Ass of Apuleius
Of English translators of Apuleius’ The Golden Ass before the year 2007, all the Latinists and Classicists who chose to translate this ribald satirical novel, a Satyricon in its own right as far as narrative goes, were men. From Adlington in the 16th century, three in the 19th century (Thomas Taylor, George Head, and Mr. Anonymous), and seven from the 20th century (Francis D. Byrne, H.E. Butler, Robert Graves, Jack Lindsey, J. Arthur Hanson, P.G. Walsh, and E. J. Kenney). The last male interpreter/translator, Joel C., wrote his version as The Golden Ass Or,[sic] The Book of Changes in 2007. Following him, the two translators of the first quarter of this century have been women: Sarah Ruden’s complete translation in 2011; then finally, Ellen D. Finkelpearl’s abridged translation, in corroboration with James Singer, in 2021.
It is interesting that for many years, man’s inhumanity to man probably turned on the Aesop’s fabulist tale of the cruelty a donkey saw, and, of course, the donkey suffered regularly much cruelty, too. Lucius’ tale abounds with acts of cruelty suffered by men and with sadistic punishments applied to animals, particularly donkeys.
However, also made clear in The Golden Ass is the dehumanizing of women: the taking for sex of a slave girl, the obliteration by butchery of an old woman by robbers, the fornication of donkey and woman, bestiality performed in a private home for the woman’s pleasure, and later another bestial event of the same sort prepared in the public arena before a taunting crowd. Finally, Peter Singer’s role was that of editor, and he chose to focus on the animal and human rights of the story. The role of women is subordinate. Therefore, Finkelpearl’s translation is abridged by a male editor who did not think the many interwoven stories would allow the reader to see the main point. The total abridgment by excising the interwoven stories was not so good judgment in my view.
The oversight is the omission of the Cupid and Psyche folk story, with its focus on a strange but pleasant courtship, a kind of Cinderella tale, but also a Beauty and the Beast tale. Both of them do fit a romance story-type which has successful love and marriage in the denouement. There is nothing quite so optimistic and full of promise as that story, and surely a good story would need a healthy contrast to balance the sadistic horror of human and animal cruelty. On this one diversionary story, Cupid and Psyche by Apuleius, more ink has been spent retelling the story and analyzing the symbolism than words of commentary about Apuleius’ ancient novel. This was the author’s promising view. The closest Lucius the protagonist could come himself to experiencing the comforting love of a woman was expressed in the final chapters when the donkey is changed into a devotee of the kind goddess Isis, a caretaking Great Mother, soul nurturer, and healer of what ails him. She takes away his passion to exploit for one’s own benefit, to hoodwink, to conquer, or to thieve one’s way through life. Cupid’s mother, Venus, plays the role of the clinging jealous mother, a hovering tiger-mom, the wicked step-mother.
It has been commented that the power of Isis worship from the time of the Roman Republic, when Isis entered worship as a strange exotic goddess, stood strong against the state religion of primarily powerful male gods. In early Christian centuries, the figures of God and Jesus did not give sufficient power to Mother Mary, such that the rise of Mariology dawned in the 3rd century A.D. It was realized by the observers of cohesive worship that the empathetic draw of a comforting Alma Mater was necessary to keep the flock enthusiastic. After the printing of the Gutenberg Bible, in several European print shops of the 15th century I know of, the catalogue of incunabula on Mariology is long.
Noah Yuval Harari in his new work, Nexus, A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, (2024), speaks of the low demand in the 15th century for religious works, when compared to the sales of books on studies of witchcraft in order to detect satanic witches. One such work was, Malleus Maleficarum—The Hammer of the Witches, a handbook on signs of such heretic females, and the methods of torturing them. The cruelty to powerful women, stigmatizing them as satanic witches, was brought back as a necessity to enforce gender control or servitude. Such bigoted misogyny has returned among us again in our totalitarian regime doing its damage through patriarchal domination by neo-machoism.
Therefore, given the interest in cruelty to women being aligned in literature with their love of magic ointments, potions, and spells, it is this secret witchcraft of a host’s wife that Lucius wants the benefit of, but which turns him into the ass and puts his life into difficult straits, human consciousness imprisoned in a donkey guise. Apuleius knew the draw of the magic of witches, just as much as Homer knew the force of his Circe and Calypso on Odysseus : the desire to keep readers enchanted. Isis who reverses the magic is the Good Witch, or fairy godmother of the story. What better outcome for a sad story of a punitive life? Even the ancient tragedian Aeschylus turned his Wild Furies into Kindly Ones (Eumenides) after Orestes’ plague of suffering for avenging his father’s death on Aegisthus, to save the city of Athens, a story of salvation. Without the Kindly Ones, the punishment of crimes and sin will just continue in acts of vengeance. An end must be put to such retribution. Artists of the ancient world were concerned to leave their audiences satisfied and cathartically cleansed. The querulous, angry, jealous Venus stands in sharp contrast with Isis, who has taken into herself all the kind and loving maternal traits of the female goddesses.
We, in our present day America, are finding retribution being dealt out by a dictator against his enemies who acted lawfully to make their claims. The dictator has turned the tables to find the people guilty of infidelity to his cause. We need a change from the Wrathful Führer to the Benign Father, to regain sanity, until the power of women can be restored to show us the Kindly Ones again.
David Gilmour (March 20, 2025)
Pertinent Voices 