The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses)

the disaster of Lucius’ own transformation. The mockery he suffers during the “trial” is a foretaste of his lot as an ass, an animal 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 exactly how 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’ transformation back into a human (11.15), they can all be seen as underlining his—proleptically anticipatory asinine—perseverance in the courses that ultimately cause his downfall. Of the stories he hears as an 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 he formerly inhabited when he was a privileged individual who would contemplate life de haut en bas original: "de haut en bas" - from above (haughtily).. 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—

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, it would have been recognized by contemporary readers as broadly realistic.

There is no doubt, for instance, that outside the larger centers, law enforcement in the provinces of the Roman Empire was by and large of the do-it-yourself order. Large landowners policed their estates