Since the Renaissance, we have known of at least three literary asses on the hoof in antiquity, with one more shadowy candidate lurking on the edge of the herd, and now a fifth making an appearance. The time seems right to consider whether we have the proper model for explaining such a growing herd—and how a different studbook might alter in particular the way we understand the most robust survivor of the group.
Two versions of the story of a man turned into an ass and then back again survive essentially intact: a one-book Greek version of the Ass (hereafter the Onos), passed down along with works of Lucian, though the scholarly consensus today is that its stylistic quality is not up to Lucian’s own, and Apuleius’ marvelous tale in 11 books that comes down to us under two titles, both as the Metamorphoses and The Golden Ass. The Byzantine patriarch Photius tells us that he read a much longer work in “several volumes” entitled the Metamorphoseis, by a “Loukios of Patrae” (clearly also the name of the principal character in that narrative), of which:
Οἱ δέ γε πρω̑ τοι αὐτου̑ δύο λόγοι μόνον οὐ μετεγράφησαν Λουκίῳ ἐκ του̑ Λουκιανου̑ λόγου ὃς ἐπιγέγραπται ‘Λου̑κις ἢ Ὄνος’ ἢ ἐκ τω̑ν Λουκίου λόγων Λουκιαν
. Ἔοικε δὲ μᾶλλον ὁ Λουκιανὸς μεταγράφοντι, ὅσον εἰκάζειν· τίς γὰρ χρόνῳ πρεσβύτερος, οὔπω ἔχομεν γνω̑ναι. (The first two books were transcribed almost exactly by Loukios from the work of Lucian entitled “Loukis or the Ass,” or by Lucian from the work of Loukios. However, it seems more likely that it was Lucian who did the transcribing, as far as one can guess, for we no longer can know which of the two was older … (Photius, Codex 129, text and translation Mason)
With only Photius’ summary to go on for this lost work, scholars have long debated over how much of the text the patriarch actually read (despite his statement about “several volumes”), and how good his own sense for literary history was. With just three points of comparison, one of them lost except in summary, scholars have naturally gravitated toward a stemmatic model for understanding the relations of these narratives. The number of possible stemmata is quite limited, especially if we make a further assumption that is almost universal, although not regularly articulated, that Roman authors may be inspired by, adapt, or even copy from Greek authors, but the Greeks almost never repaid the compliment. Thus, the surviving Onos must either be the source for, or adapted from, the lost books of Loukios of Patrae’s Metamorphoseis, and, given the close correspondence in both narrative and even phrasing, Apuleius has used one of those Greek narratives for his inspiration. Hugh Mason (1994) has summed up centuries of debate on these questions in a magisterial study and laid out what now stands as the general consensus: both the surviving pseudo-Lucianic Onos and The Golden Ass depend on the lost Metamorphoseis.
Mason also makes two other points worth noting here at the outset. First, while the anonymous author of the Onos turns two books of a previous version into one of his own, the resulting narrative may not be very much shorter than the original: the present Onos is significantly longer than many comparable books of Greek prose (Mason 1994, 1693). Second, there is no evidence that the books following the first two in the lost Metamorphoseis were further adventures of the narrator in ass form, nor is it likely that the narrator Loukios of Patrae underwent metamorphoses into other forms to provide further stories. Rather, the remaining books might have been stories Loukios heard—or simply a collection of transformation tales. Some scholars since Salmasius in 1629 have wished to see these later stories as source material for Apuleius’ additions to the Ass narrative (Mason 1994, 1693), and there is an initial plausibility to the suggestion. For example, in Book 8.19–21 of The Golden Ass, following the dreadful death of Charite, her servants in the country decide to abandon their farm, taking Lucius with them. On their journey, they meet an old man who pleads for help in rescuing his grandson who has fallen into a pit. One of the escapees goes to help. When he fails to return, another goes to look for him and finds a giant snake devouring the first man’s body. Lucius concludes the snake was the old man who thus preyed on travelers. Such a horrific metamorphosis tale could originate in the lost books of the Greek Metamorphoseis, but by no means all or indeed very many of Apuleius’ narrative additions involve metamorphosis, and the general view now is that Apuleius invented or found other sources for the material that does not appear in the Onos, most famously his 11th book.
It is worth making explicit one more implication of envisioning the lost Greek Metamorphoseis as a collection of various transformation tales, whether Loukios of Patrae played a role within the text of weaving those tales together or not. Its existence attests a market for such transformation tales, as well as ample material to gather from, and the Ass narrative, as the very first part of the collection, could be counted on as a good way to draw readers or hearers in.
One more shadow of an Ass has been lurking about since the fourteenth century, when Zanobi da Strada and Boccaccio both apparently saw and copied it from a now lost manuscript. This is the so-called spurcum additamentum or “dirty add-on,” a designation, one must admit, that prejudices the case every time it is used. All of our texts of The Golden Ass descend from a single manuscript from Monte Cassino, but now in Florence (F, Laur. 68.2: Reynolds 1983, 15–16). Zanobi da Strada wrote this passage in the margin of his copy from F at Book X, Chapter 21 of The Golden Ass, where Lucius narrates his sexual encounter in ass form with the libidinous matron. Some early scholars wanted to see these 81 words as a genuine lost bit of Apuleius’ original narrative (Robertson 1924, 31), though many found the description too pornographic for Apuleian taste, and there were oddities of vocabulary too (Mariotti 1956). In 1950, Antonio Mazzarino (1950, 43–58) suggested that it was rather a fragment of the Roman republican author Sisenna, known to have translated Aristides’ Milesiaca, and thus argued that both Aristides and Sisenna wrote versions of an Ass story. Eduard Fraenkel (1953; cf. Mariotti 1956, especially 246ff.) soon launched a powerful attack on the notion that the vocabulary of the passage could be Apuleian and offered a particularly compelling case that the apparent enumeration of the fingers by names not standard in Greek depends rather on a passage of Boethius about music and lyre strings. A consensus developed that the spurcum additamentum was a mediaeval forgery, a very learned one, given the veterinary details, but a forgery nonetheless.1 Here matters rested until recently, when along with a defense of the passage’s place in Apuleius’ narrative, Ephraim Lytle (2003) offered an ingenious interpretation of those faulty Greek finger names as rather a rendition of musical sounds as the ass’ sexual enthusiasm rises. I give a standard version of the text with Zimmerman’s translation (2000), followed by Lytle’s version:2
(A1) (1) Et ercle orcium pigam perteretem Hyaci fragrantis et Chie rosacee lotionibus expiauit. (2) Ac dein digitis, hypate licanos mese paramese et nete, hastam mihi inguinis niuei spurci < ti > ei pluscule excoria < n > s emundauit. (3) Et cum ad inguinis cephalum formosa mulier concitim ueniebat ab orcibus, ganniens ego et dentes ad Iouem eleuans Priapo < n > frequenti frictura porrixabam ipsoque pando et repando uentrem sepiuscule tactabam. (4) Ipsa quoque, inspiciens quod genius inter antheras exreuerat modicum illud morule, qua lustrum sterni mandauerat, anni sibi reuolutionem autumabat. ([A2] [1] And by Hercules, she cleansed the fine round pouch of my balls with perfumed wine and rosewater of Chios. [2] And then with her fingers, thumb, forefinger, middle finger, ring finger and little finger, she slightly skinned the shaft of my organ and cleaned it of its snow-white dirt. [3] And when she reached the top of my organ, the beautiful woman, rapidly coming there from my balls, I brayed and lifted my teeth to Jove, stretched out my Priapean member as a result of the frequent friction, and by moving it up and down I often touched the belly. [4] She too, observing what kind of genital had grown among her mixtures, affirmed that this small bit of delay, during which she had ordered our place of debauchery to be prepared, to her was the orbit of a year.)
(B1) Et, Hercule, orchium pygam perteretem hyacinthi fragrantis et Chiae rosaceae lotionibus expurgavit [expiavit]. Dein, digitis, hypate lichanos mese paramese et nete, hastam mihi inguinis nivei spurci < ti > ei pluscule excorians emundavit. Et cum ad inguinis cephalum formosa mulier conatim veniebat ab orchibus, ganniens ego et dentes ad iovem elevans, priapo, frequenti frictura porrixabam, ipsoque pando et repando ventrem saepiuscule tractabam [tactabam]. Ipsa quoque, inspiciens quod genius inter anth. teneras excreverat, modicum morule qua lustrum sterni mandaverat anni sibi revolutionem autumabat. ([B2] And, by Hercules, she cleaned the hairless base of my balls with washes of fragrant hyacinth and Chiote roses. Then with her fingers—do re mi fa sol—she cleaned for me the shaft of my snow-white groin, scouring away much filth. And when this lovely woman was coming up from my balls to the end of my cock on her efforts, whinnying and lifting my teeth heavenward, I swelled with a hard-on from the constant rubbing and, with it growing out, and out some more, I caressed my belly with it repeatedly. Seeing what a member had grown in the midst of such sweet flowers, the modicum of delay in which she had instructed that the breeding stall be made ready seemed to her to have lasted as long as a year.)
The latest word on the subject, from Vincent Hunink (2006), points out some strains in Lytle’s argument and once again rejects Apuleian authorship, without, however, insisting that this addition or forgery must specifically be as late as the eleventh or twelfth century.3
If we assume that only a medieval forger would be interested in creating the spurcum additamentum, it tells us nothing of the circulation of Ass narratives in antiquity; but if Lytle argues correctly that the Greek names designate musical tones rather than fingers, the argument that it must be post-Boethian is less certain. The passage could testify that someone, more likely a reader than Apuleius himself, had put into circulation either a fuller or indeed another narrative of the man turned into an ass. Even the existence of a post-Boethian addition witnesses readerly interest in, and active engagement with, the text.
Now a fifth Ass has appeared, and he threatens to upend the whole stemmatic model. The recent publication of a fragment of narrative on papyrus, P. Oxy. 4762, both enriches and re-orients the picture. Short as it is, the new Greek fragment seems to show an ass narrative told in the third person (rather than the first person of both the Onos and The Golden Ass). Moreover, even these few lines demonstrate that the exposition could switch from prose to poetry in the course of the narrative, something again that neither surviving whole version does. If it is a piece of the lost Metamorphoseis of Loukios of Patrae, one possibility that its cautious editor Dirk Obbink (2006) mentions, the relation between the survivors and the lost model is suddenly much more complex—or the model itself is wrong.
Before we examine this brief and cryptic new fragment, it will help to compare some related passages from the Onos and The Golden Ass. As Mason points out, there are sentences in Apuleius that look to be almost a word-for-word translation of the Greek reflected in the Onos, but rarely for more than a sentence or two at a time. Apuleius certainly expands the narrative, but can abbreviate as well. Mason’s model for how Apuleius worked, now widely accepted, is worth quoting in full (Mason 1994, 1693):
The presence in the “Golden Ass” of passages both of close translation and of varying degrees of free adaptation suggests that Apuleius composed his adaptation of the “Metamorphoseis” incident by incident, reading the Greek version of an episode before composing his own, retaining typical phrases of the Greek in his memory as he wrote, but not actually “translating” at a word-by-word level.
Moreover, according to Mason (1994, 1693–1694), Apuleius’ reworking of the narrative shows his “greater interest in character and motivation” as well as “an attempt to provide psychological wholeness, at least to Lucius.”
Two shared points in the surviving narratives show the authors’ varying approaches: the end of Lucius’ time as a pack animal for the priests of the Syrian goddess and his subsequent experiences with the unfortunate market gardener whom he unwittingly betrays to the Roman authorities. These incidents indeed show differences of psychological emphasis, but also some changes in narrative strategy. Apuleius does not just tell us more: he can change focalization as well.
Lucius’ last adventure with the priests begins thus in Onos 41:
ἐπεὶ δὲ ἤδη ὄρθρος 
ν, ἀράμενος τὴν θεὸν α
θις ἀπῄειν ἅμα τοι̑ς ἀγύρταις καὶ ἀφικόμεθα εἰς κώμην ἄλλην μεγάλην καὶ πολυάνθρωπον, ἐν 
καὶ καινότερόν τι ἐτερατεύσαντο, τὴν θεὸν μὴ μει̑ναι ἐν ἀνθρώπου οἰκίᾳ, τη̑ς δὲ παρ’ ἐκείνοις μάλιστα τιμωμένης ἐπιχωρίου δαίμονος τὸν ναὸν οἰκη̑σαι. (When it was now dawn, I took the goddess up again and left with the mountebanks. We reached another large and populous village, where they introduced a fresh monstrosity by insisting that the goddess should not stay in the house of a human but take up residence in the temple of the local goddess held in most honor among them. [text and translation by MacLeod 1961])
The parallel moment in The Golden Ass is sandwiched between two substantial apparent additions to the narrative. While the priests are staying at the villa of a patron, Lucius narrowly escapes a cook’s treacherous attempt to kill him and substitute his leg for a stolen haunch of venison. The priests move on to a village, where almost immediately Lucius relates a story he has heard, the adultery tale of the tub. Sandwiched in between is this very brief account of their arrival:
nec paucis casulis atque castellis oberratis devertimus ad quempiam pagum urbis opulentae quondam, ut memorabant incolae, inter semiruta vestigia conditum et hospitio proxumi stabuli recepti cognoscimus lepidam de adulterio cuiusdam pauperis fabulam… (GA 9.4) (After making stops at several small houses and walled estates, we halted at a village built among the half-ruined remains of a once-wealthy city, as the inhabitants informed us. We obtained lodgings at the nearest inn, and there were heard an amusing story about the cuckolding of a certain poor workman… [text and translation by Hanson unless otherwise noted])
The village in the Onos is “large and prosperous,” that in The Golden Ass “built among the half-ruined remains of a once wealthy city.” The change of course could be in keeping with Apuleius’ interest in social and economic decay. Although the insertion of “The Tale of the Tub,” one of the most famous in the novel and possessing a rich afterlife, masks the dissonance, this poverty is slightly problematic. Not only are the priests “fattened at public expense and stuffed with the many profits of their soothsaying” (munificentia publica saginati vaticinationisque crebris mercedibus suffarcinati, 9.8.1), they subsequently make even more money from the villagers by means of their new all-purpose prophecy, a couplet suitable for any occasion, another Apuleian insertion. In fact, the only reason for abandoning their racket in this village is that they grow weary of explaining the prophecy for all and sundry and hit the road (GA 9.9.1).
Despite the problems of motivation, however, Apuleius has a surprise in store for his readers. Lucius is complaining about the terrible, waterlogged road conditions,4 when:
et ecce nobis repente de tergo manipulus armati supercurrit equitis, aegreque cohibita equorum curruli rabie, Philebum ceterosque comites eius involant avidi, colloque constricto et sacrilegos impurosque compellantes interdum pugnis obverberant, nec non manicis etiam cunctos coartant, et identidem urgenti sermone comprimunt promerent ocius aureum cantharum, promerent auctoramentum illud sui sceleris, quod simulatione sollemnium quae in operto factitaverant ab ipsis pulvinaribus matris deum clanculo furati, prorsus quasi possent tanti facinoris evadere supplicium tacita profectione, adhuc luce dubia pomerium pervaserint. nec defuit qui, manu super dorsum meum iniecta, in ipso deae quam gerebam gremio scrutatus repperiret atque incoram omnium aureum depromeret cantharum. nec isto saltem tam nefario scelere impuratissima illa capita confutari terrerive potuere, sed mendoso risu cavillantes, “en” inquiunt “indignae rei scaevitatem! quam plerumque insontes periclitantur homines! propter unicum caliculum, quem deum mater sorori suae deae Syriae hospitale munus obtulit, ut noxios religionis antistites ad discrimen vocari capitis.” (GA 9.9.2–10.1) (Suddenly, we were overtaken by a group of armed riders. When they had with difficulty curbed their horses’ headlong speed, they savagely turned on Philebus and all his comrades, seized them by the throat, and, calling them filthy temple-robbers, began to beat them with their fists. Furthermore, they put handcuffs on them all and insistently demanded in menacing language that they produce at once the golden goblet, produce the wages of their crime, which they had surreptitiously abstracted from the very shrine of the Mother of the Gods, under the pretense of practicing secret ceremonies; then, as if they really thought they could escape punishment for such an outrage by leaving without a word, they had crossed the city limits in the grey light of dawn. One of them even went so far as to reach up over my back and feel around in the bosom of the goddess I was carrying. He found the gold goblet and pulled it out for everyone to see. Yet, even in the face of such a sacrilegious crime, those horribly vile creatures could not be dismayed or frightened but pretended to laugh and make other jokes: “The perversity and injustice of it all! How often innocent men are accused of crime! Just because of one little cup, which the Mother of the Gods offered her sister the Syrian Goddess as a token of hospitality, high priests of holiness are being charged as if they were criminals and put in jeopardy of life and limb!”)
Essentially the same thing happens in the Onos, better motivated but narrated like a police report:
οἱ δὲ καὶ μάλα ἄσμενοι τὴν ξένην θεὸν ὑπεδέξαντο τ
σφω̑ν αὐτω̑ν θε συνοικίσαντες, ἡμι̑ν δὲ οἰκίαν ἀπέδειξαν ἀνθρώπων πενήτων. ἐνταυ̑θα συχνὰς ἡμέρας οἱ δεσπόται διατρίψαντες ἀπιέναι ἤθελον εἰς τὴν πλησίον πόλιν καὶ τὴν θεὸν ἀπῄτουν τοὺς ἐπιχωρίους, καὶ αὐτοὶ ἐς τὸ τέμενος παρελθόντες ἐκομίζοντο αὐτὴν καὶ θέντες ἐπ’ ἐμοὶ ἤλαυνον ἔξω. ἔτυχον δὲ οἱ δυσσεβει̑ς εἰς τὸ τέμενος ἐκει̑νο παρελθόντες ἀνάθημα φιάλην χρυση̑ν κλέψαντες, ἣν ὑπὸ τ θε ἔφερον· οἱ δὲ κωμη̑ται αἰσθόμενοι του̑το εὐθὺς ἐδίωκον, ε
τα ὡς πλησίον ἐγένοντο, καταπηδήσαντες ἀπὸ τω̑ν ἵππων εἴχοντο αὐτω̑ν ἐν τ ὁδ καὶ δυσσεβει̑ς καὶ ἱεροσύλους ἐκάλουν καὶ ἀπῄτουν τὸ κλαπὲν ἀνάθημα, καὶ ἐρευνω̑ντες πάντα ε
ρον αὐτὸ ἐν τ κόλπῳ τη̑ς θεου̑. δήσαντες ον τοὺς γυναικίας γον ὀπίσω καὶ τοὺς μὲν εἰς τὴν εἱρκτὴν ἐμβάλλουσι, τὴν δὲ θεὸν τὴν ἐπ’ ἐμοὶ κομιζομένην ἀράμενοι να ἄλλῳ ἔδωκαν, τὸ δὲ χρυσίον τ πολίτιδι θε πάλιν ἀπέδωκαν. (Onos 41) ([The villagers] were very glad to welcome the foreign goddess and gave her accommodation along with their own goddess, but assigned us to the house of some paupers. After they had spent many days there, my masters wished to leave for the nearby city and asked the goddess back from the local people. They entered the sacred precinct themselves, carried her out, put her on my back, and rode off. Now, when the impious fellows entered that precinct, they stole a golden bowl, a votive offering. This they carried off concealed in the person of the goddess. When the villagers discovered this, they gave immediate pursuit; then, upon drawing near, they leapt down from their horses and laid hold of the fellows in the road, calling them impious and sacrilegious, and demanding the return of the stolen offering. They searched everywhere and found it in the bosom of the goddess. They therefore tied up the effeminate fellows, dragged them off, and threw them into prison; they took the goddess whom I had carried and gave to another temple, while the golden vessel they gave back to their local goddess.)
Here, the narrator seems as annoyed as the priests themselves that, while the goddess is well cared for, they are dumped on an impoverished household. The Greek Lucius tells his readers about the theft immediately, carefully noting that the priests’ only opportunity to steal the cup was when they were allowed in to reclaim their goddess. Although he too could choose to tell the story from a later perspective out of strict narrative order, Apuleius instead focalizes the story through Lucius, who cannot know immediately what the priests have done. This sets up a much more effective surprise on the road, when the priests are caught red-handed.5
In both narratives, Lucius is then sold to a mill. In the Onos, he simply becomes so thin from maltreatment that the owner sells him in turn to a market gardener. In The Golden Ass, the very complex narrative of the baker’s wife intervenes, where an initially humorous but ultimately tragic tale of adultery and murder brings about the baker’s death and the dissolution and auction of his estate.6 The end result, however, is the same: Lucius ends up in the possession of the gardener.
Yet, once again, the stories proceed differently to the gardener’s violent encounter with a Roman soldier and its consequences. In Apuleius, another bizarre and tragic tale precedes this moment and determines the gardener’s emotional state when confronting the soldier. The poor gardener has been invited to dinner with a man engaged in a property dispute with a rich neighbor. Monstrous prodigies at the dinner (including blood pouring from the ground) precede a messenger who reports that the host’s three sons have all died in a brawl with the rich neighbor and his thugs, and the host then commits suicide. The gardener is therefore returning from the horrors of this banquet when he meets the Roman soldier on the road:
nam quidam procerus et, ut indicabat habitus atque habitudo, miles e legione, factus nobis obvius, superbo atque adroganti sermone percontatur, quorsum vacuum duceret asinum? at meus, adhuc maerore permixtus et alias Latini sermonis ignarus, tacitus praeteribat. nec miles ille familiarem cohibere quivit insolentiam, sed indignatus silentio eius ut convicio, viti, quam tenebat, obtundens eum dorso meo proturbat. tunc hortulanus subplicue respondit sermonis ignorantia se, quid ille diceret, scire non posse. ergo igitur Graece subiciens miles “ubi” inquit “ducis asinum istum?” respondit hortulanus petere se civitatem proximam. “sed mihi” inquit “opera eius opus est; nam de proximo castello sarcinas praesidis nostri cum ceteris iumentis debet advehere.” et iniecta statim manu loro me, quo ducebar, arreptum incipit trahere. sed hortulanus prioris plagae vulnere prolapsum capite sanguinem detergens rursus deprecatur civilius atque mansuetius versari commilitonem, idque per spes prosperas eius orabat adiurans. “nam et hic ipse” aiebat “iners asellus et nihilo minus mordax morboque detestabili caducus vix etiam paucos holerum maniculos de proximo hortulo solet anhelitu languido fatigatus subvehere, nedum ut rebus amplioribus idoneus videatur gerulus.”
40. sed ubi nullis precibus mitigari militem magisque in suam perniciem advertit efferari, iamque inversa vite de vastiore nodulo cerebrum suum diffindere, currit ad extrema subsidia simulansque sese ad commovendam miserationem genua eius velle contingere, summissus atque incurvatus, arreptis eius utrisque pedibus sublimem elatum terrae graviter applaudit, et statim qua pugnis qua cubitis qua morsibus, etiam de via lapide correpto, totam faciem manusque eius et latera converberat. nec ille, ut primum humi supinatus est, vel repugnare vel omnino munire se potuit, sed plane identidem comminabatur, si surrexisset, sese concisurum eum machaera sua frustatim. quo sermone eius commonefactus hortulanus eripit ei spatham eaque longissime abiecta rursum saevioribus eum plagis adgreditur. nec ille prostratus et praeventus vulneribus ullum repperire saluti quiens subsidium, quod solum restabat, simulat sese mortuum.
tunc spatham illam secum asportans hortulanus inscenso me concito gradu recta festinat ad civitatem nec hortulum suum saltem curans invisere ad quempiam sibi devertit familiarem. (GA 9.39–40) (On the road, we encountered a tall man whose dress and manners marked him as a legionary. He inquired in a haughty and arrogant tone where my master was taking his empty ass. However, my master, who was still confused with grief and furthermore did not know Latin, walked right past him without a word. The soldier, unable to restrain his natural insolence, took offence at the gardener’s silence as if it were an insult and struck him with the vine-staff he was carrying, knocking him off my back. The gardener then humbly answered that he could not understand what the soldier said because he did not know the language. So the soldier responded in Greek. “Where,” he asked, “are you taking that ass of yours?” The gardener replied that he was heading for the next city. “Well, I need his services,” said the other. “He must carry our commanding officer’s baggage from the nearby fort with all the other pack-animals.” He immediately laid hands on me, took hold of my lead-rope, and started to drag me away. However, the gardener, wiping away the blood flowing from the wound on his head caused by the earlier blow, again pleaded with his “fellow-soldier” to behave more civilly and mercifully, begging and abjuring him in the name of the soldier’s hopes for success. “Besides,” he added, “though this ass is a lazy beast, he is given to biting and has falling-fits from a terrible disease. He can scarcely even carry a few handfuls of vegetables from my garden nearby without getting tired and out of breath, so I think he would be still less a suitable porter for larger loads.”
40. When he perceived that the soldier was not softened by his appeals, but was becoming more wildly intent on destroying him and had now reversed his staff and was splitting his skull with the thicker end, he resorted to extreme measures. Pretending that he wished to touch the soldier’s knees to arouse his pity, he stooped down, bent over, grabbed both his feet, lifted him high in the air, and dashed him heavily to the ground. Then he began at once to pound him on the face and hands and sides with his fists, elbows, teeth, and even a rock grabbed from the road. Once the soldier had been thrown to the ground he was unable to fight back or even defend himself, but he kept threatening the gardener again and again that if he ever got his feet he would hack him to pieces with his cutlass. Warned by these words, the gardener snatched the soldier’s sword and threw it far away, and then returned to the attack with even more savage blows. The soldier, flat on the ground, hindered by his wounds, and unable to discover any other means to save his skin, did the only thing left and pretended to be dead.
Then, taking the sword with him, the gardener climbed on my back, and hurried straight to town at full speed. Without even bothering to look in at his own garden, he stopped at the house of one of his friends….)
The gardener is therefore “lost in grief” (maerore permixtus) as well as ignorant of Latin (alias Latini sermonis ignarus). It is Lucius who can read the soldier as a Roman legionary from his dress and manners (habitus atque habitudo).
In the Onos, the encounter has no particular background, and the gardener’s resistance seems a momentary outburst of complete rage:
44. καί ποτε ἐξιόντων ἡμω̑ν εἰς τὸν κη̑πον ἐντυγχάνει ἀνὴρ γενναι̑ος στρατιώτου στολὴν ἠμφιεσμένος, καὶ τὰ μὲν πρω̑τα λαλει̑ πρὸς ἡμα̑ς τ Ἰταλω̑ν φων καὶ ἤρετο τὸν κηπουρὸν ὅποι ἀπάγει τὸν ὄνον ἐμέ· ὁ δέ, ομαι, τη̑ς φωνη̑ς ἀνόητος ὢν οὐδὲν ἀπεκρίνατο· ὁ δὲ ὀργιζόμενος, ὡς ὑπερορώμενος, παίει τ μάστιγι τὸν κηπουρόν, κἀκει̑νος συμπλέκεται αὐτ καὶ ἐκ τω̑ν ποδω̑ν εἰς τὴν ὁδὸν ὑποσπάσας ἐκτείνει, καὶ κείμενον ἔπαιεν οὕτω καὶ χειρὶ καὶ ποδὶ καὶ λίθῳ τ ἐκ τη̑ς ὁδου̑· ὁ δὲ τὰ πρω̑τα καὶ ἀντεμάχετο καὶ ἠπείλει, εἰ ἀνασταίη, ἀποκτενει̑ν τ μαχαίρᾳ· ὁ δὲ ὥσπερ ὑπ’ αὐτου̑ ἐκείνου διδαχθείς, τὸ ἀκινδυνότατον, σπ
τὴν μάχαιραν αὐτου̑ καὶ ῥιπτει̑ πόρρω, ετα αὖθις ἔπαιε κείμενον. ὁ δὲ τὸ κακὸν ὁρω̑ν ἤδη ἀφόρητον ψεύδεται ὡς τεθνηκὼς ἐν ται̑ς πληγαι̑ς· ὁ δὲ δείσας ἐπὶ τούτῳ τὸν μὲν αὐτου̑ ὡς εχε κείμενον ἀπολείπει, τὴν δὲ μάχαιραν βαστάσας ἐπ’ ἐμοὶ ἤλαυνεν ἐς τὴν πόλιν.
(One day, when we were leaving for the nursery, a gentleman in military uniform came up to us. First, he spoke to us in Latin and asked the gardener where he was taking his ass, namely, me. He, through ignorance of the language, I suppose, made no reply. The other got angry, taking this as an insult, and struck the gardener with his whip. The latter then grappled with him, tripped him up and laid him flat on the road, and then struck at him lying there with hands, feet, and a rock from the roadside. At first the soldier fought back and threatened to kill him with his sword if he got to his feet again. My master, so forewarned by the soldier himself, to be really on the safe side, drew the soldier’s sword and flung it into the distance and then resumed beating his prostrate opponent, who, faced with an unbearable predicament, pretended to be dead from the beating. Scared by this, my master left him lying there as he was and, making me carry the sword, proceeded to the city.)
Whereas the Apuleian Lucius knows the gardener cannot speak Latin, here the Onos narrator only speculates (ομαι) on his owner’s ignorance of the language. The Apuleian Lucius comments on the soldier’s “natural insolence” (familiarem … insolentiam), and the gardener replies “humbly” (subplicue). Apuleius has greatly developed both dialogue and characterization in the gardener’s appeal for pity. Calling the soldier his commilito is a particularly nice touch. Where rhetoric fails, however, role-playing succeeds, and in a brilliantly Apuleian touch, the gardener converts supplication into a means of knocking the soldier off his feet, and then, quite reasonably in light of his threats, beating him so severely he can be left for dead.
The soldier survives in both versions, but the narratives play out differently. In the Onos:
ὁ δὲ στρατιώτης ἐκ τη̑ς ὁδου̑ ποτε μόλις ἐξαναστάς, ὡς ἔϕασαν, καρηβαρω̑ν ται̑ς πληγαι̑ς 
κεν εἰς τὴν πόλιν καὶ τοι̑ς στρατιώταις τοι̑ς σὺν αὐτ ἐντυχὼν λέγει τὴν ἀπόνοιαν του̑ κηπουρου̑· οἱ δὲ σὺν αὐτ ἐλθόντες μανθάνουσιν ἔνθα μεν κεκρυμμένοι, καὶ παραλαμβάνουσι τοὺς τη̑ς πόλεως ἄρχοντας. (45)
(The soldier, having just managed to get himself up from the road, so they reported, and with his head aching from the blows, had got to the city and, encountering his army mates, told them of the demented behavior of the nurseryman. They accompanied him and found where we were hidden and brought along the city authorities.)
The story moves very briskly, and it seems to require no effort to find the friend’s house where the gardener and Lucius are hiding, nor does the narrator have much sympathy with the gardener’s “demented” (ἀπόνοιαν) violence.
The Apuleian version is not just richer in incident and characterization but also changes the focalization at key points:
At miles ille, ut postea didici, tandem velut emersus gravi crapula nutabundus tamen et tot plagarum dolore saucius baculoque se vix sustinens, civitatem adventat confususque de impotentia deque inertia sua quicquam ad quemquam referre popularium, sed tacitus iniuriam devorans quosdam commilitones nanctus is tantum clades enarrat suas. placuit ut ipse quidem contubernio se tantisper absconderet—nam praeter propriam contumeliam militaris etiam sacramenti genium ob amissam spatham verebatur—ipsi autem signis nostris enotatis investigationi vindictaeque sedulam darent operam. nec defuit vicinus perfidus, qui nos ilico occultari nuntiaret. tum commilitones accersitis magistratibus mentiuntur sese multi pretii vasculum argenteum praesidis in via perdidisse, idque hortulanum quendam repperisse nec velle restituere, sed apud familiarem quendam sibi delitescere. (GA 9.41)
(Now the soldier, as I later learned, finally arrived in town, looking as if he had just recovered from a terrible hangover but could just barely walk. He was weak from the pain of his numerous wounds, and barely able to support himself with his staff. He was too ashamed to tell any of the townspeople anything about his impotent incompetence, but swallowed the insult in silence. Only when he met some fellow-soldiers did he tell them the story of his disaster. They decided that he should hide out for a time in their quarters, since, besides his personal disgrace, the loss of his sword made him fear the protecting deity of his military oath. In the meantime, they would take note of our distinguishing marks and make a concerted effort to find us and get revenge. And, of course, there was a treacherous neighbor to inform them precisely where we were hiding. The soldiers then summoned the town magistrates and falsely alleged that they had a lost a valuable silver pitcher of their commander’s along the road, and that a gardener had found it but refused to give back and was hiding out at a friend’s house.
Though the narrator does not specify how he later learned this part of the story, we see these details through the eyes of the local inhabitants, who interpret the soldier’s painful walk of shame as the result of a hangover, and he dares not correct that view. Indeed, his fellow soldiers agree he had better not be seen or expose to man or god the impotent (impotentia) loss of his sword.
It not only takes a local informer to ferret out the fugitives but some ingenious role-playing on the part of the soldiers. Since they cannot admit to the loss of the soldier’s sword, they make up the story of a lost silver pitcher to persuade the magistrates to institute a search. One wonders if Apuleius is playing a nice variation on the story of the gold cup and priests of the Syrian goddess. Note also that the friend hiding Lucius and the gardener in Apuleius is “not in the least terrified” (nec ille tantillum conterritus, 9.41) when the magistrates pound on his door and threaten him with capital punishment for hiding the fugitives, just as the priests cannot be frightened (nec.. terrerive potuere, 9.10).
Both versions seem to end in the same way, with Lucius accidentally betraying his own and therefore the gardener’s presence in the house. In the Onos, the gardener is simply hauled off to prison, and Lucius has no idea what happens to him:
τ δὲ ὑστεραίᾳ τί μὲν ἔπαθεν ὁ κηπουρὸς ὁ ἐμὸς δεσπότης, οὐκ οδα (46) (What happened the next day to my master, the market gardener, I don’t know…)
Apuleius’ Lucius is not sure either but certainly expresses both more sympathy and more foreboding:
repertum productumque et oblatum magistratibus miserum hortulanum poenas scilicet capite pensurum in publicum deducunt carcerem… (GA 9.42) (they discovered the poor gardener, brought him out, handed him over to the magistrates, and took him off to the public jail, no doubt for execution…)
More is at work in these two treatments than just compression or expansion of narrative. Apuleius undoubtedly gives his version a certain theatrical panache, as the severely beaten gardener turns a gesture of supplication into an opportunity to upend his persecutor and take violent vengeance. The soldier’s stratagem of playing dead is present in both versions, and one might argue this is the seed from which both the gardener’s ploy and his fellow soldiers’ later fiction about the lost pitcher grow, but there is certainly more sympathy in Apuleius for the gardener overall. The horrors of the banquet he has witnessed explain the gardener’s absentmindedness on the road, and we readers share a certain Schadenfreude with the townsfolk as they watch the apparently hung-over soldier limp home. Then we see them lie their way to a search warrant and haul the gardener off to likely execution. This adventure tale now bears more signs of being a critique of Roman imperial power.
Lucius’ last big adventure is perhaps his best known and needs no more than the barest summary. In both versions, the soldier sells Lucius as confiscated property (in the Onos immediately, for 25 Attic drachmas: ὁ δὲ στρατιώτης πωλήσειν με ἔγνω, καὶ πιπράσκει με πέντε καὶ εἴκοσιν Ἀττικω̑ν, 46; in Apuleius, after another intervening tragic narrative, for 11 denarii, but only after the soldier is ordered back to Rome, GA 10.13). Bought by two bakers, Lucius starts stealing their food, is discovered, and becomes a sideshow, only to attract the attention of a libidinous matrona who sees other uses for him. One small but perhaps significant difference is notable in the two narrators’ views of themselves in this story. Both worry about injuring the matrona in their sexual encounters, and both make explicit, self-aware reference to the story of Pasiphaë. In the Onos, however, Lucius is concerned with justifying himself in the midst of their encounter and says:
ἀδεω̑ς λοιπὸν ὑπηρέτουν ἐννοούμενος ὡς οὐδὲν εἴην κακίων του̑ τη̑ς Πασιφάης μοιχου̑. (51) (I serviced her after that without restraint, thinking myself no worse than Pasiphaë’s seducer.)
Apuleius puts the reference before the sexual description, and it becomes part of Lucius’ diagnosis of the matrona’s malady:
nec ullam vaesanae libidini medelam capiens ad instar asinariae Pasiphaae complexus meos ardenter expectabat. (GA 10.19) (She took no remedy for her insane passion but, like some asinine Pasiphaë, ardently yearned for my embraces.)
Whether the Onos narrator’s cheeky self-justification strikes us as humorous or proof that he has the moral imagination of a beast of the field, the Apuleian Lucius sounds much more the traditional misogynist, thus showing that his is not in every respect the more interesting version.
We come at last to the newest addition to antiquity’s various asses, a recently published papyrus fragment from Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy. 4762; Obbink 2006). Just enough survives to show that it is a scene of a sexual encounter between woman and ass:7
“ω̑ς φλέγομαι· [ | “…I’m burning, terribly. |
So much is tantalizingly unclear here. It seems to be narrative with inserted direct speech. It begins in direct speech, followed by narration or perhaps we should say stage direction as the woman kisses the ass. I have not been able to transcribe paragraphoi after the fourth and 12th lines here, which may indicate speaker change or metrical blocks. We should also note that the letters τ̣ὸ̣ at the end of line 4 are by no means certain. The editor Obbink thinks it just possible that they might be the remnants of με, which would mean the quotation is embedded in another first-person narration, but third-person narration seems much more likely. Most intriguing is Peter Parsons’ suggestion that lines 9–12 could make a couplet in iambic trimeter with very slight corrections:
οὐαί, παχει̑α καὶ μεγάλη ‘στιν, ὡς δοκός.
μένε, κατὰ μικρόν· μὴδ’ ὅλην ἔσω̣ βάλῃς̣.
The phrase παχει̑α καὶ μεγάλη seems to be quoted from Aristophanes’ Peace 927.
This fragment seems sure to provide both entertainment and material for scholarly speculation for years to come. The mixture of verse with prose is reminiscent both of Petronius and a couple Greek narrative examples, most famously the Iolaus romance, once dubbed “A Greek Petronius” for just this feature (Parsons 1971; cf. Astbury 1977 [1999]), but it remains highly unusual. It might make us think of a scene from staged mime, and perhaps industrious emendation might yet yield a verse fragment from the woman’s first speech here.
Some kind of narration intervenes, nonetheless, so the scene appears to be reported. Obbink (2006) reconstructs it as a report on just two participants, the woman and the ass, but the punctuation of the translation he offers (in the preceding text) seems to suggest some back and forth between speakers at the end of the fragment, at the level of the narrating moment rather than within the scene. Is there a storyteller here who teases an audience eager for more details than are provided?
Perhaps my reader will feel teased, because I am not now going to produce a new reconstruction of this wonderful fragment or offer a new interpretation per se. Rather, I want to use its existence and already noted unusual features to question the basis of how we have looked at the surviving ass narratives for the past few centuries. P. Oxy. 4762 is third century AD, thus later than either the Onos or The Golden Ass, but it could be a copy of an earlier text. Obbink considers the possibility that this is a fragment of the lost longer narrative Photios read and ascribed to “Loukios of Patrae.” If so, the form has almost certainly been changed from third-person narrative in the original to first person in both the Onos and The Golden Ass. Does that increase the likelihood that Apuleius worked with the surviving Onos text, and concomitantly decrease the likelihood that any other material in his text had its origins in the lost Loukios of Patrae? Regine May (2009), on the other hand, suggests the source might be the lost Milesiaca of Aristides; these lost Milesian Tales might have been strung together by a narrator, possibly even for an internal audience (one way to explain the plural addressees of ἴδητε in line 3). As such, it might be leveraged into the stemma as an ancestor of Loukios of Patrae.
Or should we begin to question the stemmatic model itself, at least to the extent that we expect one version of the ass narrative to descend primarily from one other, with variations seen as “contamination?” Recent work on the Alexander Romance, especially by Daniel Selden (2009), suggests that multiple narratives in different languages may indeed be related but not reducible to a stemma of direct descent. They form rather a textual network, where transmitters are free to rearrange and remake the stories for particular local audiences.
Are we, in the cliché of the moment, at a tipping point? Are four or five versions of an ass narrative yet enough to consider the narrative model of a textual network? Tales of wonder, of adventures and magical transformations clearly commanded a significant audience in the ancient world, and the story of a man transformed into an ass, with its potential for titillating sexual adventures as well, had an obvious appeal to various audiences, whether as a brief story or a massive novel.
If neither the author of the Onos nor Apuleius had a single model of the narrative before him, their choices in conceiving their tales become much more open. The former is not necessarily an epitomator, nor does the latter simply layer accretions onto an existing armature. Nor is the first-person focalization of the narrative an inherent part of the ass story. Ewen Bowie (private communication) has already independently suggested, in the course of arguing that the Onos is by Lucian, that he innovated by changing the story to first-person narrative. In a world of many possibilities, the form is a potentially independent choice for authors in both the Greek and Latin traditions. Even the sexual element of the narratives can be given radically different emphasis. In the Onos, it functions to set up a final joke, creating a sense of an ending. In Apuleius, it helps motivate a radically new direction and different kind of ending.
If Apuleius, as a well-trained rhetorician and sophist, created his version within a network of narratives, his choices become even more interesting. He can exploit his narrator’s limited perspective to create the surprise on the road where the priests are discovered to have stolen a gold cup from the Mother of the Gods, and then perhaps even create doubt on a second reading, when we as readers have seen in the case of the gardener how easy it is to fake an accusation.8 After enduring a succession of cruel masters and dreadful treatment, his Lucius, despite his Roman name and citizenship, can come to feel much more sympathy for the maltreated and oppressed gardener.
At the same time, his choice to name his narrator Lucius and follow a previously known succession of adventures becomes an interesting choice, not just an obvious one. Some of the Greek ideal novels take over and rework the well-known history of the Greek past, including conflict with the Persians, within their own narratives. In effect, they are extended prose versions of the rhetorician’s melete, a display speech given in the character of a historical figure on a momentous occasion (Socrates before the Athenian jury or Themistocles advising the assembly on the Persian threat). Chaereas in Chariton can play a version of Alexander, successfully engineering the seizure of Tyre, but judiciously retreating to Sicily for a personal happy ending rather than a world empire.
Apuleius takes a character and situation (Lucius transformed into an ass) from a popular network of ass narratives, not because it is his only choice, but because it offers particular potential. He richly exploits the opportunity for his narrator, hidden in plain sight, both to see and to hear things he would otherwise never experience. He leads his narrator through a set of experiences that, even if not recognizable in detail as a specific historia, must have felt familiar to many in his audience who would know other ass narratives. The impact of the utterly different ending, whose significance we still debate so vigorously, must have been all the greater for that readerly horizon of expectation. Seeing how Apuleius chose to re-imagine Lucius’ struggles can help us to see how he gave us the most golden of antiquity’s various asses.
1 My summary here relies on the superb account of Zimmerman 2000, Appendix II.
2 A is the text of Mazotti as quoted by Zimmerman 2000, with her translation; B is the text and translation of Lytle 2003.
3 Hunink 2006, followed by Gaisser 2008, 64–66. Zimmerman 2000, 439, seems to adopt the view of Mariotti 1956 that the “frankness and gusto with which the author [of the spurcum additamentum] treats his subject makes it impossible … to date him before the twelfth century.” The absence of frankness and gusto in preceding centuries certainly seems a subjective judgment.
4 Where only a second reading might make us wonder why the priests were so anxious to set out right after bad weather.
5 There is a small discrepancy in the aftermath as well. In the Onos, the goblet goes back to the local goddess, not otherwise identified, while the image of the Syrian goddess is given to another temple (να ἄλλῳ ἔδωκαν). In Apuleius, both vessel and image go to the same temple of the mother of the gods (apud fani donarium, 9.10.3). Since the village in the Onos is wealthy and that in The Golden Ass poor, it may be logical that the latter might have only one temple; but one wonders if there was a further reason or explanation in the original source for why the two images of the goddesses ought not to be in the same temple.
6 It is a story so complex that Apuleius even teases us by having Lucius imagine, in a justly famous phrase, that his careful reader (lector scrupulosus, 9.30.1) might well ask how he could possibly know all this!
7 I give the text and translation of Obbink 2006, with the addition of “Look!” for the second-person plural ἴδητε (perhaps unintentionally omitted from the editor’s translation).
8 No one seems to worry that the soldiers never find the silver cup they claim was stolen, only Lucius and the gardener. Would it be so difficult, once the priests have skipped town with lots of money extracted by the all-purpose prophecy, for the fleeced villagers to conceive of a plan to plant the cup in the process of “finding” it? So Zimmerman 2007, 289–290 infers.
Astbury, R. 1977. “Petronius, P.Oxy. 3010, and Menippean satire.” Classical Philology, 72: 22–31 [reprinted in S.J. Harrison, ed., Oxford Readings in the Roman Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 74–84].
Fraenkel, E. 1953. “A Sham Sisenna.” Eranos, 51: 151–156.
Gaisser, J.H. 2008. The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass: A Study in Transmission and Reception. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hunink, V. 2006. “The ‘spurcum additamentum’ (Apul. Met. 10,21) once again.” In Lectiones Scrupulosae. Essays on the Text and Interpretation of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses in Honour of Maaike Zimmerman, edited by W.H. Keulen. Ancient Narrative: Supplementum 6. Groningen: Barkhuis, pp. 266–280.
Lytle, E. 2003. “Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and the Spurcum Additamentum (10.21).” Classical Philology, 98: 349–365.
Macleod, M.D. 1961. Lucian, vol. 7. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mariotti, S. 1956. “Lo spurcum additamentum ad Apul. Met. X, 21.” Studi italiani di filologia classica, 27–28: 229–250.
Mason, H.J. 1994. “Greek and Latin versions of the Ass story.” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, II.34.2: 1665–1707.
May, R. 2009. “An ass from Oxyrhynchus: P.Oxy. LXX.4762, Loukios of Patrae and the Milesian tales.” Ancient Narrative, 8: 59–94.
Mazzarino, A. 1950. La Milesia e Apuleio. Turin: Chiantore.
Obbink, D., ed. 2006. “4762: Narrative romance.” In The Oxyrhynchus Papyri LXX, edited by N. Gonis, J.D. Thomas, and R. Hatzilambrou. London: Egypt Exploration Society, pp. 22–29.
Parsons, P.A. 1971. “A Greek Satyricon?” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London, 18: 53–68.
Reynolds, L.D., ed. 1983. Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Robertson, D.S. 1924. “The manuscripts of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius. I.” Classical Quarterly, 18: 27–42.
Selden, D. 2009. “Text networks.” Ancient Narrative, 8: 1–24.
Zimmerman, M., ed. 2000. Apuleius Madaurensis Metamorphoses Book X: Text, Introduction and Commentary. Groningen: Barkhuis.
Zimmerman, M. 2007. “Aesop, the ‘Onos,’ The Golden Ass, and a hidden treasure.” In The Greek and the Roman Novel: Parallel Readings (Ancient Narrative Supplementum 8), edited by M. Paschalis, S. Frangoulidis, S. Harrison, and M. Zimmerman. Groningen: Barkhuis, pp. 277–290. A superb study of one story type transformed within various larger narratives.
Finkelpearl, E. 2007. “Apuleius, the Onos, and Rome.” In The Greek and the Roman Novel: Parallel Readings (Ancient Narrative Supplementum 8), edited by M. Paschalis, S. Frangoulidis, S. Harrison, and M. Zimmerman. Groningen: Barkhuis, pp. 263–276. Explores the provincial and hybrid identities of both the Onos and Apuleian narrators. An excellent introduction to historical dimensions of both texts.
Hanson, J.A. 1989. Apuleius: Metamorphoses. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hunter, R. 2008. “Ancient readers.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel, edited by T. Whitmarsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 261–271. Incisive survey of the question of who read ancient fictional narratives and how they may or may not have differed from readers of more “serious” literature.
Luppe, W. 2006. “Sex mit einem Esel (P. Oxy. LXX 4762).” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 158: 93–94.
Schlam, C.C. 1992. The Metamorphoses of Apuleius: On Making an Ass of Oneself. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. This engaging study seeks a seriocomic unity among the tales of the narrative and the ending of the novel; pp. 22–25 give the author’s view of the stemmatic relationship of the Onos, The Golden Ass, and the lost Greek Metamorphoses.
Tatum, J. 1969. “The tales in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 100: 487–527 (reprinted as Chapter 8 in S.J. Harrison, ed., Oxford Readings in the Roman Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 157–197). Offers a typology of tales within the narrative along with an argument for “interpretative harmony” and “thematic connections” among the inset tales as well as between the first ten books and the final one.
Winkler, J.J. 1985. Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’ Golden Ass. Berkeley: University of California Press. A landmark narratological study of Apuleius’ work as “hermeneutic” entertainment, wherein first and subsequent readings of the work, noting the disjunction between Books I–X and Book XI, make the ultimate meaning undecidable. Richly rewarding as a whole, quite challenging to use in short excerpts.