Apuleius: The Golden Ass

The Golden Ass is an outsider’s portrait of life in the Roman Empire, which is both shockingly familiar and alsi truly strange. It is the only complete surviving novel from Greco-Roman antiquity,

A rich young Roman named Lucius goes to the annual Festival of Laughter in a town in Thessaly and meets a witch. She mistakenly turns him into a donkey. On his travels to find the plant with the magic antidote that will restore his humanity, he experiences his society from the animal’s point of view. With this new perspective, he observes how people treat each other at work, in sex and marriage, and in all aspects of everyday life. Our relations to animals, to each other, and to the divine. Murder, adultery, theft, kidnap, slavery, ecstatic rituals, bribery, drunkenness—he sees it all from the animal underside of society.

Add to this story many classical myths, a fairy tale, oracles, mystery cults, cuckolded husbands and hectoring wives, violence, sex, dreams and hallucinations, some philosophy, paradoxes, and a vivid sense of screwball humor, and you have Apuleius’s picaresque The Golden Ass. Apuleius was a North African Platonic philosopher who lived in the prosperous and highly cultured Greek periphery of the Roman Empire in the second century CE. This shameless, strange, hilarious but also very serious book, well-read in its day, survived to become a best-seller in the Renaissance. It has been popular in English, through many translations, since Shakespeare’s time.

The novel touches on slavery and economic struggle, which were essential to Roman imperial society. Using absurdity, parody, farce, and spoof, Apuleius nests stories within stories in this close-up view of life in the Roman world that is also a delicious tale for our own day about alienated identity.

It is not like anything you have ever read. In this readers’ seminar we will laugh at and be puzzled by The Golden Ass in its most recent English translation, by Sarah Ruden—the first woman to translate it.

Text:
Apuleius, The Golden Ass Sarah Ruden, translator

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