The Golden Ass: “I had seen the experience of many things, and was become more wise”

1/ I generally read classic literature in modern translations (for obvious reasons), so one fascinating thing about reading William Adlington’s 1566 translation of The Golden Ass (when Shakespeare was 2 years old) is coming across many phrases that I thought were just the language of the King James Bible: “it comes to pass”, “play the harlot”, “yield/ give up the ghost”, etc. 

2/ As written in the previous blog post, at roughly mid-point, Apuleius interrupts the main story to tell the story of Cupid and Psyche, which is about 50 pages or so. 

I’m surely not the only one who read that story and thought Psyche’s biggest problem was that she’s overly curious and couldn’t obey orders—I understand wanting to find out the husband’s identity, but why on earth does she have to open Persephone’s box for Venus? 

That however is something she shares with Lucius, the narrator of the main plot: both are overly curious; both must endure many trials; both are transformed at the end. 

3/ Apuleius’s novel and Ovid’s narrative poem are both named Metamorphoses—the name Asinus aureus (The Golden Ass) came from Augustine of Hippo and Apuleius’s novel is known by that name to this day. 

I don’t read Latin and can’t tell who’s better on the sentence level, but Apuleius’s Metamorphoses is more like my thing for multiple reasons. 

Firstly, as Ovid moves from one myth to another—over 250 myths in the book—there is no sense of forward movement and sometimes it drags (probably doesn’t help that I read it in translation). This is not a problem with Apuleius: he meanders; he digresses; he once interrupts the story for about 50 pages or so; but there is one character in the centre of the book and the story moves forward, with a clear goal that Lucius must transform back to being a human. 

Secondly, it’s funnier and bawdier (though I’m going to have to reread it in a different translation, as I suspect our Elizabethan translator to have bowdlerised it a bit). 

Thirdly, Ovid retells Greek/ Roman mythology and depicts many types of transformations (generally gods putting on disguises, or human beings getting turned into things, bodies of water, trees, animals, the other sex, or gods) and there are physical metamorphoses in The Golden Ass (witches changing shape, hapless Lucius getting accidentally transformed into a donkey, some animal hides getting turned into men through enchantment, and so on), but more importantly, the novel depicts a spiritual metamorphosis. As a donkey, Lucius experiences the suffering of animals and also meets many kinds of people that he otherwise may not have met—he meets thieves and murderers and charlatans and adulterers and sadists, etc.—and changes as a person. 

(The quote in the headline comes from B.9, ch.39) 

As I have written before, every single Shakespeare play features some kind of disguise and transformation: it could be literal (women disguising as men, kings pretending to be commoners…) but it could also be figurative (Iago acting like an honest and concerned friend as he poisons Othello’s ear, Richard III putting on various masks, Edmund playing a role and deceiving his brother and his father…)—the latter interests me more, because I’m interested in human nature. And The Golden Ass also has both.   

4/ The Golden Ass has a rather strange and puzzling ending: is it a genuine religious conversion, or does Lucius, having escaped the servitude of a donkey, now enter another servitude as a priest for the goddess Isis? I do not know—it’s hard to tell about a literary work written in the 2nd century.

However, (I can’t help that) I am modern, so I’m going to note that: a) Lucius hesitates and doesn’t seem particularly religious (to me) in the final part of the book; b) we see lots of witches and enchantresses throughout the story but the gods seem absent for the large part; c) when Lucius accidentally turns into a donkey (instead of a bird as he wishes), Fotis already says roses are the antidote, and there’s no indication that he wouldn’t be able to transform back to his human shape by eating the roses, without any intervention from Isis. 

I’m going to have to think some more about it, but The Golden Ass is probably my favourite work so far that was originally written in Latin.