Metamorphoses, or The Golden Ass
A review of an ancient Latin novel by Apuleius
The Metamorphoses is a Latin prose narrative composed by Apuleius around 170 AD, not to be confused with Ovid’s famous ode of the same name from an earlier era. The text is also known popularly as Asinus aureus (The Golden Ass), an alternative title whose first known usage was that by St Augustine in Civitas Dei (18.18). Apuleius (Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis) was a North African writer, Platonist philosopher and rhetorician, born around 124 AD in the Roman province of Numidia, in the Berber city of Madauros in modern day Algeria. He studied Platonism in Athens, travelled to Rome, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and died sometime after 170 AD.
On one level, the Metamorphoses is a bawdy picaresque novel brimming with irreverent and amusing shenanigans, the only novel of its kind to have survived in its entirety to this day. It relates the adventures of Lucius, a well-to-do young man whose insatiable curiosity for the magical arts sees him accidentally transformed into an ass when things go wrong while trying to perform a spell to transform him into a bird. This leads to a long journey, literal and metaphorical, to reverse this unfortunate outcome. Along the way, this frame story is filled with many inset tales related by the characters he meets.
As a frame story containing a series of shorter inset stories, the Metamorphoses is reminiscent of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Thousand and One Nights, and is considered a precursor to the literary genre of the episodic picaresque novel, in which Francisco de Quevedo, François Rabelais, Giovanni Boccaccio, Miguel de Cervantes, Voltaire, Daniel Defoe and many others have followed. Within the structure of the frame story, the inset tales stand either as independent short stories, or as a means of developing the frame story's plot.
One particularly long story in the middle of the novel is the myth of Psyche and Cupid, which represents about a fifth of the text’s total length. Essentially a myth about female jealousy, this story was known to Boccaccio around 1370 AD, and has been retold in its own right extensively throughout the Western classical tradition in poetry, drama, and opera, and depicted widely in painting, sculpture, and even wallpaper.
On another level, the Metamorphoses is also a kind of Bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel which describes the process of personal growth experienced by the protagonist, a Roman aristocrat reduced to the lowest levels of society. The text provides a wealth of fascinating insights into the Graeco-Roman world during the reign (approximately) of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. It is almost unique in its sympathetic depiction of the condition of the lower classes of the day, as Lucius is forced to share the toils of slaves and destitute freemen who are reduced, like him, to being little more than beasts of burden by their exploitation at the hands of wealthy landowners. Lucius himself is captured, sold and resold by a succession of aristocrats, bandits, farmers, millers, soldiers and even a band of wandering devotees of the goddess Siria (Book 8.24). Lucius finally finds salvation and is transformed back into human form through the intercession of the goddess Isis, into whose cult he is eventually initiated.
During Apuleius’ era a variety of mystery cults flourished alongside Christianity throughout the Roman Empire, and Apuleius was an initiate in several of them. The final book of the Metamorphoses provides significant detail about the cult of Isis in particular, including a prayer which Lucius offers to Isis beginning with words that would be familiar to any TLM Catholic: Regina Caeli. Other practices described by Lucius are, to my mind at least, highly reminiscent of popular Italian Catholicism to this day, particularly a religious street procession (Book 11.8-11) which appears almost identical in character to those held at Easter and on other saints’ days.
Lucius also describes a form of ritual baptism which “purified me of every stain” (Book 11.23), often mentions “salvation” and “rebirth” in rather Christian-sounding terms, and describes the veneration of statues and images while at the same time being quite clear that these items were not idols, that is, not themselves considered gods. There is speculation that aspects of the widespread veneration of Isis in Imperial Rome may have eventually been transferred to the veneration of Mary in the Catholic Church - but that is a topic for another day. Christianity does make a brief appearance in the Metamorphoses: at one point (Book 9.14), a very disagreeable woman is described as spurning “the true religion” for a “false and sacrilegious faith in a god she claims is one”.
Apuleius' writing style in the Metamorphoses has been described as innovative, mannered, baroque, exuberant, dazzling, ornate, and “mellifluous North African Latin pyrotechnics”, the vocabulary often eccentric and including archaic words. At the outset, the protagonist Lucius describes what follows as a Fabulam Graecanicam (Greek fable), and in particular as a “collection of various tales in the Milesian style”. The Milesian tale is a genre of fictional narrative prominent in ancient Greek and Roman literature, consisting of a short story, fable, or folktale featuring love and adventure, usually of a bawdy nature. The term is also applied to collections of such tales set within a frame story, resulting in a complex narrative fabric with framing story carried by a main narrator and numerous subordinate tales carried by subordinate narrative voices. The Metamorphoses is the best complete example of a Milesian narrative remaining today, another classical example being the Satyricon of Petronius.
Apuleius wrote several other works and was well known to Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), a fellow North African Romanised Berber better known today as St Augustine. Augustine respected Apuleius' knowledge of Greek, Latin and Platonic philosophy, and mentions another of his works, the De Deo Socratis, many times in his own monumental De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos (The City of God Against the Pagans). Apuleius was greatly interested in demonology and magic, and believed that between the gods and humans existed a third class of being, the demons, who acted as intermediaries between the two. St Augustine was equally interested in these topics, but from a completely different perspective of course: while agreeing that demons exist, he argued against their worship or use as intercessors between God and men. For much of his earlier life as a skilled Roman orator and rhetorician, St Augustine held many pagan beliefs similar to those of Apuleius, including the efficacy of astrology for example, eventually abandoning them with his conversion to Christianity.
Despite being close to 2000 years old, the Metamorphoses is an entertaining and fascinating read, more so than most novels published in the last 50 years. The era around 200 AD when pagan and Christian literally lived side by side around the Mediterranean is fascinating, and a greater appreciation for what actually occurred through that period would go a long way to ameliorating much of the hard “pagan vs Christian” polemics common today. The Metamorphoses provides further evidence that Christianity did not simply “replace” Graeco-Roman paganism: rather, the evidence appears to be that paganism became, and was completed by, Christianity.
See also: De Christianis et Paganis
The version of the Metamorphoses by Apuleius reviewed here is the bilingual Latin/Italian version titled Metamorfosi (L’Asino d’Oro) edited by Marina Cavalli and published by Oscar Mondadori, Milan, 2023.