The Golden Ass

The narrator is turned into a donkey and undergoes various tribulations before recovering his human form. The only Latin novel to survive complete, it is a unique curiosity shop of diverse treasures: fantastical, comic, bawdy, beautiful, violent, and finally—biggest surprise of all—devoutly religious. "It smells of incense and urine," Flaubert said. Much of the work consists of tales related by the characters whom the donkey comes across, of which the longest is Cupid and Psyche, a fabulously rococo display of exquisite and enchanted storytelling. The virtuoso beauty of the description of Cupid’s wings is unbeatable. "Reader, listen up:… show more.

This Roman novel cast a spell on me when I first read it, and that’s fitting, since the book’s all about magic. Our narrator, a good-looking young man whose curiosity about witchcraft is even more insatiable than his sex drive, is turned into “an ass from head to hoof, a beast of burden instead of the man called Lucius.” Mostly through the ass’s eyes we see the underbelly of the Roman Empire: gangs of thieves; peasants trying to eke out a living; traveling fortune-tellers, priests, and other grifters. Inset throughout the novel are further stories of adventure, many quite racy.… show more.

The students in my Magic and Witchcraft class always love this exuberant tale. It is both whimsical and deadly serious. Even its comic elements expose societal injustice and human cruelty. The book is irreverent in the extreme, but its resolution is profoundly spiritual. Apuleius of Madura was a renowned Platonic philosopher who lived in the aristocratic world of late second-century Rome. His picaresque story (called Metamorphoses in Latin) is the only classical novel to survive in its entirety. The premise of the story is that a man named Lucius has an illicit fascination with magic. While he is visiting a… show more.