The Golden Ass

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 159

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Books 1-6

Books 7-11

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Symbols & Motifs

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Symbols & Motifs

The Ass

Not for nothing is Lucius transformed into an ass: The symbolism fits him just right. The donkey has long represented stubborn persistence, lowliness, foolishness, brutishness, and hard work—qualities the pleasure-loving upper-class Lucius must either embrace or admit to during his ordeal. But with its long, sensitive ears, the donkey is also a listener. As Lucius remarks, donkeys get to hear all kinds of stories that humans miss. The story’s donkey imagery thus underlines that Lucius’s metamorphosis isn’t just a freak accident, but a humbling education: Being a donkey “render[s him] well-rounded, if not wise” (195). As a donkey, he gains knowledge of both the world and his own nature.

The Statue of Diana

The astonishing statue of Diana and Actaeon that decorates Byrrhena’s foyer foreshadows Lucius’s entire story: It represents a human’s magical metamorphosis into an animal, reflects the transformative power of art, and suggests that moon goddesses are not to be trifled with! As a fiction that brings strange truths to life, this statue echoes The Golden Ass—but its perfection counterintuitively makes a subtle case for the superior power of storytelling among the arts. The statue’s intense-but-fantastical realism, which is the “spitting image[] of reality,” makes a myth live and breathe—but the book we are reading is what brings this imaginary statue itself to life (24).

Hair

Early in the story, Lucius remarks that he’s always had a thing about hair, and considers it the true determiner of beauty: Venus herself, if she lost her hair, “would not even please her own husband, Vulcan,” he declares (27). But by the end of the story, Lucius himself has willingly surrendered his hair to become a priest of Isis and Osiris, and does not “cloak or conceal” his baldness (272). This points to hair’s important symbolic role as an ornament and a concealer. Like language, hair can prettify, please, and disguise. But after his ordeal as a donkey, Lucius has had enough of elegant concealment (and perhaps of sexual misadventure, too): In his maturity, only the bald truth suits him.