I took on the task of introducing this ancient Latin novel with some trepidation. You would think that someone steeped in this remarkable prose narrative for many years would be excited at the opportunity to promote his or her work to a wider readership. I did, however, wonder about this ancient novel’s reception in the here and now and how best to whet appetites for Apuleius’ story of magical metamorphoses. There is enough sex and violence in The Golden Ass to fulfill stereotypes of the morals and mores of the Roman world, as it is generally perceived in popular culture. On the other hand, the modern reader of this text might simultaneously bring different assumptions about the classical past, believing it to be the cradle of civilization in a cultural sense (the Greeks) and a model of military organization of advanced building and engineering (the Romans).
It might come as a surprise to our notional modern reader to discover a racy story (almost a graphic novel, with a fair dose of S & M) in a familiar form, a work of prose fiction—and thereby hangs a tale! There are lively debates among classical scholars about the nature and status of this kind of writing in the Greco-Roman world. I shall go into more detail about the definitions of genres in my essay on Apuleius. The Golden Ass is in a sense a stand-alone work, but also a common point of reference in discussions about the structure, tone, content, and purpose of romantic, fantastic and comic adventure stories of ancient times. So, who was responsible for this literary conundrum?
Apuleius was African, born c. 120 CE in the town of Madauros (modern Mdaurusch, Algeria). North Africa had long been a Roman province and, as one of two sons of a local magistrate, Apuleius enjoyed modest wealth and status. He is likely to have conversed in Punic (native African) and Latin, was educated at Carthage and, as a young man, traveled to Greece on a grand tour, perfecting his knowledge of the Greek language and the riches of Greek culture.
At this time, the Roman Empire enjoyed relative economic and social stability under Antoninus Pius, a relatively “light touch” and stay-at-home emperor, in contrast to Hadrian, his predecessor, who was much more high profile, traveling extensively and especially through the Greek provinces. Whatever the character of the ruling regime, aggressive or defensive in its foreign policy, the Empire was always in a state of military tension. Under Antoninus, there were wars and hostile incursions at the frontiers, and at no point in its history could the Roman world be internally and universally “policed” in any modern sense. There were lawless swathes of countryside, notwithstanding a far-reaching urban culture that has left a worldwide legacy of impressive material remains and also a fascinating array of literary evidence about Roman art, architecture, and sophisticated social structures.
Apuleius became a successful orator at Carthage, the flourishing capital of the North African province which, typically, combined indigenous and Roman cultural and religious traditions. He was also honored with statues in other cities of the province, a not unusual colonial success story. His public lectures and writings indicate that he was well versed in Greek philosophy, and that he followed the Platonic school. Apuleius’ surviving works range widely: we have treatises on Plato’s philosophy (ascribed to Apuleius, but their authorship is disputed), and a work on Socrates, Plato’s teacher, and the intriguing Apologia, which is the author’s lengthy trial defense against charges of using magic to seduce and marry an older widow. Did this happen or is it an exercise in persuasive and entertaining oratory? Whatever the truth, such a rhetorical rebuttal might well have helped Apuleius to celebrity status in a world where performance and the public display of knowledge were highly rated and assisted upward mobility.
We also have the Florida, a series of speeches on all kinds of topics—cultural, ethical, and anthropological—in which we receive sound bites about Apuleius’ interests and attitudes. However, Apuleius’ lasting claim to fame in the modern world is his Metamorphoses, better known as The Golden Ass, a fantastical tale of transformation with a prologue promising wonder and delight for its readers—Lector, intende: laetaberis (“Reader, concentrate: you will be glad you did!”).
The Golden Ass is a narrative fiction told in the first person. In the ancient world, this could indicate that, at least in parts, it constituted what we might now call “life writing.” Aurelius Augustinus, better known as St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in modern Algeria, was another Romanized African who penned a confessional narrative about religious conversion over 200 years later, puzzled over whether Apuleius had pretended to be turned into an ass or had really undergone the experience (Civ. Dei 18.18). This suggests that Augustine, who never mastered Greek, was not aware of the derivative nature of Apuleius’ work, the Onos story ascribed to Lucian of Samosata. The Onos (full title, Lucius or the Ass) is itself a problematical text being an epitome, a shorter version of a longer and more layered work in Greek, also called Metamorphoses. This text does not survive, but is alluded to in a large compilation of “book reviews” by Photius, patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century CE.
We could pass over Augustine’s apparent belief that a man might become an ass with a superior smile; and yet scholars since have speculated upon less fantastical autobiographical moments seeping through Apuleius’ multi-layered text. Andrew Laird’s 1993 discussion of the “factual” nature of the story still sparks debate about the ancient and modern readers’ reception of texts written in the first person. There is not world enough and time to explore the subtleties of “ego” narrative in a taster essay like this one, but a browse through the many interpretations of the novel’s Prologue (Kahane and Laird 2001; Keulen 2007), where Lucius, the hero, appears to introduce himself, will demonstrate that the topic of narrative identity (identities) is by no means exhausted in scholarly circles.
Apuleius’ mainframe narrative concerns a well-bred and well-schooled young man, Lucius, who visits the town of Hypata in Thessaly, a region associated with witchcraft especially in literary traditions, and who is turned into an ass as a result of meddling in magic. Both in his human and donkey forms, the hero, Lucius, experiences or witnesses a variety of bizarre and disturbing events and episodes and overhears others, including the substantial centrally situated story, Cupid and Psyche, introduced as an old wives’ tale. This fable is a lengthy interlude that has attracted a great deal of attention and has proved as slippery to characterize as the main narrative. This story of the love god in love with a beautiful princess whose name means Soul was, as far as we can tell, a new myth in and of its time. Cupid and his mother Venus drift in and out of character as gods of sexual passion, making the fable yet another story of altered states.
It is possible to identify themes of transformation in all the stories surrounding the mainframe narrative about the ass. The motif of metamorphosis1 is rarely confined to corporeal and physical dimensions in ancient literature. Apuleius’ novel deals in the miraculous, the vagaries and vicissitudes of fortune and at least one transformative journey of a spiritual nature. Lucius is lucky enough after a good deal of suffering and humiliation to be restored to his human form by the good graces of the Egyptian goddess Isis. He becomes her acolyte and is initiated into the priestly cults of both Isis and Osiris.
For the first three of the 11 books or “chapters,” Lucius settles into Hypata, eager to see what the city has to offer. On his way to the outskirts, he meets two travelers and hears a horror story about witches and the tragic outcome of their sorcery for those who cross their path and thwart their desires. Not deterred, though no doubt deliciously terrified, Lucius, after finding his lodgings with letters of introduction to the town’s miser, Milo, and having a strange and somewhat humiliating experience in the local fish market, starts to search Hypata the next day for evidence of magic.
Lucius imagines the presence of things unexpected and supernatural lurking beneath the surface of stones and fountains. We assume that he systematically explores the familiar tourist attractions in which Hypata evidently excels—the baths, the temples, the public works. However, Niall Slater (2008, 242–243) observes that Lucius is listening and looking out for figments of his imagination during his city excursion: “The result, however, is that we readers tour the world of the narrator’s mind: all of these elements of nature he imagines to be metamorphosed human beings.”
The hero’s constant circling of the city is not fruitless: upon turning into the forum cupidinis (literally “the market place of desire,” but meaning, more prosaically, the provision market), Lucius runs into a wealthy relative. During the exchange of greetings and pleasantries, his aunt Byrrhena anxiously informs him that his host’s wife is a witch to be avoided at all costs. Pamphile, which roughly translates as nymphomaniac, is always on the lookout for lovers as comely as our hero. Lucius promptly rushes back to his lodgings with a plan to get closer to the sorceress and his hostess, Pamphile.
The narrative proceeds along convoluted lines as Lucius calculatingly embarks upon an affair with the sexy slave girl, Photis, which sets off a disastrous train of events. In Book 2, Photis botches a task for her mistress who needed hair clippings from a young boy from Boeotia, the current object of her desire, and Photis substitutes the hair of goat hides that were being prepared as wine skins. The drunken Lucius is fooled into attacking the animated vessels, believing them to be robbers entering Milo’s house. He undergoes a mock trial for murder, which turns out to be the centerpiece of a local festival where Risus, god of Laughter, is celebrated. Lucius had been asked to find material for merriment at his aunt Byrrhena’s banquet on the previous evening, where another guest, Thelyphron, a man mutilated by witches, narrated a second cautionary tale, which the company received with gales of laughter. Lucius demurred but the curious incident of the goats in the nighttime fortuitously for the Hypatans furnished the means for his contribution.
The worst is yet to come: after the humiliation of the Laughter “trial” and through another of Photis’ errors, Lucius is turned into an ass. Photis agrees to help Lucius spy upon her mistress to make up for her role in his public exposure. Lucius excitedly witnesses the witch fly forth into the night as an owl, in pursuit of erotic encounters. Photis gives in to his eager pleading and rubs on the ointment that should grow feathers upon her lover. Unfortunately, Photis, comically accident prone, passes the wrong pot to Lucius and he is transformed into a very earth-bound ass. From Books 4 to 10, he has a life of tedious travel, toil, ill treatment, and degradation, relieved occasionally by intriguing incidents, farcical and tragic, and more stories of magic and mayhem.
Lucius’ metamorphosis begins a series of adventures, punctuated by “secondary” stories relayed by the ass but with other fictional characters taking the narrative reins, as the ass changes hands, travels through Greece, and sees life high and low in the raw. He overhears raucous, sinister, and tragic tales of adultery and betrayal, is ill treated and tortured, and then falls on his hooves as it were. Recognized and paraded as an exceptional beast with human desires (he is even seduced by a beautiful and high-born woman), his fortunes seem to have taken a turn for the better—but not for long.
His horror and fear at being put on show in the arena as an ass copulating with a criminal woman prompts him to break free from a potentially fatal situation. He takes flight and prays to the moon on the shores of Cenchreae for a fostering divine savior to end his misery. All the exhausted ass wants at this stage is closure, and he seems to be inviting death. Enter the goddess Isis, who appears before Lucius after his fervent prayer to the moon and instructs him to eat roses at her festival, which proves to be an appropriate setting for his retransformation in more ways than one. Lucius’ previous attempts to consume the antidote to the transformation spell have gone awry. Isis guarantees his access to the longed for flowers.
At several points during his life as an ass, Lucius, in spite of retaining his human personality and his enquiring mind in a bestial form, has despaired of ever finding himself again. When he is re-transformed and restored to humanity at the Festival of Isis, the presiding priest, forewarned about the miracle in a divine dream, is ready with some choice words about the lessons Lucius should have learned. Here was a handsome and privileged young man in possession of doctrina (advanced learning), but he foolishly allowed his curiosity to catapult him into dangerous and demeaning desires. Lucius became the plaything of blind Fortuna. Isis is seeing-Fortuna (almost an “overseeing” Fortuna), and the novel’s hero finally enters her safe haven: In tutelam iam receptus es Fortunae, sed videntis, quae suae lucis splendore ceteros etiam deos illuminat (“Now you have been accepted into the protection of Fortune, but the seeing Fortune, who lights up even other gods with the brilliance of her own illumination.” [11.15]).
The priest’s speech is a rapid distillation of the story’s basic plot, a flashback of his suffering with a passing mention of his encounters with brigands, wild beasts, and the daily fear of death that is a slave’s lot. Lucius’ nights of vigorous sexual activity with the slave Photis might be in the priest’s mind when he mentions the hero’s falling into servile pleasures (serviles voluptates, 11.15), but this is an oblique phrase, considering the evils of servitude Lucius has suffered. The swerves of Blind Fortune have also punctuated his bestial and human existence, dragging him down to the depths, in spite of the odd tantalizing upturns during his adventures as an ass.
Commentators have identified several signs and significant scenes before Lucius’ transformation in the third book that prefigure his asinine life, which suggest that, as a man, he was halfway to being a beast. Lucius is manipulated into humiliating situations and, at one point, his transformation seems to be predicted as he stares at a lifelike sculpture group depicting the myth of the unfortunate Theban prince, Actaeon, in the courtyard of Byrrhena early in Book 2. Actaeon spies on the goddess Diana as she bathes naked; he has been cunningly carved as if already changing into a stag. This ekphrasis, an elaborate description of an artwork that can be thematically significant for the viewers inside and outside the text, is a link to Lucius’ unbridled curiosity. To his peril, he recognizes none of the consequences of meddling in the unknown and spying on powerful females.
Photis, though herself a slave, physically straddles and saddles this freeborn young man, who becomes addicted to their sexual encounters. During the Festival of Laughter in Book 3, his host, Milo, and the local dignitaries, under the pretense of arresting him for murder, lead him around the town in mimicry of a purification parade known as the lustrum, which would usually involve an animal groomed for a religious occasion. Lucius is a very unwilling participant in the day dedicated to Risus, god of merriment, a deity who resides only in the pages of Apuleius’ novel, unless lost ancient texts reappear to enlighten us.
However, in the big finish to The Golden Ass, Isis is presented as a supernatural figure who can be approached, adored, and trusted to turn around Lucius’ life. Apuleian devotees are divided over the fervently religious conversion of the hero in the final book. Is it at odds in tone, pace, and character with the rest of the novel? It is a very different resolution to the Greek narrative on which the story seems to be based. In the primarily comical Onos story, there is no religious resolution. Lucius lights upon some roses in the amphitheater, eats them, and sheds his ass form. He then returns to the noblewoman who paid money to his keeper for a night of passion with the ass, thinking how thrilled she will be now he is his handsome human self. Scornful of his reduced sexual prowess (the ass had a member the manufacturers and purchasers of Viagra can only dream of), she has him thrown out of the house.
Opinion is divided over Lucius’ fate in Apuleius’ version—is it comical, a satirical resolution for the gullible and curious protagonist still being deluded by the smoke and mirrors maybe not of magic but of a false religion?2 Isis has been viewed as another powerful and controlling female with suspect supernatural attributes who has enslaved the hero. The Greek Lucius takes his drubbing out of the fine lady’s house with an amused philosophical air; the Latin Lucius walks the street of Rome, as a priest of Osiris, with a shaven head—the bald acolytes were figures of fun in Roman satiric traditions—and yet has no sense of self-irony.
Surely all these ingredients and uncertainties would be appreciated by a modern reader, but what about the foreign nature of the world in which the fantastic tale takes place? How alien or alienating is the ancient novel, both in content and structure? I became intrigued by the idea of restoring the responses of a first-time reader of this unusual, even unique surviving text. In a groundbreaking critique of the novel’s nature as a “philosophical comedy about religious knowledge,” John J. Winkler (1985) argued that Apuleius “wrong foots” the first-time reader rather like the writers of detective fiction. Unexpected twists and turns, not least the final book, force us to rethink the meaning and narrative trajectory of Lucius’ incredible journey:
It is one of my contentions that the AA [Asinus Auritus or The Golden Ass] is not simply a problem of interpretation from our point of view in the twentieth century, a vantage from which we can notice readers through the ages disagreeing about the meaning of the work, but that in itself and for any reader it raises problems… (14)
I decided it would be worth recapturing a perspective on Apuleius’ prose narrative that was truly “innocent” of theoretical big issues in the scholarly debate, bearing in mind Winkler’s emphasis (1985, 13) that a first-time reader is not to be equated with a naïve reader. Of course, Lucius, the narrator, seems to relay much of his story from an innocent or, more accurately, ignorant viewpoint and to make assumptions he then has to correct. The narrator takes us on the journey without the benefit of his hindsight to help us on our way. In the logic of the fiction, Lucius must be writing the book after his retransformation, but does this assumption demonstrate that the reader has been entrapped into accepting the truth of the tale?
I decided to try Apuleius out on secretarial and coordinator colleagues at the Open University center who have attended the occasional lunchtime seminars I offer on my current research and course writing. They read The Golden Ass in translation and also selections from Tomas Hägg’s 1983 book The Novel in Antiquity as they were intrigued to know about modern-looking fiction in the Greek and Roman world. I alerted them to the significant expansion of interest in the Greek Romances as complex texts and the controversies over where works like The Golden Ass and the earlier Latin prose “romp,” Petronius’ Satyricon, might interrelate chronologically and culturally. The group encountered Apuleius in a variety of translations, and this in itself led to some interesting differences in their responses, especially about how ancient or modern the novel felt. On reflection, my new readers would have benefited from dipping into Carl Schlam’s accessible 1992 overview of Apuleius’ novel The Metamorphoses of Apuleius: On Making an Ass of Oneself, which manages expertly to cover a great deal of ground, suggesting as well as summarizing ways in which such a rich text can be read and responded to. I emphasized the role of Winkler’s 1985 book Auctor and Actor in stimulating a ferment of ideas about this work but being a tougher read at their stage in the game, particularly in the number of rich cultural registers it insinuates into the fabric of Apuleius’ novel. We did discuss Winkler’s application of theories of narratology to The Golden Ass. I also briefly set the scene for these ancient novel novices with a taste of Apuleian scholarship from culturally expansive contextualization to microscopic linguistic and literary readings (see Chapter 20 in this volume, “Apuleius’ Metamorphoses: A Hybrid Text?”).
One of the secretarial coordinators, who was studying Open University social science modules in her spare time, was struck by the violence and horror in this “lurid world,” but wondered about its potential as an historical source, especially in laying bare relations of power, patronage, and hierarchical social formations that operated within the proto-Gothic setting of the story. Her particular interests convinced me that not all readers would want to plunge into The Golden Ass without chronology and contextualization. Schlam and Finkelpearl (2000) did a splendid survey on scholarship of Apuleius’ novel from every possible perspective that included summaries of critical interpretations in The Metamorphoses as a Representation of Life in the 2nd Century. For instance, legal themes and allusions feature in the novel, albeit in the most incongruous places, for example, on Mount Olympus. The last decade has witnessed Apuleian scholarship moving ever onward on all fronts.
Historians accept that social realities may be satirized and subverted, as well as synthesized and intensified to create the novel’s dystopian ambience, but an increasing number of commentators are writing about issues of cultural and social identity, dominant ideologies, and political destabilization within the narrative. Edith Hall argued in 1995 that the Greek Onos story highlighted aristocratic hegemonic power by housing a high-born youth in the body of a bestial slave, and this prompted ancient novel scholars such as Jean Alvares (2007) to take a closer look at the paradoxes of political accommodation lurking in the text of The Golden Ass.
In spite of being exposed to all kinds of explicit and shocking images in contemporary culture, my colleagues still found the novel a rollercoaster of contrary moods and unexpected situations. The course manager of the Open University’s Creative Writing modules said the novel relied on a telling not a showing technique, which sent me scurrying back to explanations about effective narrating techniques from the perspective of writers of fiction today. On reflection, it seemed to me that Apuleius was adhering to Henry James’ dictum, “dramatize, dramatize, dramatize,” that this “novel before the novel” did indeed offer a feast of sensory details, giving descriptions impact, showing as well as telling the reader things about place, character, and emotions. It is difficult to judge an early example of prose fiction from a twenty-first-century perspective, and it is possible that a number of canonical classical authors would fail Creative Writing courses across the genres!
For my first-time readers, The Golden Ass was not quite a “novel” as they understood the term. They “struggled to get into it” and would probably have very much agreed with C.S. Lewis’s deft description of the work: “The Golden Ass is a strange compound of picaresque novel, horror comic, mystagogue’s tract, pornography and stylistic experiment.” This slight bewilderment with the “nature of the beast” is compounded by the novel’s narrative swerves and its variable tones. Apuleius also imports elements (scenarios, language, plotlines) from Greek and Roman drama and mime and exploits literary modes familiar from satire, epic, and love elegy. In the academic world of Apuleian studies, very few scholars would think it necessary to defend Apuleius against charges of sloppy sequencing and just plain weird plotting here and there, but this style of narration disturbs first-time readers who experience rather than recognize the strange weave of ancient genres. The frequent reader of the text may assume that particular motifs and concepts (philosophical, rhetorical, psychological) hold this multi-stranded narrative together, but does that make the narrative inconsistencies melt away? How much do we have to supply in sequence and subtext to make sense of the story (stories), and is that all part of the Apuleian jeu d’esprit? I have energetically spoken out for the unity of The Golden Ass and, early on in my acquaintance with the work, concluded that Apuleius’ detractors were missing the subtleties of his structural principles. I wonder if I was right.
After some discussion on apparent non sequiturs in the narrative, my focus group speculated upon aspects of Lucius’ experiences in Hypata, especially the scenes of false accusation, as these seemed to involve the most mercurial pieces of plotting Apuleius had introduced (we assume) into the Greek mainframe story. Take the Risus Festival, for example. All the Hypatans are in on the joke, but Lucius lives a nightmare until the bodies of three burly burglars he has described at his trial (he embellishes the truth by giving them dialogue) are uncovered and the huge audience bursts out laughing. In our reading group, we speculated upon who might have stage-managed this public event and how far ahead. Lucius’ central role was surely not something left to chance by the festival organizers? In other words, we tuned to Winkler’s mischievous detective story template for the novel and tried to answer the question “Whodunnit?” (or a pantomimic “behind you” as far as Lucius is concerned). Looking back at the reactions of key Hypatans to Lucius before the festival, the reader should realize that the hero is being singled out as particularly attractive and eminently suitable to play the perfect fool on this religious occasion. Milo, his host, praised his looks and manners (1.23). His aunt Byrrhena and her personal assistant effused over Lucius’ beauty and modesty (2.3). As soon as influential members of the town set eyes upon him, he was earmarked, culminating in a direct request that he willingly celebrated the God, Risus, with an entertaining performance. A star was being groomed but not for a pleasant experience. Lucius felt as if he is dying a death of humiliation at the Risus Festival and believed he was about to be tortured, and then executed for murder.
It is worth recalling that Lucius had run into his relative Byrrhena during his voluntary tour of Hypata. He had been circling around the city in an obsessive way, leaving no corner of it unexplored or untouched. This prefigures the lustrum, touching every nook and cranny in a ritual of purification, which he performed for the community when he is led around the same city like a lamb to the slaughter on the day of the Risus Festival. It would seem he had manipulated himself into the candidature of a fool for a day.
Any reader is free to speculate and supply motives and hidden agendas, but the conspiracy theory does not really explain subsequent events when Lucius is accused of criminality for real and blamed for the actual burglary of Milo’s house. Lucius the ass hears how he has been made the scapegoat for the robbery in which he himself formed part of the plunder. He bitterly laments the calumny that was gleefully reported by the robber scout on his return from town, and this time it is no charade. Once again, the Hypatan society deliberately strips him of his worth and falsely accuses him. This is a mysterious turn of events as Lucius brought letters of recommendation and was closely questioned about his hometown by Milo on the very first night in Hypata. His old school friend and self-important official, Pythias, had recognized him at the fish market. His aunt and entourage eagerly embraced him. Overall, his good character seemed unassailable. He was even offered a statue by the chief magistrates to celebrate his performance at the Risus Festival. There is actually no logic to his being suspected of the crime other than his sudden disappearance. I have since wondered if Lucius the ass, taken by force from the town, has repeated his role as scapegoat, but this time it is the robbers’ crime and guilt he has carried away with him, as well as Milo’s treasure.
I did not come away with the impression that my first-time readers would necessarily revisit the novel, but it had aroused their interest in the geography, the political structures, and the belief systems of this period of the Roman Empire, as well as prompting them to rethink assumptions about literary forms and styles, ancient and modern. I would have been intrigued to discuss possible dramatizations with them and whether a translation to the stage or the screen would make Apuleius more or less accessible, especially as The Golden Ass is increasingly viewed by classicists as a performance piece made up of eminently performative pieces. This is not necessarily to pander to the tendencies in modern consumerist culture mentioned by Winkler (1985, 10–11) and first raised by Roland Barthes, namely the practice of “casting aside a story once it has been ‘devoured,’ so that we can go on to another story, buy another book.” Rather, it is interesting to explore how a visualization of a vividly written text might illuminate its mises en scènes, as well as its themes and thematic continuity. A wondrous tale of magical metamorphoses and the twists and turns of fate or Fortuna cries out for dramatizing and for cinematic special effects. There has been at least one BBC 3 radio production that took the Isis conversion seriously and made the finale aurally atmospheric. I also attended the critically acclaimed if over-long production of the novel at London’s Globe theatre in 2002. This highly creative and exuberant dramatization by Tim Carroll (Master of Play) with an English translation by Peter Oswald admirably met the challenge of bringing this story to life for a modern audience. Classicists like to emphasize to students in cultural history courses who might be reading Greek and Latin texts in a prose translation that the grand narratives of epic are invariably in poetic form. It was paradoxical, but proved very successful, that Peter Oswald opted for a verse translation of Apuleius’ prose text. The novel is, after all, both epic and dramatic. Imaginative staging and quite a bit of risk-taking (a jumble of styles and set designs spanning centuries of popular cultural forms, from fairground, circus, music hall, and silent cinema) made this an intriguing experience for the audience.
The Globe’s The Golden Ass managed to evoke a rich range of moods and was a tragicomedy with moments of real poignancy alongside scenes of slapstick. For those familiar with the novel, these choices reflected Apuleius’ stylistic swerves and juxtaposition of high and low literary forms in his novel. Mark Rylance’s performance as the long-suffering Lucius was the dramatic heart of this stage version. Rylance’s Lucius appeared as a debonair man about town catapulted into a world without refinements, so the sense of loss of identity and privilege was palpable. The actor had a physically demanding role as he trundled up and down the stage with a mallet swinging between his legs and dragging a low and cumbersome cart to signify his life as a beast of burden, a pantomime donkey but also a nod to the Victorian freak show “where the half-animal and half-human were paraded before the public for entertainment” (Zoë Gray, Globe Theatre Programme, 2002). The audience was swept along in a picaresque world where the grotesque and godlike all formed part of the big carnival. Rylance managed to convey an unshakeable naivety and innocence as an ass, as all pretentions had been stripped away by his metamorphosis. This is perhaps the quality that the amazed crowd at the Isis festival recognizes in the naked, newly (re) born man:
felix Hercules et ter beatus, qui vitae scilicet praecedentis innocentia fideque meruerit tam praeclarum de caelo patrocinium, ut renatus quodam modo statim sacrorum obsequio desponderetur (“What a lucky fellow he is, by Hercules, and three times blessed, one who has surely deserved, by the innocence and trustworthiness of his former life, such exceptional protection from heaven that he is like a new man, instantly committed to the priestly cult” [11:16]).
Apuleian commentators have sometimes assumed that the crowd is misreading the situation and indeed Lucius’ character, carried away by the moment because the hero has been blessed by the goddess and embraced by her priest. Perhaps, as readers outside the text as opposed to viewers inside it, we are missing the visual impact of Lucius’ rebirth as the coup de théatre. On the other hand, Lucius’ perceived innocentia might make him suitable, yet again, as a sacrifice, a troublesome thought in the light of Lucius’ subjugation to Isis and following a festival where he is once more, as on the Risus day, the center of attention. Isis did save the hero in Oswald’s retelling of the story for the Globe, but she also appeared selling “ices” on the beach, an enjoyable pun and a way of bringing the great goddess down to earth, to say nothing of her dealing in an overpriced commodity.
The Globe production interestingly redeemed Photis, who followed her luckless lover through the scenes attempting to bring him roses for his salvation. In the novel, the liaison with this sorceress’ apprentice ends on a sour note. Lucius looks back upon her as a witch who enslaved him, which is somewhat economical with the truth. It is perhaps significant that the well-born woman who pays for sex with Lucius the ass (this occurs in Book 10, in a scene that corresponds to the Greek version) is unintentionally the cause of his near-humiliation and slaughter in the arena, but she does not suffer censure in the Latin novel. All the same, it would seem that there is no safe sex in Apuleius. This is the subtext of Psyche’s story, who is both rescued and raped by Cupid, the god of love. The significance of the narrative interlude for Lucius, the listening ass, is still being hotly debated, as the heroine of the inset fable seems to parallel Lucius in misplaced meddling and inappropriate behavior with supernatural forces before being elevated by divine intervention. Psyche suffers as a slave and is tormented and degraded as she performs tasks for a grimly transformed Venus. The heroine makes one final mistake, falling at the last hurdle, but Cupid saves the day and Psyche wins immortality and enjoys an apparent happy ending. My first-time readers recognized all kinds of fairy and folktale elements in the story and could see why it could be and has been so effortlessly extracted from the novel in its literary and artistic afterlife. The Globe production was universally praised for an imaginative staging of this story. The goddess Venus was represented by a gloved hand with a cigarette holder, a symbol, perhaps, of refined elegance and cruelty. Cupid and Psyche appeared as gorgeous puppets in the style of Japanese Bunraku theatre, and their story was accompanied by glorious singing—a mini opera with Claire van Campen’s music modeled on the Greek Harmoniae mode. This entranced critics and audiences alike, in addition to underlining the illusory quality of the episode in Apuleius; for a classicist, the puppets could have doubled as shadows in the cave, a metaphor of Plato’s for the transient images that humanity receives as reality.
In Apuleius, the interlude of Cupid and Psyche is told by the drunken robber to the housekeeper to quiet the traumatized girl, Charite, whom the robbers have captured for ransom, but the fable is not without its darker and deeper sides. As a mythical tale, it contains divine machinery with gods interacting on the heavenly and earthly planes, as well as striking familiar poses from mime and comedy. The presence of either or both love gods in all their sensuous and sensual beauty might lend lepos (charm, allure) to the story. Nevertheless, the fates of those in the thrall of these overpowering emotions represented by Cupid and Venus, outside the confines of mere fantasy, expose the lawlessness of love and the destructive potential of passion. Presenting Cupid and Psyche as a superior puppet show within a play of fantastic fictions makes its unreal nature explicit.
This brings me back full circle to the joyously celibate Lucius, who closes the story, going about priestly college duties and keeping his head shaven to celebrate his status as acolyte of Osiris. The old Lucius had quite a fetish for luxuriant locks, so it is small wonder that scholars have wondered about the hero’s sacrifice of his hair in the service of god. Is Lucius still being manipulated into playing the fool? Thinking back to the Globe production, we may wonder whether he has ended up as just another “freak show.” If he is parading his bald head wherever he goes in Rome, it is possible that Lucius is yet again and unwittingly performing another purification ritual. The place has changed but Lucius’ lustrum lingers on. Those skeptical of Lucius’ happy ending might say so. What we are shown, if we have eyes to see, can be in tension with what we are told, provided, of course, we can work out who or what is our narrative source for the showing or the telling. I have to say that my group of first-time readers did not detect satire in the Isis book and perhaps there is something to be said for taking the text at face value and going with the spiritually fervent flow of Lucius’ conversion.
In this introductory chapter, I have also done some eccentric circuits during my journey through The Golden Ass, relating parts of Lucius’ story and the stories Lucius relays while simultaneously trying to alert the first-time reader to the joys and conundrums of these different narrative “arcs.” In “Apuleius’ Metamorphoses: A Hybrid Text?,” which also appears in this volume (as Chapter 20), I focus on some of the strategies that scholars of Apuleius have employed to address the challenges of The Golden Ass, but this should be seen as a complementary discussion, not necessarily a “specialist” debate. All the first-time reader needs to do is finish Apuleius’ novel before embarking upon the next chapter, as by then s/he will have joined the ranks of the knowing and attentive (scrupulosus) reader. Intende!
1 Metamorphoses appears on the manuscripts and is assumed to be the author’s title to the work, in acknowledgement of its Greek model.
2 “Smoke and Mirrors” was the title of Brigid Libby’s stimulating paper about Isis as charlatan delivered at the ICAN conference 2008 in Lisbon, and which was published in 2011.
Please note that the references and the further reading list are relevant to both chapters (this chapter and Chapter 20) as they discuss a single text.
Alvares, J. 2007. “The coming of age and political accommodation in the Greco-Roman novels.” In The Greek and Roman Novel: Parallel Readings, edited by M. Paschalis, S. Frangoulidis, S.J. Harrison, and M. Zimmerman. Ancient Narrative. Supplementum 8. Groningen: Barkhuis Publishing, pp. 3–22.
Finkelpearl, E. and Schlam, C. 2000. “A survey of scholarship on Apuleius, 1971–1998.” Lustrum, 42.
Gray, Z. 2002. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. The Golden Ass Program, 2002.
Hägg, T. 1983. The Novel in Antiquity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Hall, E. 1995. “The ass with double vision: Politicising an ancient Greek novel.” In Heart of a Heartless World: Essays in Cultural Resistance in Honour of Margot Heinemann, edited by D. Margolies and M. Joannou. London: Pluto Press, pp. 47–59.
Kahane, A. and A. Laird, eds. 2001. A Companion to the Prologue of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Keulen, W. 2007. “Vocis immutatio: The Apuleian Prologue and the pleasures and pitfalls of vocal versatility.” In Seeing Tongues, Hearing Scripts. Orality and Representation in the Ancient Novel, edited by V. Rimell. Ancient Narrative Supplementum 7. Groningen: Barkhuis Publishing, pp. 106–137.
Laird, A. 1993. “Fiction, bewitchment and story worlds: The implications of claims to truth in Apuleius.” In Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World, edited by C. Gill and T.P. Wiseman. Exeter: Exeter University Press, pp. 147–174.
Schlam, C.C. 1992. The Metamorphoses of Apuleius: On Making an Ass of Oneself. London: Duckworth.
Schlam, C.C. and Finkelpearl, E.D. 2000. A Review of Scholarship on Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, 1970–1998. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Slater, N. 2008. “Apuleian Ecphraseis: Depiction at play.” In Paideia at Play: Learning and Wit in Apuleius, edited by W. Riess. Groningen: Barkhuis Publishing, pp. 235–250.
Winkler, J.J. 1985. Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’s Golden Ass. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
James, P. 1987. Unity in Diversity: A Study of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann.
James, P. 2006. “Ritualistic behaviour in The Wicker Man: A classical and carnivalesque perspective on ‘the true nature of sacrifice.’” In The Quest for the Wicker Man: History, Folklore and Pagan Perspectives, edited by B. Franks, S. Harper, J. Murray, G. Carpenter, and L. Stevenson. Edinburgh: Luath Press, pp. 44–55.
Lewis, C.S. 1956. Till We Have Faces. London: William Bles.
Libby, B. 2011. “Moons, smoke and mirrors in Apuleius’ portrayal of Isis.” American Journal of Philology, 132.2: 301–322.
Riess, W., ed. 2008. Paideia at Play: Learning and Wit in Apuleius. Groningen: Barkhuis Publishing.
There is a good choice of readable translations of Apuleius’ novel: Robert Graves’ 1950 Penguin Golden Ass (revised by Michael Grant in 1990) is a lively free version still widely available, and Jack Lindsay’s rich prose rendition, which captures the poetic rhythms and exuberance of the original (Bestseller Library, 1960), is worth searching for second-hand. Within the last 15 years, distinguished Apuleian scholars have produced high-quality translations, for instance, Arthur Hanson in the Loeb series (Harvard University Press, 1989), E.J. Kenney (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), P.G. Walsh (Oxford University Press, 1994) and, most recently, J.C. Reilihan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007).
Recommended introductions to the novel are Peter Walsh’s 1970 The Roman Novel (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press), James Tatum’s 1979 Apuleius and The Golden Ass (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), Carl Schlam’s 1992 The Metamorphosis of Apuleius: On Making an Ass of Oneself (London: Duckworth), and John Winkler’s groundbreaking but intellectually challenging 1985 Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’ Golden Ass (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press). The casual reader and new student of Apuleius may find entries in comprehensive works of reference, such as the Oxford Classical Dictionary, are a good starting place for understanding the author, his context, and place in the literary canon.
For those who have a more intimate and scholarly acquaintance with Apuleius, the Groningen commentaries on Metamorphoses (completed under the expert leadership of Maaike Zimmerman, but initiated and sustained by such distinguished Apuleian scholars as Ben Hijmans, Victor Schmidt, Berber Wesseling, and U. Egelhaaf-Gaiser) are a must-read. The commentaries also provide many insights into the cultural, literary, and narrative texture of this singular piece of prose fiction. E.J. Kenney’s 1990 commentary on the fable of Cupid and Psyche (Cambridge University Press) and Gwyn Griffith’s 1975 detailed account of the religious rituals and allusions within the Isis book (Leiden: Brill) are invaluable complements to the Groningen collection. The proceedings of the Groningen colloquia (including the two volumes specifically on Aspects of Apuleius’ Golden Ass) and The Ancient Narrative series have built up a bank of stimulating critiques of the novel from close readings of particular episodes to thematic studies and the historical and social contexts of the work.
Since the mid-1980s, there have been a number of monographs, articles, and chapters on Apuleius’ novel teasing out the text’s literary allusiveness, narrative strategies, philosophical timbres, folklorist elements, and the psychological, social, and ethical implications of its treatments of belief, sex, gender, and animal, human, and divine identities. Authors not already mentioned here who have produced books focused solely upon The Golden Ass are (in chronological order of their publications): Paula James, Ellen Finkelpearl, Stephen Harrison, Judith Krabbe, Nancy Shumate, Stavros Frangoulidis, Maeve O’Brien, Regina May, and Luca Graverini.
Eminent scholars in Classics have written influentially on Apuleius and his works, produced commentaries on individual books of the novel (see Groningen commentaries cited earlier), and / or edited essay collections, and journal supplements and conference publications, all of which also explore and expand the themes and motifs outlined here. Key names are Anton Bitel, Stephen Harrison, Vincent Hunink, Ahuvia Kahane, Wytse Keulen, Andrew Laird, Thomas McCreight, Danielle van Mal Maeder, Stelios Panayotakis, John Penwill, Gerald Sandy, Warren S. Smith, Rudi van der Paardt, and Maaike Zimmerman. Two key works on the reception and refashioning of Apuleius’ novel through the centuries are Robert Carver’s 2007 The Protean Ass: The Metamorphoses of Apuleius from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Oxford University Press) and Julia Gaisser’s 2008 The Fortunes of Apuleius and The Golden Ass (Princeton University Press). Since this chapter (and Chapter 20) were first drafted, Apuleian scholarship has continued to blossom. Any devotee of The Golden Ass can conduct regular searches for essays, articles, and books about this fascinating ancient narrative that have been emerging in the last few years. Sadly there is as yet no movie on the horizon.