The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses)

No writer has ever more faithfully obeyed Horace’s precept:

His is an extreme, but not an uncommon instance. The reader who has been moved by the poignancy of Wordsworth’s The Solitary Reaper may be disconcerted to discover that the poet’s source for the plaintive song of the Highland lass was not his own experience but a book. 28 That does not rob the poem of its value, but it is a salutary warning against drawing biographical inferences from imaginative literature.

Most of the Latin books that have come down to us were written by men who had been through the mill of an educational system grounded in the study and practice of classical rhetoric. This was essentially the art of persuasion, its aim plausibility. For a writer trained from childhood in its techniques, it was not necessary actually to have been granted a vision of Isis or to have undergone initiation into her cult to be able to describe such things vividly and convincingly. 29 Since we happen to know that Lucius in The Golden Ass is not an original literary creation but a character taken over from the Onos (a Greek work), and that his adventures up to the moment of his purported conversion largely reproduce those of the Greek model, we might well suspect that the sequel too has been borrowed—perhaps with ulterior motives—from some lost narrative of a purported mystic experience. It therefore comes as something of a shock when, at the very end of the novel, it is authenticated by the sudden re-emergence of the author who had made so fleeting an appearance in the Prologue and then faded inconspicuously into the fictional narrator. Indeed, he not only resurfaces but as good as names himself.

That the author of The Golden Ass was one Apuleius of the North African city of Madaura we know both from the manuscripts of his book and from the testimony of, among others, St. Augustine. It is indeed Augustine who is our authority for the title under which it is best known, The Golden Ass, which he expressly states (City of God, 18.18) was that given to it by Apuleius himself. In the manuscripts it is called Metamorphoses (“Transformations”), on the face of it a more obviously appropriate title. The Prologue’s announcement of it as a tale of changes of shape and vicissitudes of fortune points up its affinity to Ovid’s great poem of the same name, which also depicts a world in which “no event or character... can be trusted to remain what it may first seem to be.” 30 Apuleius clearly