The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses)

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, 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 Lucius must resort to in order to meet the necessary expenses. The demands of God and Mammon A biblical reference (Matthew 6:24) contrasting spiritual service with worldly wealth., however, are finally reconciled when, under the special protection of Osiris, he is enabled to build 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, 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)?

A book that began by seemingly promising nothing but entertainment, with only the faintest hints that some reading between the lines might be required, has abruptly, and without anything that can reasonably be called a 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 Original Latin: "extra ordinem" - outside the order/sequence.. 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.

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 pretend 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...