The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses)

themselves with their own retainers; it is the insensate rage of the tyrannical plutocrat rather than the arbitrary nature of his conduct that would have seemed exceptional (9.35–8). Brigandage robbery/banditry, prominent in the plots of other romances and central in that of The Golden Ass, was a fact of life, controlled—in so far as it was controlled—by ad hoc impromptu punitive action (7.7) rather than by systematic policing. In point of fact, the only effective police were the soldiers at the disposition of the provincial governor. Hypata boasts a town guard (3.3), but in the absence of government troops, the city was evidently powerless to curb the activities of the local "Mohocks" An archaic term for street ruffians or hooligans. (2.18). This may be a case of authorial inadvertence, but it rings true in the light of what Juvenal has to say about street crime in Rome itself some half a century earlier (Satires, 3. 278–314). Whether a court other than that of the governor was legally competent to try a Roman citizen on a capital charge is debatable, but many contemporary readers may have been more certainly informed than modern scholars on such points, and it would probably have occurred to few to think about a question which the hero himself does not raise. Nor again would most readers stop to wonder why the doctor in the trial of the evil stepmother delays giving his crucial evidence until the very last moment (10.8), instead of aborting the proceedings at the outset. That would indeed have spared the innocent defendant much anguish, but it would have deprived the reader of his pleasure. Courtroom scenes were a standard feature of ancient romance precisely because of their dramatic potential, and the essence of drama is suspense.

It is against this generally recognizable background that the inserted stories in books 8–10 are projected. They present a grim composite picture of a world motivated by deceit, spite, greed, and lust. Increasingly, it is the themes of adultery and murder, often by poisoning, that predominate. The coloring of the picture is self-consciously literary: the story of the incestuous stepmother is acknowledged as lifted from Greek tragedy and embellished with allusions to the Latin poets (10.2 and note). Nevertheless, it will not do to write them off as too literary and too highly colored to be credible. A glance at a typical morning’s newspaper headlines suffices to make the point: infidelity and murder, often in bizarre circumstances, are as much part of the fabric of everyday life as they were eighteen centuries ago. The mother whom Juvenal, ironically expecting to be disbelieved, arraigns for poisoning her own children (Satires, 6.629–46) actually existed, and there were others like her. When he proclaims that

Posterity can add
No more, or worse, to our ways; our grandchildren
will act
As we do, and share our desires. Truly every vice
Has reached its ruinous zenith,