A young man with too much curiosity and too little sense travels to Thessaly — the witchcraft capital of the ancient world — and gets himself turned into a donkey. What follows is the most outrageous novel to survive from antiquity: a picaresque journey through every level of Roman society, from bandits' caves to millionaires' banquets, culminating in a mystical encounter with the goddess Isis. The Golden Ass is by turns hilarious, obscene, terrifying, and transcendent. It contains, nested at its heart, the only complete version of the myth of Cupid and Psyche.
Start ReadingLucius arrives in Thessaly hungry for magic and immediately hears a story about a man who witnessed a witch eat a dead man's face. The atmosphere of the book is set in a single evening: this is a world where the supernatural is real, dangerous, and everywhere. Lucius is fascinated. He should be terrified.
Lucius explores the town of Hypata and discovers that his host's wife, Pamphile, is a powerful witch who can transform herself into an owl. He seduces the household slave Fotis to get closer to the magic. At a dinner party, he laughs at a story about animated wineskins — not realising the joke is on him.
Lucius finally gets what he wanted: transformation. The wrong one. Fotis grabs the wrong ointment and instead of a majestic bird, Lucius becomes a donkey. The cure is simple — eat roses. But before he can find any, bandits break into the house and steal him along with the valuables.
In the bandits' cave, Lucius the donkey witnesses their raids and hears their stories. A captive girl is brought in — a bride kidnapped on her wedding day. The old woman who minds the cave tells her a tale to soothe her grief. It begins: "In a certain city there lived a king and queen who had three daughters..." The story of Cupid and Psyche has begun.
Psyche's beauty has made her a goddess on earth and left her utterly alone — no man dares marry her. Her father consults an oracle and is told to leave her on a mountaintop for a monster. Instead, she is carried by the West Wind to a magical palace where an invisible lover visits her by night. He makes one rule: never look at him. She promises. The promise will not hold.
Psyche lights a lamp, sees the most beautiful god in existence sleeping beside her, and drops hot oil on his shoulder. Cupid flees. Venus, his mother, is furious. Psyche wanders the world searching for her lost husband, and Venus sets her four impossible tasks: sorting a mountain of grain, gathering golden wool, fetching water from the Styx, and descending to the Underworld for a box of Proserpina's beauty.
Back in the real world, Lucius the donkey escapes the bandits — briefly. He passes from owner to owner, each worse than the last. A boy tortures him on mountain paths. A farmer works him to exhaustion. The donkey's life is a catalogue of human cruelty observed from the receiving end, and Lucius cannot even scream in his own language.
The priests of the Syrian Goddess buy Lucius and parade him through the countryside. They are frauds, thieves, and sexual predators hiding behind religious costume. Apuleius's satire is savage. When their crimes finally catch up with them, Lucius passes to a miller whose household is a theatre of adultery, murder, and revenge.
The miller's wife is unfaithful. The baker's wife is worse. Adultery tales pile up — some farcical, some deadly. Lucius witnesses the full spectrum of Roman domestic dysfunction from his stable. The humour is dark, the social observation razor-sharp, and the donkey is beginning to despair of ever finding the roses that will restore him.
A wicked stepmother poisons her way through a family. A young man is framed for murder. Lucius is trained to perform at banquets — eating at table, drinking wine, even wrestling. His final indignity: he is scheduled to publicly mate with a condemned woman in the amphitheatre. He bolts into the night.
Everything changes. On a beach at Cenchreae, under a full moon, Lucius prays to the heavens. Isis answers — radiant, merciful, present. She tells him to eat the roses from a priest's garland in tomorrow's procession. He does. He becomes human. And then, in the most unexpected turn in ancient literature, the comic novel becomes a conversion narrative. Lucius is initiated into the mysteries of Isis and Osiris, and the man who was a donkey becomes a priest.