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THE GOLDEN ASS, OR METAMORPHOSES |
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L. Introduction Apuleius is the most whimsical of authors and is a law to himself H. E BUTLER ... the [II] is a puzzle. J. J. WINKLER Apuleius is determined to confuse us. M. GRANT [1] I What is conventionally termed the Prologue [2] to The Golden Ass ends with an apparently straightforward promise of entertainment in store. Lector, intende: laetaberis -- 'Give me your ear, reader: you will enjoy yourself. ' That promise is amply fulfilled. This is the most continuously and accessibly amusing book that has come down to us from classical antiquity. But in The Golden Ass appearances more often than not turn out to be deceptive, and there is a good deal more in this short Prologue than immediately meets the eye. The two words intende: laetaberis are more suggestive than they seem. Intendo connotes directed effort; the reader is to be intentus, attentive, serious, switched on. [3] The coordinate structure of the Latin phrase stands, as often, for a conditional clause: if you give your mind to what follows, you will be made happy. The implication is that the amount, and possibly the quality, of the reader's enjoyment will depend on the degree of attention brought to bear on the book. What has preceded, however, is calculated to puzzle the really attentive reader. The Prologue begins with an address to some unidentified person in a chatty and informal style suggesting a conversation already in progress: 'Now (to get down to business), what I am going to do ...' First we are promised 'a series of different stories' strung together in a 'Milesian discourse'. This points to a collection of tales of the kind associated with Aristides of Miletus (fl. c. 100 BC): anecdotes, more often than not scabrous, culled from the illimitable subliterary repertoire of traditional popular storytelling and embellished for an educated audience. This class of literature was not considered edifying. After the battle of Carrhae in 53 BC the victorious Parthians were, or affected to be, scandalized by the discovery of Aristides' Milesiaca in the baggage of the defeated Roman army (Plutarch, Life of Crassus, 32). According to the author of the life of Clodius Albinus in the Historia Augusta, that emperor was criticized for frittering away his time on 'his countryman Apuleius' Milesian stories and other literary trivialities' (Hisforia Augusta, 12. 12. 12). This is 'amusing gossip', [4] which will 'charm the ear'. However, this anodyne programme is immediately qualified by the following request not to 'scorn' Egyptian paper written on with a sharp pen from the Nile. These disparate stories, it seems, have some sort of Egyptian flavour and are in some way pointed (see I.I and note). Moreover, they have after all a common theme, metamorphosis, transformation of men 's shapes and fortunes. At this point a voice is heard asking Quis ille?, 'Who is this?' We may well retort the question: who is supposed to be asking it? The writer himself, anticipating the reader's curiosity? The reader, in words put into his mouth by the writer? A third party? The possibilities, given more particularly that ancient scribal conventions knew nothing of quotation marks and such devices, shade into one another: the blurring of identities which so much preoccupies critics of The Golden Ass has begun. The answer to the question is not altogether precise. Corinth, Athens, and Sparta together make up the speaker's 'ancient ancestry', but their respective parts in his formation only emerge later ( I. I and note).The verb used to describe his Latin studies at Rome is ambiguous: excolui can mean, not merely 'cultivated', but 'developed', 'improved', 'adorned'. [5] Such apologies for insufficiency prefacing a book or a speech are commonly disingenuous, as the following comparison with the trick-rider shows this one to be. This collection of stories, it is insinuated; is to be a stylistic tour de force by a Greek who can teach native Romans a thing or two about how to handle their own language. But one more surprise is in store. In two crisp words we learn that what is about to unfold is a single tale, fabulam Graecanicam, 'a Grecian story'. It seems that after all this is not some sort of anthology of anecdotes, but one story translated or adapted from a single Greek [6] original. The reader is for the time being left to wonder -- and wonder has been promised as well as pleasure -- about this apparent discrepancy. That will eventually be resolved when The Golden Ass turns out to be both these things. For the surprise that is ultimately in store not even the most attentive of first-time readers can have been prepared. Clairvoyance rather than concentration would have been needed to foresee that. 2 We have not long to wait for the first of the promised metamorphoses. The figure of the author, manipulating with almost insolent assurance his diverse literary materials and the two languages of which he is self-proclaimed master, now fades into and is lost in that of a narrator, the hero of the fabula Graecanica -- the plaything of Fortune, the slave of his passions, controlled by the events of the story which as author he had purported to control. [7] He identifies himself as one Lucius -- though his name is only revealed casually towards the end of book I [8] -- a young man of good provincial family from Corinth, on his way when the story opens to Thessaly 'on particular business'. This proves to be an obsessive interest in witchcraft (for which Thessaly, was famous); and it turns out that his hostess at Hypata, where he is bound with letters of introduction, is a renowned sorceress. With the help of her maid Photis he obtains access to her devil's smithy, where by mischance he is changed, not as planned into a bird, but into a donkey. Before he can get at the antidote to the spell, which is to eat some roses, he is carried off by a gang of robbers; and the tale of his ensuing adventures, misadventures, and narrow escapes from death as he passes from one owner to another takes up the rest of the first ten books of the novel. The narrative is bulked out by stories heard by Lucius both before and after his metamorphosis, making up some sixty per cent of the text of books I-10. This is the 'Milesian' element heralded in the Prologue, but an attentive reader will perceive that there is more to it than 'amusing gossip', though that is how Lucius himself invariably accepts it. These stories are clearly intended to form an integral part of the literary structure of the book, providing what is in effect a commentary on the experiences, sufferings, and final deliverance of the hero. Their allegorical character (using the word in its broadest sense) is most obviously evident in the tale of Cupid and Psyche, set off from the rest by its length, elaborate literary texture, and central placing in the narrative framework (4.28-6,24). [9] This is yet another surprise: the implicit undertaking to combine 'different stories' and a single 'Grecian story' is fulfilled in a way which their separate mention at the two extremes of the Prologue could hardly have led any reader, however attentive, to expect. 3 In order to tell his story, Lucius must survive his adventures and regain his human shape. It required no excessive ingenuity on the author's part to contrive a plausible opportunity for him to find the prescribed remedy, for by the end of book 10 it is once more spring and roses are available. It is now that events take the most startling turn of all. With the last of his series of owners Lucius has apparently fallen on his feet. Thiasus ('Mr Revel') discovers by chance that this ass of his possesses almost human tastes and intelligence, and 'trains' him to display his capabilities in public. A rich woman falls in love with him and bribes his keeper to allow her to spend a night with him. This is a great success, and when Thiasus gets wind of it he decides to exhibit Lucius in the role of lover in the games he is about to hold at Corinth. On learning of this and of the atrocious crimes of the woman who is to be his partner in the spectacle, Lucius despairs. Confronted with what he sees as the ultimate in degradation and fearing, reasonably enough, that the beasts in the arena are unlikely to distinguish between the innocent and the guilty parties, he decides to make a break for freedom. He escapes and prepares to spend the night on the seashore a few miles from Corinth. So ends book 10, with the hero in a state of physical and spiritual prostration. To him at this nadir of his fortunes rescue now comes, in a way that the most percipient and attentive reader could not have guessed. He suddenly awakes from sleep to see the full moon rising in all her unearthly brilliance from the sea, and prays to her for deliverance. Nothing has prepared the reader for his instant conviction [10] that here is his salvation, that she -- invoked simultaneously as Ceres, Venus, Diana, and Proserpine -- is the supreme governing power of the universe and that she and she alone can save him. This unexplained revelation comes, as is the nature of revelation, out of the blue. The goddess answers his prayer, not in any of the guises under which he has invoked her, but in one that subsumes and transcends them all. After enumerating the names under which she is worshipped throughout the world, she discloses her real identity: Isis, truly venerated under that name in Egypt -- and the mind of the reader is immediately transported back to the mysterious hints in the Prologue. [1]1 She promises him release from his sufferings and gives him exact instructions for achieving it: in return he is to devote the rest of his life to her service. All goes according to plan. Lucius is duly restored to human shape, receives a public lecture from Isis' priest on the significance of what has happened to him, and is initiated into the cult of the goddess. He moves to Rome, undergoes further initiations, and the end of the story finds him an apparently respectable member of society, simultaneously pursuing a secular career as a successful barrister and following a religious vocation as a shaven-headed official of an ancient priestly college. The emergence of the story into the light of common day finally reveals the nature and purpose of the over-arching metamorphosis from which The Golden Ass itself has emerged, and, so to say, gives the literary game away. Lucius has turned out to be a mask for the author himself; his story taken over, as will appear (below, §4) , and allegorically transformed so as to illuminate an (ostensibly) actual spiritual experience, just as centrally within the book the tale of Cupid and Psyche is taken over and transformed to illuminate his own fictional case (see below, §9). The distinctly prosaic note on which the book ends, anticlimactic as it may seem after the excitements that have preceded, is functionally motivated, a deliberate underlining of the author's intentions. Nevertheless the sense of anticlimax continues to nag. The first fifteen chapters of book 11 constitute the longest sequence of consistently elevated writing in the novel, writing as brilliant and compelling as anything in Latin literature. That glory of revelation and rebirth tails off into a workaday account of successive initiations and the shifts to which Lucius has to resort to meet the necessary expenses. The demands of God and Mammon, however, are finally reconciled when, under the special protection of Osiris, he is enabled to work up a flourishing legal practice. And so, to adapt the famous though possibly apocryphal dictum of Thomas Gaisford, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, we see that 'the advantages of serving Isis and Osiris are twofold -- it enables us to look down with contempt on those who have not shared its advantages, [12] and also fits us for places of emolument not only in this world, but in that which is to come'. Is this really what Isis meant when she prophesied that under her protection Lucius would 'live gloriously' (11.6)? 4 A book which began by seemingly promising nothing but entertainment, with only the faintest of hints that some reading between the lines might be required, has abruptly, and without anything that can reasonably be called warning, modulated at its end into fervent religiosity tempered by meritocratic self-satisfaction. To some critics book 11 has seemed too loosely attached thematically to the first ten, and too sharply contrasted with them in tone and feeling, for The Golden Ass to be convincingly defended as an integrated literary whole. A work in eleven books is in itself an anomaly: the preference was for even numbers or multiples of five. The author could perfectly well have incorporated the 'extra' element in a ten-book structure; the 'Isis-Book' draws attention to itself by being, literally, extraordinary, extra ordinem. Ideally the problem ought perhaps to be tackled without reference to anything but the book as we have it. That view is expressed robustly by George Saintsbury: Origins ... and indebtedness and the like, are, when great work is concerned, questions for the study and the lecture-room, for the literary historian and the professional critic, rather than for the reader, however intelligent and alert, who wishes to enjoy a masterpiece, and is content simply to enjoy it. [13] However, in this case it happens that, whether fortunately or unfortunately, we do possess a good deal of information external to The Golden Ass, both as to its author and as to its sources, models, and literary congeners. This is something we can hardly affect to ignore. In attempting to arrive at a proper appreciation of the author's genius and the merits and failings of his creation, and of what it has to say to us, that material cannot be left out of account, even if examination of it raises more questions than it answers. The Milesian element in The Golden Ass is referred to twice in the book, once, as we have seen, in the Prologue, and again in a facetious authorial apology for reporting an oracle of Apollo in Latin verse. This latter allusion, however, is opportunism of a kind one soon learns to recognize, prompted by the fact that the oracle in question is the one at Miletus (4.32 and note). There is nothing remotely Milesian about the story of Cupid and Psyche. The fabula Graecanica we can identify. Transmitted among the works of the Greek satirist Lucian (fl. c. AD 165) is a piece entitled 'Lucius or the Ass' (Loukios e Onos; henceforth Onos). This is a first-person narrative by one Lucius, who is changed into an ass by a spell which miscarries and after various adventures is changed back again: a version of our story lacking certain episodes, most notably that of the Festival of Laughter, the stories heard or reported by Lucius, Cupid and Psyche, and the Isiac sequel. The close correspondence between The Golden Ass and the Onos, leave no room for doubt that they derive from a common original (see Appendix), What this was we learn from the Bibliotheca of the Byzantine scholar Photius (c. AD 850), who records having read both the Onos and another book distinct from it called 'Various tales (or books) of Metamorphosis by Lucius of Patrae'. Photius' testimony, when critically examined, is less precise than might be wished, but there is general agreement that (i) The Golden Ass is an
adaptation and the Onos an abridgement of that lost work (henceforth
Met.). The chief question mark is that hanging over book 11 of The Golden Ass and Lucius' 'conversion'. In the Onos Lucius, now restored to human shape, again presents himself to the lady whose favours he had enjoyed as an ass and is humiliatingly rebuffed because his genital equipment no longer measures up to her requirements. Some have thought that this broadly farcical denouement has replaced an original ending on a more serious note which served as model or inspiration for book 11 of The Golden Ass. There is little evidence either for or against this hypothesis, which is a good example of the type of explanation to which scholars resort from an ingrained reluctance to believe that any classical writer ever thought of anything for himself. There is no solid reason to withhold from our author the credit of originality as regards the way in which he chose to round off his book. Whether the result of combining this and the other disparate elements -- the cautionary tales and Milesian stories, Cupid and Psyche, and the rest -- in the framework of the ass-narrative can be considered successful is another matter. Certainly the whole undertaking was an ambitious one, like nothing else in the way of prose fiction that has survived from classical antiquity. 5 Most readers probably feel that down to the end of book 10 the story hangs together well enough. Though loose ends and minor inconsistencies abound, [15] where the author has not taken sufficient pains to dovetail the added material into the original fabric, the reader is irresistibly carried along by the sweep of the narrative and the narratives within the narrative. This is the secret of the classic novel, the trick of maintaining an even flow of narration, steadily moving on no matter how thick and rich it may be. If a man can do this instinctively -- and, let me add, very few men can -- then God intended him to be a novelist. [16] There is no doubt that God intended the author of The Golden Ass to be a novelist. The book is indeed 'thick and rich' with interwoven matter, but the weaving is done with skill and elan. This is particularly evident in what has been called the 'Charite-complex' (4.23-8.14), in which the fates of Charite and Tlepolemus, Cupid and Psyche, and Lucius himself are integrated into a complex counterpoint. [17] It is only now and then, as in the case of the tale of the delinquent slave (8.22), that a story is casually tossed in simply because it seemed too good to lose. In general the inserted stories and episodes significantly reinforce and illustrate the main narrative and the characterization of the hero. Of the inserted episodes preceding Lucius' metamorphosis that of his involvement with the Festival of Laughter, his encounter with the 'robbers', and his public humiliation in his spoof trial for murder (2.31 - 3.18) has provoked much discussion. It can be read as a warning of what is in store for him if he persists in his obsessive interest in witchcraft: it is a mistake on the part of Photis, the sorceress's apprentice, that leads to the unplanned metamorphosis of the wineskins and its sequel, and it is to be a second mistake of hers that precipitates the disaster of Lucius' own transformation. The mockery which he suffers during the 'trial' is then a foretaste of his lot as an ass, proverbially a subject of ridicule for ugliness and stupidity. There are obvious technical flaws in the conduct of the story (3.13 and note) , and it is difficult to know how exactly to interpret the manifest irony of Byrrhena's invitation to Lucius to 'provide a diversion' (2.31 and note). She is a more ambiguous character than Abroea, her prototype in the Onos; is she, like Milo, a willing party to the deception? The other inserted episodes and stories in books 1-3 are, in contrast, transparently cautionary, reinforcing the warning explicitly given by Byrrhena (2.5). Read or reread in the light of the priest's homily after Lucius' retransformation (11.15), they can all be seen as underlining his -- proleptically asinine -- perseverance in the courses that ultimately cause his downfall. Of the stories that he hears as ass, that of Cupid and Psyche stands in a class by itself and calls for separate consideration. The others constitute a running commentary on the world of which he is now a feeling but inarticulate spectator. It is in fact the same world as that which he formerly inhabited when he was a privileged individual who would contemplate life de haut en bas. Now he sees it from below and is duly appalled by what he sees. 6 Provincial life in second-century Greece as depicted in The Golden Ass is in many ways so anarchic, legally, socially, and morally, that it is natural to question the historical accuracy of the picture, and to ask whether the writer has taken the novelist's freedom to create his own world -- a travesty or caricature of reality -- to enhance the impact of his narrative and to point the moral of his book. No more than poets are novelists bound to tell the truth -- oh, creative poetic licence and The Golden Ass was not written as social history. However, unlike most of the Greek romances, but like the Onos and Petronius' Satyricon, the setting of the book is firmly contemporary, and as far as we can tell from the available evidence would have been recognized by contemporary readers as broadly realistic. There is no doubt, for instance, that outside the larger centres law enforcement in the provinces of the Roman Empire was by and large of the do-it-yourself order. [19] Large landowners policed their estates themselves with their own retainers; it is the insensate rage of the tyrannical plutocrat rather than the arbitrary nature of his conduct that would have seemed exceptional (9.35-8). Brigandage, prominent in the plots of other romances and central in that of The Golden Ass, was a fact of life, controlled, in so far as it was controlled, by ad hoc punitive action (7.7) rather than by systematic policing. In point of fact the only effective police were the soldiers at the disposition of the provincial governor. Hypata boasts a town guard (3.3), but in the absence of government troops the city was evidently powerless to curb the activities of the local Mohocks (2.18). This may be a case of authorial inadvertence, but rings true in the light of what Juvenal has to say about street crime in Rome itself some half a century earlier (Satires, 3.278-314). Whether a court other than that of the governor was legally competent to try a Roman citizen [20] on a capital charge is debatable, but many contemporary readers may have been no more certainly informed than modern scholars on such points, and it would probably have occurred to few to think about a question which the hero himself does not raise. Nor again would most readers stop to wonder why the doctor in the trial of the evil stepmother delays giving his crucial evidence until the very last moment (10.8), instead of aborting the proceedings at the outset. That would indeed have spared the innocent defendant much anguish, but it would have deprived the reader of his pleasure. Courtroom scenes were a standard feature of ancient romance precisely because of their dramatic potentialities, and the essence of drama is suspense. It is against this on the whole recognizable background that the inserted stories in books 8-10 are projected. They present a grim composite picture of a world motivated by deceit, spite, greed, and lust. Increasingly it is the themes of adultery and murder, often by poisoning, that come to predominate. The colouring of the picture is self-consciously literary: so the story of the incestuous stepmother is acknowledged as lifted from Greek tragedy and embellished with allusions to the Latin poets (10.2 and note). Nevertheless it will not do to write them off as too literary and too highly coloured to be credible. A glance at a typical morning's newspaper headlines suffices to make the point. Infidelity and murder, often in bizarre circumstances, are as much part of the fabric of everyday life as they were eighteen centuries ago. The mother whom Juvenal, ironically expecting to he disbelieved, arraigns for poisoning her own children (Satires, 6. 629-46) actually existed, and there were others like her. When he proclaims that Posterity can add he no doubt exaggerates the peculiar wickedness of his own age, but what he says would have corresponded, as such portrayals still do, with contemporary perceptions. The scene of moral chaos of which Lucius, willy-nilly, is a fascinated and revolted spectator and in which he is forced in the end to participate, formed part of the mental furniture of the age. It is to escape from this nightmare world that, quite unexpectedly, he throws himself on the protection of the saviour goddess Isis. 7 In the Onos Lucius manages at the eleventh hour, when he is actually in the theatre and about to perform his act, to snatch a bite at some roses and regain his human shape. This he accomplishes without divine assistance, but the intervention of the governor is needed to save him from possible untoward consequences (54). [22] In The Golden Ass the role of the governor is taken by Isis, the implication being that only under her special protection can the reverse metamorphosis be safely achieved. But why Isis? In the popular consciousness as interpreted by the Greek writer Artemidorus (fl. c. AD 175) in his handbook on the interpretation of dreams, Isis and other Egyptian gods stood for salvation of those in extreme peril (Onirocritica, 2. 39). That of course cuts two ways: in invoking her protection Lucius might appear to some to be a credulous victim of superstition. Credulity has all along been one of his leading characteristics and has contributed heavily to his downfall. Will he fare any better as a devotee of Isis than he did as a devotee of witchcraft? The beauty and the fervour of the language in which his experiences and sentiments are described may seem to rule out irony, or they could conceivably be taken to underline it. Striking correspondences with historically attested cases, particularly that of St Augustine, can be cited in support of the thesis that this is the authentic narrative of an actual conversion that this is autobiography. For the effect that the sight of the full moon has on Lucius, Nancy Shumate has compared what was felt by the former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, also on a Mediterranean seashore. [23] This is not an isolated instance. At the age of fourteen Gerald Brenan underwent a similar experience, though it ended less dramatically than Cleaver's, which culminated in a vision of Christ. This was at Dinard on the coast of Brittany: Going into my bedroom one night after dinner I discovered the full moon pouring in through the double windows and filling the little box-like space with its light. It seemed to be distending and pushing apart the walls with its brightness, to be filling the room, the bed, the cupboard to bursting. I stood gazing at it for a moment. Then, stepping out onto the balcony, I looked down on the long glittering path it had laid on the water and heard the waves splashing softly far below. All at once a feeling I find it difficult to describe came over me -- a sense of some enormous force and beauty existing around me a presence, a state that promised unspeakable delight and happiness if only I could join myself to it. But I could not so join myself. I was my ordinary self, carried suddenly into an over-charged, over-resplendent world. For a time I stood there, overcome by the sheer transcendency of the spectacle, then gradually the impression faded and I went away. [24] Brenan's vision in fact has more in common with Lucius' than does that of Cleaver; particularly interesting is the suddenness of his 'sense of some enormous force and beauty existing around me', which closely parallels Lucius' instant conviction that what he sees is a manifestation of the goddess whose power controls the workings of the whole universe (11.1). Even more interesting, perhaps, is the contrast between Lucius' voluntary submission to the dominion of the goddess and Brenan's stalwart refusal to abdicate his selfhood. No less apparently authentic is the lyrica1 description of the spring morning to which Lucius awakes after his vision (11.7).This sense of rebirth, of the newness of everything, can also be paralleled in conversion narratives, but is not exclusive to them. It can be brought about by a sudden reprieve -- from sentence of death by execution or cancer, for instance -- or by anything which takes one right out of oneself, such as being in love: It was not the first time they had seen trees, blue sky, green grass, not the first time they had heard running water and the wind blowing through the leaves; but certainly they had never yet admired it all as though nature had only just come into existence, or only begun to be beautiful since the gratification of their desires. [25] It can be convincingly expressed by any writer with experience of life who has the gift of identifying with the emotions of his characters. This was what Dickens, who was an accomplished actor and less like a miser than any man who ever lived, did with Scrooge: Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious! Glorious! [26] No writer has ever more faithfully obeyed Horace's precept: Before you can move me to tears, His is an extreme, but not an uncommon instance. The reader who has been moved by the poignancy of Wordsworth's 'Solitary Reaper' may be disconcerted to discover that the poet's source for the plaintive song of the Highland lass was not his own experience but a book. [28] That does not rob the poem of its value, but it is a salutary warning against drawing biographical inferences from imaginative literature. Most of the Latin books that have come down to us were written by men who had been through the mill of an educational system which was grounded in the study and practice of classical rhetoric. This was essentially the art of persuasion, its aim plausibility. For a writer trained from childhood in its techniques it was not necessary actually to have been vouchsafed a vision of Isis or undergone initiation into her cult to be able to describe such things vividly and convincingly. [29] Since we chance to know that Lucius in The Golden Ass is not an original literary creation but a character taken over from the Onos, and that his adventures up to the moment of his purported conversion largely reproduce those of the Greek model, we might well suspect that the sequel too has been borrowed -- perhaps with ulterior motives -- from some lost narrative of a purported mystic experience. It therefore comes as something of a shock when at the very end of the novel it is authenticated by the sudden re-emergence of the author who had made so fleeting an appearance in the Prologue and then faded inconspicuously into the fictional narrator. Indeed he not only resurfaces but as good as names himself. 8 That the author of The Golden Ass was one Apuleius of the North African city of Madaura we know both from the manuscripts of his book and from the testimony of, among others, St Augustine. It is indeed Augustine who is our authority for the title under which it is best known, The Golden Ass, which he expressly states (City of God, 18. 18) was that given it by Apuleius himself. In the manuscripts it is called Metamorphoses, 'Transformations', on the face of it a more obviously appropriate title. The Prologue's announcement of it as a tale of changes of shape and vicissitudes of fortune points up its affinty to Ovid's great poem of the same name, which also depicts a world in which 'no event or character ... can be trusted to remain what it may first seem to be'. [30] Apuleius clearly knew his Ovid, as can be seen, to take one particularly striking example, in his portrayal of Psyche's agonized indecision over whether to kill her husband (5.21 and note). It has never on the other hand been convincingly explained in what sense Lucius-as-ass is 'golden'; the Latin word should connote worth or splendour, [31] not qualities which can plausibly be attributed to him. To Isis the ass, identified in her cult with the malign Seth Typhon, her enemy and the murderer of her husband Osiris, was a hateful beast (11.6); and Lucius' behaviour in that guise does nothing to redeem its reputation or his own character. The mischievous suggestion of Paula James that Apuleius' (if it was his) alternative title for his book was not Asinus Aureus but Asinus Auritus, 'the ass with ears', the listening or attentive ass, [32] is perilously attractive. That would be in the best vein of Apuleian irony, the ambiguity of auritus underlining the contrast between the efficiency of Lucius' ears as receptors (9.15) and his consistent inability to profit from what they tell him (1.1 and note). To return to the author himself. After his brief and shadowy appearance in the Prologue, he becomes more or less invisible, apart from the joking apology for the language of Apollo's oracle (above, §4) and occasional arch reminders of the literary quality of what the reader is enjoying (2.12, 6.25, 6.29, 8.1 and notes), until the dream of the significantly named Asinius. To him it is revealed by Osiris himself that the candidate for the last and most important of his series of initiations is 'a man from Madaura' (11.27). This offhand identification of Lucius with his creator has rattled scholars; some have even emended Apuleius' text to eliminate it. Are we in fact obliged to take it seriously? Writers sometimes do this sort of thing just for fun. Evelyn Waugh's novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold ends with 'Pinfold' sitting down to record his adventures, and beginning by transcribing the title page and the first chapter-heading of the book that the reader has just come to the end of, minus in this case the name of the real author. This is a technically elegant device, a witty acknowledgement of what Waugh's friends at least were well aware of, that the book was based on his own experiences. In the case of The Golden Ass it is arguable that the author's sudden appearance represents a variation on the common literary device of the so-called sphragis or seal, an allusive registration of authorship incorporated in the text of the book itself. [33] In other words, is this perhaps simply an arch way of saying 'Apuleius wrote this book'? If so, he chose a way of doing so that was calculated, not merely to flutter the critical dovecotes centuries later, but to give his contemporary readers something to wonder about. In identifying himself in this way Apuleius, as would not have been the case had he simply named himself, was deliberately drawing attention to his public persona. He was a notable figure in his province, the recipient of numerous civic honours and holder of an important priesthood. His reputation rested on two pillars, his oratorical powers and his status as a Platonic philosopher. St Augustine calls him 'the famous Platonist'. [34] His native place was clearly proud of her distinguished son; there has survived the base of a statue put up there at public expense 'To the Platonic philosopher', which can hardly commemorate anybody but Apuleius. [35] Lucius is not a Platonic philosopher, but he boasts (1.2 and note) of his descent from Plutarch, who was a declared Platonist and who had written a work On Isis and Osiris, in which he set out to make philosophical sense of the gruesome Egyptian myth of the murder and dismemberment of Osiris by Typhon. [36] He had also written a treatise On curiosity, [37] very much to Lucius' address. Obviously the author of The Golden Ass cannot be identified tout court with its narrator, [38] but equally the ass and the Platonic philosopher cannot be considered to have nothing to do with each other. A strong argument to the contrary is the presence in the book of the story of Cupid and Psyche, its structural and thematic centrepiece. 9 Though often, for understandable reasons, detached and edited or translated separately, Cupid and Psyche is an organic and integral part of The Golden Ass. Structurally it is firmly anchored in the 'Charite-complex' (above, §5), the story being continued across the divisions between books 4-5 and 5-6, another technique characteristic of Ovid in the Metamorphoses. [39] Thematically the story of a, or rather the, human soul in quest of salvation through union with the divine is a parable for what is happening to Lucius even as he listens to it, though as with everything else he sees, hears, and suffers, it all goes in at one of his ass's ears and out at the other. It calls attention to itself as a unique feat of literary combination: a fairy tale plot of a traditional type transformed into a universal allegory by the symbolic status of its protagonists, Love and the Soul, and presented in terrms of a Platonizing duality. [40] It is this last element that is important in the present context. In his contribution to the discussion in Plato's Symposium Pausanias had distinguished between two Aphrodites, Urania or Heavenly, and Pan-demos or Vulgar, and two Eroses to correspond, their respective provinces being the love of souls and bodies (1 8od2-181b8). Apuleius was familiar with the passage, which he paraphrases in his Apology (ch. 12); and in Cupid and Psyche he displays Venus and Cupid in these dual Platonic guises contending for the human soul. The actual battle is carried on between Venus in her lower (II, Vulgaris = Aphrodite Pandemos) and Cupid in his higher guise (Amor I, Caelestis = Eros Uranios), [41] just as Venus in both guises, personified by Photis and Isis, contends for mastery over Lucius. The role of Cupid and Psyche in the economy of the novel as a philosophical commentary on the main narrative is central to an understanding of the book as a whole. Contemporary awareness of Plato largely centred on the more popular and accessible dialogues. These included, in addition to the Symposium, the Phaedrus and the Phaedo. Psyche's pursuit of Cupid and her fall to earth (5.24) recall the Phaedrus: 'When the soul is unable to follow God and fails to see, and through some misfortune grows heavy, being filled with forgetfulness and wickedness, it loses its wings [42] and falls to earth' (248c). In the Phaedo what is said about the need for the soul to purge itself of the defilements of bodily pleasure if it is to attain to eternal life with the gods (8Ia-c) is clearly relevant to both Psyche and Lucius; and the transformation which in the Onos appears to have no special significance takes on a new, metaphorical, dimension in The Golden Ass in the light of Socrates' suggestion that 'those who have thoughtlessly given themselves over to gluttony and violence and drunkenness are likely to be clothed in the shapes of asses and similar beasts' (8Ie). We may also detect Plutarch behind the part played in the stories of both Psyche and Lucius by what the priest of Isis calls 'ill-starred curiosity', curiositas improspera ( 11.15). In his treatise on curiosity or importunate meddling Plutarch appeals to a standard philosophical distinction between proper objects of investigation, such as natural science, and things that are attractive merely because they are hidden (De curiositate, 5). Apuleius himself draws a similar distinction when rebutting accusations of sorcery in his Apology (29-41), and it is implicit in the contrast between the pursuits for which Lucius' family connections and educational advantages should have equipped him (1.2, 1.4 and notes) and his prurient obsession with the unclean secrets of witchcraft. Philosophy, as Plutarch had emphasized (On Isis and Osiris, 68), was the only true guide to the mysteries. These higher and lower forms of curiosity can also be seen as corresponding to the higher and lower forms of love that war for the souls of Psyche and Lucius. 10 In the light of these various hints the attentive reader postulated in the Prologue can hardly fail to sense the lurking presence of the Platonic philosopher in The Golden Ass, and to suspect that Apuleius has taken a leaf out of the book of another Latin poet whom he evidently knew and admired, Lucretius. He, in a famous passage of the De rerum natura, twice repeated, had compared the poetry in which he had clothed the teachings of Epicurus to the honey smeared by the doctor on a cup of bitter medicine to induce children to drink it, an image which Apuleius could also have come across in Plato's Laws (De rerum natura, I.936- 47, 4. I I -22; Laws, 659e). Thus the pleasure promised in the Prologue is a means to an end, the honey on the astringent cup of edification. Apuleius' strategy, however, is more subtle than this suggests. The pleasure experienced by the irreflective reader of these amusing [43] stories is not, as in the case of Lucretius, morally neutral. It is implicitly on a par with that experienced by their narrator and with his slavish enjoyment of Photis. Plutarch taxes those of a prying disposition with shunning scientific research because 'there is nothing in it' and preferring 'histories' of which the staple is misfortune; and the catalogue of such 'histories' that follows is almost identical with the subjects of the inserted stories in The Golden Ass (De curiositate, 5). Our ideally alert and perceptive reader cannot, like Lucius, be a mere spectator of these events, but is, so to say, on his literary honour to participate in the book's dialectic and to make judgements of a moral order on what he reads. Whereas Lucius remains impervious throughout to the implications for himself of what is happening to him, even at one point going out of his way to remark that his experiences have left him no wiser (9. 13 and note), and cannot be said to have earned his salvation by repentance, greater self-awareness, or (pace Nancy Shumate) intellectual enlightenment, the reader has no excuse, with the example of Lucius before him, for not perceiving that there is in all this some sort of moral, a lesson to be learned. Nancy Shumate has argued eloquently that Lucius' 'conversion' is intellectually rather than morally motivated. It is difficult to extract this from the text. It is emotion -- a combination of fear and disgust -- rather than reason [44] that precipitates his flight from the world of confusion and disintegration into which his metamorphosis had plunged him to the vision of cosmic order embodied in the omnipotent and all-embracing godhead of Isis. The realization that she and she alone rules the destinies of mankind (II.I) is not arrived at by any process of ratiocination and has not been prepared for: it simply happens. The relationship of Fortune, Providence and Isis-as-Fortune/Providence remains as nebulous after the revelations of the priest as it was before (I I. 15 and note). For Lucius it is enough that he has found security. Nothing in the subsequent account of his devotions and initiations indicates the existence of an intellectual component in his religious experiences. The 'harbour of Tranquillity' into which he has been received (II. 15) is a final resting-place, not a point of embarkation for a voyage of philosophical discovery. Moreover it must again be emphasized that Lucius has done nothing to earn his salvation, as the ignorant comments of the crowd ironically remind us (I I. 16 and note). A Platonic philosopher would surely have held that enlightenment had to be actively sought and worked for. If The Golden Ass was seriously intended to edify, the conclusion to which the narrative of Lucius' experiences as a soul in quest of salvation ultimately comes is an unexpected one. That this indeed is what the book must be about is demonstrated by the presence in it of the story of Cupid and Psyche; its allegorical implications and its bearing on the story of Lucius himself clinch the matter. But did Apuleius, the famous 'Platonic philosopher', really mean to offer devotion to the cult of Isis and Osiris as the way to the highest good for a man? What would his contemporary admirers have made of that idea? Centuries later we find Macrobius expressing surprise that he had indulged himself in the composition of 'fictitious love-stories' (Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, 1.2. 8). That, one would think, was nothing to the surprise that would have been felt by Apuleius' fellow citizens at the gloss that they were evidently expected to put on those stories. Were they, however, his intended audience? The composition and publication of The Golden Ass is generally dated to the later period of his life, when he had returned from Rome and settled in Africa. [45] It is tempting to wonder whether he wrote it as a young man during his residence in Rome. Appeals to its style cut both ways: exuberance is no more a reliable sign of youth (Nabokov) than technical assurance is of maturity (Lucan, Macaulay). More cogent is the argument that this may seem more like the sort of book that would appeal to a metropolitan readership rather than to staider provincial tastes. The intrusive allusions, rather in the manner of Pl autus, to matters specifically Roman and to legal quibbles (2.16, 4.18, 5.26, 5.29, 6.8, 6.22, 6.29, 9.10, 9.27, 10.29 and notes) may be thought to point in the same direction. One objection to this earlier dating is the presence in The Golden Ass of apparent references to the Apology. [46] About the circumstances in which this speech was delivered we are better informed. On his way home from Rome Apuleius was detained by illness at a place called Oea in Tripoli, where he married a wealthy widow, Pudentilla. This was at the instance of one of her sons, whom he had met in Rome, but other members of her family, who had an interest in the disposition of her fortune, prosecuted Apuleius on various charges, principally one of gaining Pudentilla's affections by magic. The Apology, a brilliantly witty and apparently effective rebuttal of these accusations, was delivered in about AD 160. That does not rule out the possibility that The Golden Ass was originally written at Rome to be read to selected audiences there, and that the passages containing the apparent allusions to the Apology were touched in later. There is, after all, nothing to show that the book was given to the world in Apuleius' lifetime. He might well not have wished his public image to be compromised by a youthful jeu d'esprit in which Platonism is harnessed to Oriental superstition. That argument is weakened if in fact the tendency of the book is in the end to undermine rather than to proselytize. Lucius' uncritical raptures at his first initiation and his emotional parting from the Cenchrean Isis and her priest (11.24 -5) are succeeded by surprise and a certain impatience on his part when he discovers that he is not as yet safely berthed in the harbour of Tranquillity. More initiations, and more expense, are needed before he can count himself really of the elect. It is natural to wonder if he is being taken for a ride, as at one point he himself suspects (11.29). It has been suggested that the original Greek Metamorphoses was a satire on credulity and superstition. [47] Is there an echo of this in Apuleius' adaptation? There is more than a hint of naivety in the satisfaction which Lucius takes in the resplendent get-up and the statuesque pose in which he is displayed to the congregation (11.24) .However, it could be maintained that these ironies, if they were so intended, would have come across more sharply in Rome than in Madaura. In the eyes of educated Romans what sort of figure would a shaven-headed Isiac hierophant have cut in the Forum? Would Lucius, gleaming pate (11. 10) have, as Winkler suggests, identified him in that setting as a buffoon? [48] Temples of Isis were scattered all over the Greek and Roman world, but that in Rome was particularly frequented by women and had a louche reputation (11.26 and note). Did Apuleius really mean his readers to feel that Lucius' final state is a truly enviable one? Or is he, when we take our leave of him, living in a fool's paradise? Is he as much of an ass as ever? And if so, how far down the garden path have we allowed ourselves to be led along with him by Apuleius' storytelling genius? II The Golden Ass is a fictional romance. Papyrus discoveries have greatly enlarged our notions of the range and variety in subject-matter, treatment, and style of ancient Greek fiction. [49] Apuleius' book, viewed against this background, is not suigeneris; it shares more of the characteristics of the genre -- if this is not too precise a term for this diverse and fluid category of writing -- than has been generally supposed. All narratives of separation, travel, and reunion of lovers look back to the Odyssey, as Lucius' ruminations in the mill acknowledge (9. 13 and note), and as is even more explicitly and repeatedly signaled in Petronius' Satyricon. [50] Digressions and inserted narratives were a standard feature of epic as of prose romance. Pirates and bandits figure prominently in the novels; what is unusual about Apuleius' treatment of this theme is the comic disparity between the grim stronghold and warlike pretensions of his robber band and their often farcical incompetence in action. Is this a mild literary send-up? [51] Egypt had always fascinated the Greeks: the scene of Xenophon's Ephesiaca, Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon, and Heliodorus' Ethiopica is set partially in Egypt, and a war between Persia and Egypt figures in Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe. The Egyptian element in The Golden Ass reflects this fascination and may have been incorporated by Apuleius for literary rather than autobiographical reasons. It may be that scholars have been too ready to take his evidence as to the details of Isiac cult at its face value and make insufficient allowance for his exuberant fancy (11.10, 16, 17, 30 and notes). A pervasive theme in the Greek romances is the influence of Fortune. Fortune (Tyche) was widely worshipped in Greece, and her prominence in shaping the lives of the characters in the novels is often taken to reflect a general sense of insecurity in the life of ordinary people. In The Golden Ass this role is greatly enhanced. Fortune, not always distinguished from Providence, controls every turn of events. [52] She is not merely capricious, but actively malevolent, persecuting Lucius as Poseidon and Juno had persecuted the heroes of the Odyssey and Aeneid, and as Priapus had persecuted Encolpius in the Satyricon. Eventually her function in the scheme of things as anti-Isis, blind as opposed to (fore)seeing Fortune, is revealed in the priest's homily. Though the theological implications of this dichotomous or Manichaean conception of Fortune are never made clear (11.15 and note), here again Apuleius can be seen taking a theme from the common stock of romantic fiction and manipulating and exploiting it with some freedom for his own purposes. That what emerges from the process is not entirely clear or consistent -- what for instance is the relationship of the Providence that watches over Psyche to that which rescues Lucius? -- is something that by now we have perhaps come to expect. If in the final analysis the reader is left wondering what The Golden Ass is really about, what exactly Apuleius is getting at, that may be just what its author intended. What he promises in the Prologue is enjoyment and wonder. The Latin word for 'wonder', miror, can connote bewilderment as well as admiration. [53] Like all great works of art, The Golden Ass stoutly resists simplification. In this it resembles that other great Latin narrative of changed fortunes, travel, heroic endurance, separation, union, and homecoming, Virgil's Aeneid. When we part company with Lucius he is enjoying himself, as we have been. Much of the pleasure of reading and rereading this great book is that of being kept guessing. 12 In another particular Apuleius turns out to have dealt faithfully with his readers. The promise of a literary tour de force conveyed in the image of the circus-rider, leaping from horse to horse in mid- gallop, is amply redeemed. The Golden Ass is a dazzling combination of parable, allegory, satire, robust humour, sex, violence, Grand Guignol, confession and buffoonery, a unique feat of creative fantasy. Its rich literary texture is matched by a linguistic exuberance and stylistic versatility that confronts the translator with a succession of thorny, sometimes insuperable, problems. How Apuleius himself handled the task of translation can be seen from comparison with the Onos. [54] He rarely renders the original word for word for long at a stretch, but subjects it to a process for which it is difficult to find a better term than souping up. Most of his innovations are by way of verbal amplification and the addition of picturesque detail, but the characterization is also enriched, and sometimes, as with Milo and Photis, radically revised. The general effect is to impart life and colour to a comparatively jejune original. This is typical of Roman treatment of Greek literary models, reminiscent for instance of what the comic dramatists, Plautus especially, did with their exemplars: what was called uertere, 'turning', something not adequately described by the word 'translation'. Liberties of this sort are not for the translator nowadays, but it is interesting to note that one writer in modern times produced a 'version' of The Golden Ass which took more than Apuleian freedoms with the book. In 1708 one Charles Gildon, a well-known Grub Street figure of the time, published anonymously what he called The New Metamorphosis; or, The Pleasant Transformation: being The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius of Medaura. Altered and Improv'd to the Modern Times and Manners [55] -- as indeed it had been with a vengeance. This purported to be a translation from the Italian of 'Carlo Monte Socio, Fellow of the Academy of the Humanities in Rome'; his account of the scandalous goings-on attributed to 'Nuns, Fryars, Jesuits', who are substituted for the dissolute priests of Atargatis, is no doubt not unconnected with the fact that Gildon himself had been educated for the Roman Catholic priesthood but had subsequently lapsed into deism. He made one ingenious and effective concession to plausibility by having the hero transformed into a lapdog rather than a donkey, and so freely admitted to the drawing-rooms and bedchambers of the society ladies whose licentious behaviour he so feelingly depicts. Though more than once reprinted, Gildon's book has been little noticed. The version most familiar to educated Englishmen, which held the field until comparatively recently, is that of William Adlington, first published in 1566. Though the language inevitably sounds unfamiliar to those not brought up on the King James version of the Bible, it can still be read with pleasure; and in one respect both Adlington's and Gildon's versions have a useful lesson to teach. Any attempt to reproduce Apuleius' peculiar Latinity, its idiosyncratic mixture of colloquial, poetic, and archaizing vocabulary, which includes many words coined by Apuleius himself, its often wilfully contorted phraseology, and its elaborately balanced rhythmical structures -- let alone to render it literally --would involve something like the creation of a new dialect of English. One feature of his writing, however, can be reproduced in modern English, and that is its fluency; and this is something that both Adlington and Gildon achieve and that has eluded some of their successors. Classical Latin writers -- Cicero, Livy, even in his own way Tacitus -- cultivated the periodic style, in which the utterance is built up from interdependent and interlocking clauses into a syntactical structure designed to postpone the full comprehension of the sense until the reader has reached the end of the sentence: a circular rather than a linear arrangement. Apuleius' sentence-structure is serial: the clauses do not as a rule interlock but succeed each other, and this, added to his habit of repeating and varying his expression for effect or emphasis, creates a flow and momentum in his prose analogous to the flow achieved by Ovid in the more strictly ordered medium of the epic hexameter. A student corning to him fresh from Cicero or Livy may well find his style disconcerting at first; but if one discounts its more rococo embellishments his is an easier and racier Latinity, with its roots reaching further back, a truly native style. The periodic sentence was a Greek importation and had to be painfully learned; some respectable writers, such as the Elder Pliny, never really got the hang of it. With Apuleius the reader is in contact with a late flowering of a tradition of free-flowing discourse that goes back to the very beginnings or Latin culture. The present version, therefore, aims above all at doing justice to the movement of Apuleius' Latin in idiomatic contemporary English. It takes as its motto the words of Michael Grant: 'Simplicity ... is the only hope ... English must be readable, and readable today.' [56] This is in the tradition of Adlington, whose English is characterized in the anonymous Preface of the Abbey Classics edition of 1922 as 'simple, direct and fresh'. Occasionally, where Apuleius becomes, even for him, obtrusively mannered, some compromise with this principle must be allowed. If then here and there the English expression seems not altogether natural, it is likely to be because the expression of the Latin is so Apuleian that it would denature it altogether to reduce it to a blandly current idiom. 13 The widespread literary fame which Lucius promises himself, or rather his creator (2.12, 4.32, 6.25, 6.29 and notes), was in fact slow to materialize. Between the sixth and the thirteenth centuries The Golden Ass was largely lost to view, and it was as a magician that its author was celebrated. Augustine, in his discussion of the place of demons in the scheme of things (City of God, 8. 12-22), repeatedly cites Apuleius as prime witness of the Platonic position, and his uncertainty as to whether he had actually undergone metamorphosis (above, n. 38) evidently betokens acceptance of the fact that such things were possible. That would also have been true of many if not most of Apuleius ' contemporaries. The picture that emerges from the Apology is that of a society where religion and magic perforce co-existed, however uneasily, and where people believed in and regulated their lives by both. [57] The very fact of the prosecution's being brought at all and the elaborate character of Apuleius' defence shows that these matters were taken seriously. Nor was this true only of Oea. [58] There was thus little or nothing in Lucius' narrative, with the possible exception of the dragon (8.21 and note), that even an educated reader would have necessarily found incredible. It was at the Renaissance that Apuleius came into his own as a storyteller, when he was rediscovered by Boccaccio. Artistic exploitation of The Golden Ass speedily took off in a number of directions. [59] Its rich store of inserted tales was plundered by, among others, Boccaccio himself in the Decameron, Cervantes in Don Quixote, and Le Sage in Gil Blas. The ass-story lent itself readily to allegorical and satirical development. It is, however, unsurprisingly, through the tale of Cupid and Psyche that Apuleius' book has exerted its greatest influence. The story has been a perennial source of inspiration to poets, dramatists, composers for opera and ballet, and artists. That Shakespeare had read it in Adlington's translation appears from several plays, most notably A Midsummer Night's Dream and Othello. [60] Keats, Morris, and Bridges all fell under the spell. Perhaps, however, the peculiar charm of Apuleius' storytelling genius has been most tellingly communicated to English readers in the languorous prose of Walter Pater's recreation of the tale in Marius the Epicurean. These are only some, and by no means the last, of the multifarious transformations undergone by The Golden Ass during the six and a half centuries since it emerged from the long obscurity of the Dark and Middle Ages. It is this endless capacity for metamorphosis that truly identifies Apuleius as a magician. * NOTES I. H. E. Butler and A S. Owen
(eds.), Apulei Apologia sive Pro se de magia (Oxford, 1914), p. x, n. 4;
Winkler, Auctor & Actor, p. 227; Grant, revision of Graves, p. xiv.
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