by Peter Singer
EPILOGUE
AS SUMMER TURNED TO AUTUMN, AND WINTER passed into another spring, I found it more and more difficult to focus my thoughts on the infinite goodness of the goddess who had rescued me. Instead, thoughts of Fotis kept entering my mind, even during the most holy rites. Though her careless mistake had been the cause of all my troubles, and the ass I once was had often cursed her and wished it could have kicked her to death, the peace I found in Rome brought forgiveness, and with forgiveness came the realization that I truly loved Fotis and could not be happy without her. My longing for her became so strong that I neglected my spiritual duties as an initiate of the cult of Isis. When the high priest of Isis in Rome noticed this, he bade me come to his chamber. I feared that he would reprimand me sternly for my ingratitude, or perhaps even tell me that if I did not change my ways, the goddess would turn me back into a donkey. Instead, when I explained my obsession with the slave girl, this wise and humane man told me that not everyone is so constituted as to be able to be a celibate member of the cult of Isis. With his blessing, I set out for my ancestral home. On arrival, I sold sufficient assets to buy the freedom of the woman I loved, even from an owner as stingy as Milo. Once again I saddled up my horse and made my way to Hypata.
Fotis had been harshly interrogated after my disappearance, because I was the prime suspect in the robbery. The authorities wanted to torture her, and she might even have been executed, had Milo not, in a rare display of kindness, insisted on her innocence of any wrongdoing and ordered her spared. She had been overjoyed at the news of my miraculous return to human form, and not only because that removed any lingering traces of suspicion. But then, month after month, she had waited for a word from me, hoping for forgiveness, and in her more optimistic moments, much more than that. As time went by, however, she had given up all hope of hearing from me again. She had sunk into a long depression that made her so useless as a slave that Milo was willing to sell her at a reasonable price. I took no consolation in my financial savings, however, for her condition brought home to me how cruel I had been in not seeing her, nor even getting a message to her, as soon as I could. My only excuse is my immense gratitude to Isis for freeing me from my life as an ass. At least I can truly say that my faithfulness to Isis meant that, since returning to human form, I had remained entirely chaste.
I brought Fotis to the city of my birth as a free woman and set her up to be financially independent, for I did not want her to be with me unless she loved me as I loved her. It took time, but with my gentle attentions she once again became the fun-loving, witty, and passionate woman she had been before I so foolishly persuaded her to aid me in my venture into magic.
Once married and settled, we employed a good part of our fortune and time in buying up and taking care of old, worn-out, and abused donkeys. As I write these concluding words, Fotis is out in the pasture giving them treats, surrounded by the grateful animals with which I feel such deep empathy.
Dear reader, we confess that this epilogue is entirely our invention. In the original, after Lucius is again a man, he appears to have forgotten all about Fotis, for she is not mentioned at all. Nor does he establish a donkey sanctuary. These are such obvious flaws in this otherwise remarkable work that we prefer to believe that Apuleius wrote a sequel, since lost, along the lines we have just sketched. And who can prove us wrong?
PS & EF
THE LITERARY AND CULTURAL CONTEXT OF APULEIUS’S THE GOLDEN ASS
ELLEN FINKELPEARL
Apuleius and His Work
Apuleius (possibly Lucius Apuleius) was born around 123 of the Common Era (CE) in Madauros, now M’Dauorouch in Algeria, and lived into the 170s or 180s. These were the years of the “good” emperors: the quirky Hadrian, the long-lived Antoninus Pius, and the Stoic Marcus Aurelius, a period considered the height of the Roman Empire and a time of relative peace. Apuleius was a native of a region called Africa Proconsularis, an area conquered and colonized earlier by the Romans, but retaining much indigenous religion and culture. The Latin authors more familiar to most readers, Vergil, Horace, and Ovid, wrote during the Augustan Age (first century BCE–first century CE) and lived, of course, in Italy. So it is important to note that Apuleius is both later and of a somewhat different culture than these others, though what exactly that means for interpreting The Golden Ass is a matter of fierce debate. In another of his works, in any case, he describes himself as “semi-Numidian, semi-Gaetulian” (i.e., two North African tribes) and asserts that it’s nothing to be ashamed of.
Somewhat more is known about Apuleius’s life than about many ancient authors through his Apology (see below) and excerpts from his rhetorical presentations called the Florida. He came from a family that belonged to the local elite, and in keeping with this status, after some local schooling in Carthage, he went away to complete his education in Athens and spent time in Rome. Yet he chose to return to North Africa, probably living primarily in Carthage and in Sabratha, his wife’s town. He wrote in Latin, the official language of the Roman Empire, but he also spoke Punic, the local language, and was versed in Greek, the language of the educated.
The Golden Ass, or Metamorphoses as it is also called, was written in the 170s or 180s. It is not Apuleius’s only work. He was known as a Platonic philosopher, as he wrote several treatises that survive, on or related to Plato’s philosophy. He also gave frequent public presentations to admiring audiences, transmitting Greek philosophy and culture to Latin speakers of North Africa. As such, he was a Latin-speaking participant in the intellectual movement now known as the Second Sophistic, which revived Greek learning from its greatest flourishing in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, a movement known for the showiness and celebrity status of some of its practitioners. Another surviving work, his Apology, presents his defense in a lawsuit brought by his stepson and other in-laws, who claimed he had won his somewhat older and wealthy wife, Aemilia Pudentilla, by magic. The defense, filled with anecdotes about the magical powers of fish, a bit of poetry and a dash of philosophy, and even reflections on dental care, shows Apuleius’s powers as a consummate entertainer and orator. It is hard to take seriously as a speech delivered in a court of law—and yet it was delivered before the Roman proconsul of Africa, Claudius Maximus, in 158.
In his own day, Apuleius was well known and popular as an orator and philosopher, so much so that he apparently was commemorated in his hometown with a statue whose base reads “Philosophus Platonicus.” The novel is not mentioned by his contemporaries or even in his own Apology, whether because it was considered too trivial or because any reference that might have been made has been lost. After his death, the year of which remains unknown, he is not mentioned in surviving literary sources until he begins to be a target of Christians who view him as a sorcerer and the wrong kind of miracle-worker (in contrast with Christ). Augustine refers to Apuleius repeatedly in his correspondence and in City of God, mentioning that Apuleius “is better known to us Africans” because he was himself an African. Augustine seems to have believed that Apuleius claimed to have himself turned into an ass, and possibly really did so. This misreading, along with the charges of magic laid out in the Apology and Apuleius’s professed belief in a daimon (or demigod) of the sort that guided Socrates in moments of moral crisis, branded Apuleius as a magician and demonologist in Christian circles. Saint Augustine’s interest in Apuleius’s magical powers and also his philosophy may, paradoxically, have been the reason his works survived.
There are strong arguments for considering The Golden Ass a “novel,” given the wide variety of novelistic forms, and yet the narrative persists that the novel appeared along with the ready availability of print media and an emerging middle class in England in the eighteenth century (ignoring, for example, Cervantes’s Don Quixote). In antiquity, prose fiction was a relatively late invention and generally scorned as unserious. There was no name designating the genre, but a number of works survive that have been grouped together by scholars under the heading “the ancient novel” or
“ancient prose fiction.” In Latin, Petronius’s Satyricon from the mid-first century CE has achieved some notoriety because of Fellini’s surreal film. Fragmentary, picaresque, and certainly decadent, it follows Encolpius and his male lovers scrounging for dinners in southern Italy. Several Greek novels from about the first century BCE to the third or fourth century CE survive, featuring remarkably similar plots: a supernaturally beautiful couple is separated, usually via abduction by pirates or shipwreck, they travel to exotic locales in the Mediterranean and Middle East, resist challenges to their chastity, and eventually are reunited and married back in their hometowns. More relevant to Apuleius is the “Ass Story” attributed in one ancient source to Lucian, a Syrian-Greek author roughly contemporary with him. This relatively brief text is probably an abbreviated version of a longer work by another Greek, confusingly named Lucius, but the relationship to Apuleius’s Golden Ass is obscure and disputed. Many episodes in Apuleius’s work bear a remarkable similarity to some in the Greek, but the Greek story that survives lacks the inset tales and religious conclusion of Apuleius’s work. It is unclear how many of the tales in Apuleius that do not appear in the short “Ass Story” were borrowed from the longer version that no longer survives, raising serious questions about Apuleius’s originality. However, the Greek “Ass Story” as it now exists does not have the literary and stylistic complexity of Apuleius’s Golden Ass.
The abridged version of The Golden Ass you have just read leaves out most of the “embedded tales” of the original, which is about twice the length of this text. The full text features tales of magic and witches, more robber and adultery tales, and the widely known “Tale of Cupid and Psyche.” This last is often wrongly considered a generic “Greek myth,” but it appears in antiquity only in Apuleius. It may have existed as an orally transmitted tale; sculptural figures of Cupid with Psyche abound, but the narrative is Apuleius’s alone. So the full Golden Ass is a meandering work, narrated not only by Lucius in the first person, but by a wide variety of other characters, mostly not drawn from the elite: small-time traveling cheese merchants, hapless travelers who run afoul of witches, the old slave woman who narrates “Cupid and Psyche,” outlaws and runaways. This is not the world of ancient epic heroes! On the other hand, while a fantastical tale, The Golden Ass probably gives us a good sense of what life was like for ordinary people (and animals!) in the ancient world, where market gardeners eke out a living, young boys gather wood in the mountain passes for their families, millers run their mill-bakeries with the help of mistreated donkeys, where one might well encounter brigands or an arrogant Roman soldier in the street, and rural estates are largely managed by (mistreated) slaves.
Yet Apuleius’s Latin prose style is anything but ordinary. While he does not indulge as much as Cicero in the long, complex sentences that make Latin so difficult, his language is full of rhyme and alliteration, repetitive clauses with the same rhythm, invented words, and revived archaic vocabulary. He is anything but minimalist. These tropes pop up especially in lush descriptive passages, e.g., about Fotis’s hair, his aunt’s atrium, or the longed-for roses. At one time, his anomalous style was reviled and suspected of being “African Latin,” with all the racist overtones that implies. In the current moment, the discovery of a style or dialect of Latin unique to North Africa would instead be greeted with great interest. Quite likely, this is simply later Latin written with the inventiveness of a multilingual author, but it would be hard to believe that the local dialect of Latin was not influenced by the indigenous languages, Punic and Libyan. Apuleius also incorporates, sometimes in outrageously inappropriate contexts, specific lines of earlier Latin poetry. (For example, in the context of Lucius’s response to watching Fotis twist her hips while stirring the pot, Apuleius echoes Vergilian language from descriptions of Aeneas’s encounter with Dido, Queen of Carthage.)
As a translator with a sense of loyalty to Apuleius’s original, I have tried to mirror this florid style at critical junctures, though not incessantly. To omit this feature of Apuleius’s work entirely is to miss out on one of the great joys of this rich novel (alliteration is fun!), but to attempt to duplicate it constantly is not only difficult, but also alienating to the reader. A translation that follows Apuleius (or any other Latin author, for that matter) too literally becomes hopelessly awkward in English because of the very different structures of the languages, and one that reproduces constantly his mix of the archaic, invented words, periphrases, and repeated rhythms would distract from the tales at hand. So the translator must balance faithfulness to the original style with readability.
Apuleius may be less well known today than other ancient authors, perhaps because his work did not fit the twentieth century’s image of what a “Classical” text should look like, but he was immensely popular all over Europe in the Renaissance, when ancient texts were being rediscovered. William Adlington’s translation of The Golden Ass into English in 1566 made the work widely accessible, and several scholarly studies have demonstrated just how frequently Shakespeare borrowed phrases from the translation in many of his plays. He was, of course, thinking of Apuleius when he transformed Bottom into an ass in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Raphael and his assistants covered an entire room in the Villa Farnesina in Rome with frescoes of the story of Cupid and Psyche, as did Giulio Romano in Mantua. Boccaccio borrowed several Apuleian tales (e.g., “The Tale of the Tub”) for the Decameron. A Spanish translation appeared in 1513 and Cervantes borrowed repeatedly from Apuleius for his own more famous picaresque novel, most clearly in the wineskin episode (not included in our abridgment).
Other Animal Texts from Antiquity
Apuleius was not unique among ancient authors in holding a sympathetic view toward animals. While the familiar arguments for human exceptionalism prevailed in the Stoic philosophical school—“Man alone among animals” is rational, has language, morality, emotion, justice, memory—there was also distinct resistance to this view. Some of the resistance came from followers of Pythagoras, whose philosophical school opposed meat-eating. But the Pythagoreans were not the only ones to see a continuum between humans and animals. Philo of Alexandria (15 BCE–45 CE) wrote a dialogue presenting both sides of the debate about the worth of animals, with the pro-animal side given much more space (though ultimately dismissed). Plutarch (ca. 50–120 CE) wrote several treatises arguing for the intelligence of animals and for a vegetarian diet on moral, hygienic, and religious grounds—and note that Lucius, when introducing himself early in The Golden Ass, claims to be related to him! Porphyry (ca. 233–306 CE) wrote an extended polemic against eating flesh, meticulously rebutting the traditional Stoic arguments: e.g., just because we don’t understand what dogs are saying, we cannot claim they lack language; we don’t understand barbarians either!
Perhaps more relevant to Apuleius’s imaginings of what it’s like to be a donkey are the nonphilosophical works of the first through third centuries CE: Books 8 and 9 of Pliny’s Natural History, Aelian’s charming animal anecdotes worthy of contemporary internet memes, and Oppian’s work on fishes and marine animals. Pliny, drawing on numerous earlier sources, ascribes religious sentiment, communal action, and great intelligence to elephants (for example). Aelian compiles anecdote after anecdote chronicling amazing actions of animals, recentering the world. In his epilogue, he rejects the pursuit of wealth and honor among men, saying instead: “I, however, occupy myself with foxes and lizards and beetles and snakes and lions, with the habits of the leopard, the affectionate nature of the stork, the melodiousness of the nightingale, the sagacity of the elephant, and the shapes of fishes and the migrations of cranes and the various species of serpents, and so on.” Oppian at least as deliberately rejects anthropocentrism, describing only the world of the sea, the pleasure the clam takes in its navigations, or the tight community of anchovies. Where Homer uses animals in battle similes, Oppian reverses the practice and uses humans as the material for similes describing fish. As always, many similar texts did not survive. In short, m
odern sourcebooks on animals that move rapidly past antiquity with Aristotle’s assertion that only Man is rational are missing a significant body of texts advocating for vegetarianism and chasing after the subjective experience of a nonhuman animal.
Another important body of ancient animal lore is, of course, the fable. Aesop appears to have been a real person, born in the sixth century BCE, but he evolved into the name of a genre and tradition. His fables exist now in a motley collection from here and there but were also versified and preserved in a more literary form in the writings of Babrius (in Greek) and Phaedrus (in Latin) in the first century CE. Animal fable can be distinguished from the writings above by its use of the animal more as a symbol for certain human types (the clever fox, the slow and steady tortoise) than as a deep exploration of the lot of animals—not to minimize the degree to which animals are also still animals in fable! Phaedrus claims that the fable was a genre invented by slaves to enable them to speak behind their masters’ backs, and we should note that the donkey was the animal that stood in for the slave most clearly and frequently. Donkeys were the work animal of the ancient world, and frequently contrasted with the aristocratic horse in fable. Anyone familiar with fable in the ancient world would have recognized many of them as a subtext in Apuleius. In addition, many have pointed out that The Golden Ass may be read as an allegory of the life of a slave, partly by virtue of the slave identity of donkeys in fable.
Isis
Most readers are surprised when the series of amusing and ribald tales gives way to a religious conclusion. They may wonder why the deity who saves Lucius and enrolls him as a priest of her cult is not a Graeco-Roman god, but an Egyptian goddess. The abrupt shift in tone is the subject of much scholarly debate, but the appearance of Isis should not surprise us as much. Her cult had spread throughout the Greek and Roman worlds from Hellenistic times; a temple in Athens dates to the third century BCE, and there was a large sanctuary in Rome from the first century BCE. The temple that Lucius mentions was real and there were sanctuaries scattered all over the Mediterranean; a well-preserved temple in Pompeii now displays a long quotation from Apuleius on a large placard. Surviving statues depict Isis very much as a Graeco-Roman goddess, but bearing the attributes of the Egyptian Isis: the sistrum (rattle), a pitcher of Nile water, and a shawl with the characteristic “Isis knot.”