The Golden Ass

While Lucius waits in dread of his imminent castration, a slave of Charite’s arrives with dreadful news: Charite and Tlepolemus are both dead. Thrasyllus, a jealous rival of Tlepolemus’s who lusted obsessively after Charite, schemed his way into the couple’s affections, looking to get Tlepolemus out of the way so he could make his move. He got his chance while the two men were out hunting one day: When they scared up a dangerous wild boar, Thrasyllus knocked Tlepolemus from his horse and let the animal kill him, finishing him off with a final spear thrust.

When Charite heard this news, she went into such deep mourning that she no longer bathed or emerged from the house, but “closed the books on the daylight in which we live” (164). Thrasyllus nonetheless began to push remarriage on her—an idea she stalwartly resisted.

One night, Charite had a terrible dream in which Tlepolemus’s ghost appeared to her and warned her of all Thrasyllus’s cruelty, showing her the final wound Thrasyllus inflicted on him. Appalled, Charite began to prepare her vengeance. Telling Thrasyllus she’d sleep with him secretly one night, she instead got him drunk and blinded him with a hairpin. Then she rushed to Tlepolemus’s tomb, where—after explaining all that had happened to the horrified onlookers—she threw herself on a sword and died. The blinded Thrasyllus, overwhelmed with guilt, sealed himself up in the couple’s tomb to starve to death.

In the wake of this awful tragedy, all of Charite’s slaves are getting ready to run away. Lucius joins this traveling group, though he’s very nervous about the rapacious wolves that lurk along the road. As it turns out, the travelers are more in danger from suspicious villagers, who take them for thieves and loose their dogs on them.

Battered and weary, the travelers sit down to nurse their wounds. But a local shepherd ominously tells them that this is no place to rest. Not long afterward, a desperate old man runs up and begs someone to rescue his grandson, who has fallen down a ravine; the man who goes to help never comes back, and the rest of the travelers find a dragon devouring his corpse. They hurry swiftly on.

At last, the group comes to a town, and rests there. Lucius recounts a sordid story about this town: A freed slave who lived here cheated on his long-term partner, who killed herself and her newborn child in her grief. The freed slave’s former master, who had given this man an important position, decreed that he should be tortured to death—smeared with honey and devoured by ants. The travelers leave this gloomy place quickly.

The next town is more hospitable, and the travelers resolve to settle here. They send Lucius to auction to make some money, but no one seems to want this worn-out (and rather bitey) donkey.

At last, though, an old man named Philebus buys him. Philebus turns out to be one of a cult of flamboyantly gay priests who worship the goddess Cybele, carrying an effigy of her around the streets and begging for money. It becomes Lucius’s job to carry this effigy; he accepts this task with bad grace, disliking the priests’ effeminacy and their violent self-flagellation (which are motivated less by religious fervor and more by the fact that they inspire good donations from the crowd).

One unfortunate day, while Lucius is braying with disgust as the priests enjoy an orgy, some men who are looking for a stolen donkey burst into the room, and the priests’ reputations as chaste and holy men are destroyed. They’re forced to leave town, and give Lucius a good beating for his part in their downfall. Soon, they find themselves guests of a man who worships the same goddess they do. Here, Lucius gets in trouble again: When a dog steals the joint of venison meant for dinner, the cook’s wife tells him to just butcher the donkey, spice it well, and no one will ever know. Yet again, Lucius’s life is in peril.

Lucius has another narrow escape when a rabid dog tears through the house, disrupting everyone’s dinner. Fearing that Lucius himself has become rabid, the priests lock him away until he demonstrates his health by drinking a big basin of water. As the priests get on the road, Lucius tells another ribald story: A woman conceals her lover from her husband in a large pottery jar, makes her husband believe that her lover is a potential jar-buyer, and then has sex with her lover even as her husband is in the jar, fixing it up for purchase.

The priests’ latest scam is divination: They write the exact same message on hundreds of mystic woodchips as an all-purpose reply to punters’ petitions. The words “An ox team cleaves the soil for just this reason: / Sown grain will sprout abundantly in season,” interpreted the right way, answer just about every question there is (190).

After the priests get arrested for stealing a sacred golden chalice, Lucius gets sold again, this time to a baker with a mean, cheating wife. This wife finds her various lovers with the assistance of an old lady, who tells her a story about another cheating wife.

Arete’s husband Barbarus tasks his servant Myrmex to keep any man from so much as looking at Arete. But inevitably, another man, Philesitherus, falls for her, and bribes Myrmex to look the other way and Arete to submit to him. Barbarus returns home unexpectedly while the couple is having sex, so Philesitherus is forced to flee without his shoes. When Barbarus goes hunting for the shoes’ owner, Philesitherus plays a clever trick, accusing Myrmex of stealing his shoes. Barbarus falls for it and believes the whole thing has been a misunderstanding.

The baker’s wife admires Philesitherus’s quick wit, and wishes her own lover were as clever. She invites her lover over that very evening, and finds herself in much the same situation as the characters in the story when the baker returns home unexpectedly. She hides her lover under a trough, and learns that the friend the baker was meant to dine with also has a cheating wife, whom the friend and the baker caught in the act! That woman’s unfortunate lover hid in a wicker laundry bleaching basket, which uses sulfur smoke to whiten clothes; by the time the husband found him, he was already half-dead from the fumes, and will be fully dead by the time the husband is through with him.

The baker’s wife hypocritically curses this woman up and down, all the while thinking of how she can get her own lover out of there. Lucius, indignant, decides to help the baker out: He sees the lover’s fingers sticking out from under the trough and stamps hard on them, so the young man screams and reveals himself. The baker reacts, not with outrage, but with a modest proposal: Why doesn’t he share this handsome young fellow with his wife, and no more said about it?

The baker sleeps with the young man, beats him, and divorces his wife not long after. Infuriated, the baker’s ex-wife goes to a witch for help; the witch sends a frightening female ghost to seduce and then murder the baker.

With his latest master dead, Lucius gets sold again, this time to a poor farmer, a kind man who suffers cold and hunger right alongside Lucius. The farmer’s fortune seems about to take a turn when he offers a weary traveler a place to stay and the traveler repays him generously by hosting a banquet. But at that banquet, terrifying omens begin to appear. First, a chicken gives birth to a live chick; then, rather more dramatically, an “enormous fountain of blood” rises up under the lunch table, and all the animals in the vicinity start attacking each other (211).

It turns out these portents herald a disaster: A rich and greedy neighbor has hideously slain the host’s sons in a land dispute. The host promptly slits his own throat in despair. The appalled farmer tries to go home, but a soldier who wants to steal Lucius stops him, and they fight. The farmer escapes, but now he’s made an enemy. He and Lucius hide in a friend’s house, but the soldier and his comrades eventually find the farmer when Lucius happens to peek out of the attic. The farmer gets dragged off to jail, and Lucius is left in the hands of the soldiers.

The soldiers take Lucius a small city where a terrible crime has just been committed. A stepmother fell obsessively in love with her stepson, and eventually propositioned him. The stepson refused her, so she first tried to poison him, and then, when her own son drank the poison intended for her stepson, she framed the stepson for the younger boy’s murder, claiming that her stepson propositioned her and killed her son in revenge when she refused him. The slave she sent to buy the poison corroborates her story, and it seems as if the stepson would be convicted.

But a single juror, a doctor, objects, and tells the court that he sold the poison not to the stepson, but to the slave who testified. What’s more, the doctor was so uncomfortable about the shady transaction that he gave the slave a soporific rather than a real poison: The young boy, presumed dead, might just be deeply asleep. So it proves. The slave gets executed and the stepmother exiled.

The soldiers sell Lucius to a pair of brothers: a pastry chef and a cook. These kind, generous men treat Lucius well—and as a bonus, they often leave him unattended in rooms full of delicacies, upon which he feasts: “I wasn’t so dumb, such a true ass, as to leave this exquisite food lying there and turn to the roughest repast there ever was, my hay” (229).

But the brothers get suspicious, and after accusing each other of stealing the food, they resolve to keep an eye out for the real thief. When they finally catch Lucius in the act of devouring all their treats, they laugh uproariously enough that other people come to see what’s so funny. Lucius gets sold to a rich man, Thiasus, as a novelty: the gourmand donkey that feasts, drinks, and reclines at banquet tables like a human. In time, carefully pretending to “learn” bit by bit so that he won’t be slaughtered as a demon or a freak, Lucius also answers questions and communicates with the people around him.

Thiasus is putting together a gladiatorial show, and he makes Lucius the star. He becomes very fond of his donkey: “Among many other compliments, he professed himself thrilled that in me, a single being, he possessed both someone he could have dinner with and someone he could ride” (234). He also turns a handsome profit selling audiences with Lucius—including allowing a lady who takes a shine to the donkey to sleep with the animal.

Thiasus realizes that there might be money in a spectacle like that, and finds a disgraced woman to perform a sex act live with Lucius. This woman was the daughter-in-law of a man who left for a trip while his wife was heavily pregnant, and ordered her to murder their new baby if it turned out to be a girl. The wife indeed had a daughter, but gave her to the neighbors to raise. Some years later, when the girl grew up, the wife cautioned her son not to get interested in the neighbor’s daughter, since she was in fact his sister. The son agreed to keep this secret, and when his sister was orphaned, he took brotherly care of her.

The woman Lucius was to have sex with on stage was this son’s wife, who became suspicious of the secret sister, believing her husband was having an affair with her. She tricked the girl into meeting her in a distant villa, and murdered her horribly by burning her genitals with a torch. Then she killed both her husband and the doctor with poison, though the doctor managed to tell his wife what had happened before he died.

The murderer then gave birth to a baby daughter, whom she also poisoned. She also tried to poison the doctor’s wife for knowing too much, but that woman managed to make it to the governor’s house and report all the murderous lady’s crimes. The murderer was sentenced to be thrown to the wild beasts. But first, she is to be forced to have public sex with Lucius—an idea that doesn’t appeal to Lucius at all. He sees a glimmer of hope for escape: Spring has rolled round again, and the roses that can cure his donkeyhood will come into bloom.

Before he can get a bite comes the day of the performance. Lucius first watches an elaborate masque, in which actors perform the Judgment of Paris, the contest between the goddesses to determine which was the most beautiful that triggered the Trojan War. Lucius has a few choice words about self-interested juries here: The legendary Paris, who decided this contest on the basis of what was in it for him, was only the first!

Then, it’s time for the donkey sex. Lucius is hesitant and frightened, not just because he doesn’t want to have public sex with a murderer, but because he’s afraid that the wild animals who will thereafter tear this woman apart will also devour him. At the last minute, he manages to escape, and runs away to the coastal town of Cenchreae, where he falls asleep on the beach.

Waking up under the moonlight, Lucius wades into the ocean and prays to Isis, the goddess of the moon, whom he believes to be the most powerful and benevolent of all. Much to his surprise, she appears to him in person, a spectacular figure in flowing robes. She tells him that she’s taken pity on him, and will cure him the next day. He only needs to eat the garland of roses from a procession in her honor, and he’ll transform back into a human. But thereafter, he must devote his life to her service. She’ll be his patron goddess, and will even prepare a home for him in the afterlife. Dazzled and overjoyed, Lucius willingly agrees.

All goes just as Isis tells him: During a spectacular procession the next day, Lucius eats the ceremonial roses and returns to human form. A chastened (and happier) man, he devotes himself to worshiping Isis, joining her mystery cult through a solemn secret ritual.

But Isis isn’t done with him yet. She also wants him to become a priest in the temple of her husband, Osiris, sending him prophetic dreams to gently lead him in that direction. By this time, Lucius has learned to be patient, receptive, and obedient, so he allows the signs and portents to slowly guide him towards serving both mystery cults. As a final sacrifice, he shaves his lovely hair to join the cult of Osiris, unashamed even when he returns to his work as a prominent lawyer: “I did not cloak or conceal my baldness, wherever I went and whomever I met” (272). A holy man made wise by his ordeals, he lives a good and joyful life, serving his gods and practicing his profession.