The Golden Ass
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The Golden Ass, prose narrative of the 2nd century ce by Lucius Apuleius, who called it Metamorphoses.
In all probability Apuleius used material from a lost Metamorphoses by Lucius of Patrae, which is cited by some as the source for an extant Greek work on a similar theme, the brief Lucius, or the Ass (attributed to the Greek rhetorician Lucian). Though Apuleius’s picaresque novel is fiction, its hero has been seen as a partial portrait of its author. The work is particularly valuable for its description of the ancient religious mysteries. Lucius’s restoration from animal to human shape with the aid of Isis and his acceptance into her priesthood suggest that Apuleius himself had been initiated into that cult.
Considered a rare portrait of ancient manners, the work has been valued also for its entertaining and at times bawdy episodes that alternate between the dignified, the ludicrous, the voluptuous, and the horrible. Its “Cupid and Psyche” tale (books 4–6) has been frequently imitated by later writers, notably William Morris in The Earthly Paradise and C.S. Lewis in the novel Till We Have Faces. Some of Lucius’s adventures reappear in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Alain-René Lesage’s Gil Blas.
