The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses)

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 1.1 and note). Moreover, they have, after all, a common theme: metamorphosis, the transformation of men's shapes and fortunes.

At this point a voice is heard asking Quis ille?, 'Who is this?' We may well return the question: who is supposed to be asking it? Is it the writer himself, anticipating the reader's curiosity? Is it the reader, in words put into his mouth by the writer? Is it 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 (1.1 and note). The verb used to describe his Latin studies at Rome is ambiguous: excolui Original Latin: "excolui" - I cultivated/adorned 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, Original Latin: "fabulam Graecanicam" - a Greek-style story '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 Greek⁶ 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