The Golden Ass
Also known as: Metamorphoses, Asinus Aureus, The Golden Asse
Apuleius’s comic-initiatory novel follows Lucius, whose reckless curiosity transforms him into a donkey. Enduring beatings, theft, and grotesque misadventures, he witnesses tales including Cupid and Psyche before salvation arrives through the goddess Isis, who restores him and leads him into her mysteries.
Description
The Golden Ass is the only complete Latin novel to survive antiquity. Set largely in Thessaly and Greece, it explores metamorphosis—literal and moral—through the misadventures of Lucius, changed into a donkey when he seeks to dabble in a witch’s ointments. As an animal he passes through owners and stations, exposing the violence, credulity, and sexual hypocrisy of assorted social types. Apuleius embeds multiple inset tales, the most famous being the myth of Cupid and Psyche, whose pattern of trial, descent, and reunion mirrors the book’s larger arc of error and redemption. In the climactic books, the goddess Isis appears in epiphany, directing Lucius to eat roses and later to be initiated into her—and Osiris’s—mysteries. Blending Milesian storytelling, Platonic color, and religious devotion, the work closes with Lucius restored in body and consecrated in a new spiritual identity.
Historiography
The novel survives complete in medieval Latin manuscripts, with principal witnesses from the 11th–12th centuries and later humanist copies. Its relationship to the Greek Onos and a lost Metamorphoseis has long been debated; Apuleius appears to have reworked the tradition extensively, adding the Isis books and the Cupid–Psyche myth. Renaissance readers (Boccaccio, Ficino) prized it for style and allegory, and early modern translations (Adlington) shaped its English reception.
Date Notes
Composed in Latin in the later 2nd century CE; adapts material from a Greek narrative tradition (the lost Metamorphoseis and Lucian’s Onos).
Archetypes
Major Characters
- Lucius
- Isis
- Photis
- Charite
- Milo
Myths
- The Tale of Cupid and Psyche
- Isis’s Epiphany and Lucius’s Initiation
Facts
- The Golden Ass is the only ancient Latin novel to survive complete.
- Apuleius reworked a Greek ass-story tradition, surpassing Lucian’s shorter Onos in scope and theology.
- Books 1–10 emphasize comic-macabre satire; Book 11 pivots to religious epiphany and initiation.
- The inset myth of Cupid and Psyche is the earliest surviving full version of that tale.
- Lucius’s restoration by roses occurs during the Navigium Isidis festival at Cenchreae.
- Isis and Osiris are given a universalizing, philosophic interpretation in Apuleius’s finale.
- Medieval transmission in multiple manuscripts ensured continuity into Renaissance humanism.
- William Adlington’s 1566 English version popularized the work in early modern England.
- The novel blends Milesian tales, Platonic motifs, and provincial Roman settings.
- Its animal-transformation plot became a touchstone for later European narrative experiments.