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The Golden Ass

Author Lucius Apuleius (Africanus)
Categories Classic, Sexuality, Humor
Language English
Published 1566
Word count 80,366
Excerpt

liberall sciences, and much profited under his masters there, whereby not without cause hee calleth himself the Nource of Carthage, and the celestial Muse and venerable mistresse of Africke. Soone after, at Athens (where in times past the well of all doctrine flourished) he tasted many of the cups of the muses, he learned the Poetry, Geometry, Musicke, Logicke, and the universall knowledge of Philosophy, and studied not in vaine the nine Muses, that is to say, the nine noble and royal disciplines.

Immediately after he went to Rome, and studied there the Latine tongue, with such labour and continuall study, that he achieved to great eloquence, and was known and approved to be excellently learned, whereby he might worthily be called Polyhistor, that is to say, one that knoweth much or many things.

And being thus no lesse endued with eloquence, than with singular learning, he wrote many books for them that should come after : whereof part by negligence of times be now intercepted and part now exta

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2004.09.25
Wikipedia

Written in the second century CE, The Golden Ass is a precursor to the literary genre of the episodic picaresque novel, in which Rabelais, Boccaccio, Voltaire, Defoe, and many others have followed. It is an imaginative, irreverent and amusing work that relates the ludicrous adventures of one Lucius, a virile young man who is obsessed with magic. Finding himself in Thessaly, the "birthplace of magic", Lucius eagerly seeks an opportunity to see magic being performed. His over-enthusiasm leads to his accidental transformation into an ass. In this guise, Lucius, a member of the Roman country aristocracy, is forced to witness and share the misery of slaves and destitute freemen who are reduced, to little more than beasts of burden by their exploitation at the hands of wealthy landowners.

The Golden Ass is the only surviving work of literature from the ancient Greco-Roman world to examine, from a first-hand perspective, the abhorrent condition of the lower classes. Yet despite its serious subject matter, the novel remains imaginative, witty, and often sexually explicit. Numerous amusing stories, many of which seem to be based on actual folk tales with their ordinary themes of simple-minded husbands, adulterous wives, and clever lovers, as well as the magical transformations that characterize the entire novel, are included within the main narrative. The longest of these inclusions is the tale of Cupid and Psyche, encountered here for the first but not the last time in Western literature. Apuleius' style is as amusing as his stories, for though he was not a Roman by birth, Apuleius was a master of Latin prose.