The original title of this book, The Transformation of Lucius Apuleius of Madaura, was early shortened to The Golden Ass because Apuleius had written it in the style of the professional story-tellers who, as Pliny mentions in one of his letters, used to preface their street-corner entertainments with: 'Give me a copper and I'll tell you a golden story.' So 'golden' conveys an indulgent smile rather than genuine appreciation.
William Adlington, in whose vigorous early-Elizabethan translation the book is still best known, remarks in his introduction that Apuleius wrote 'in so dark and high a style, in so strange and absurd words and in such new invented phrases, as he seemed rather to set it forth to show his magnificent prose than to participate his doings to others'. Adlington has missed the point: Apuleius, who could write a good plain prose when he chose, as his Discourse on Magic and his God of Socrates prove, was parodying the extravagant language which the 'Milesian' story-tellers used, like barkers at country fairs today, as a means of impressing simple-minded audiences. The professional story-teller, or sgéalai, is still found in the West of Ireland. I have heard one complimented as 'speaking such fine hard Irish that Devil two words together in it would any man understand'; but this hard Irish, like Apuleius's hard Latin, is always genuinely archaic, not humorously coined for the occasion.
Why did Apuleius choose to write in this eccentric style? For the same reason that Rabelais did. The parallel is close. Both were priests-pious, lively, exceptionally learned, provincial priests-who found that the popular tale gave them a wider field for their descriptions of contemporary morals and manners, punctuated by philosophical asides, than any more respectable literary form.
In my translation I have made no attempt to bring out the oddness of the Latin by writing in a style, say, somewhere between Lyly's Euphues and Amanda Ros's Irene Iddesleigh; paradoxically, the effect of oddness is best achieved in convulsed times like the present by writing in as easy and sedate an English as possible. Here is the same sentence from Cupid's address to Psyche as translated by Adlington, by the anonymous Victorian author of the Bohn's Classical Library version (1881) and by myself:
Et hic adhuc infantilis uterus gestat nobis infantem alium, si texeris nostra secreta silentio, divinum, si profanaveris, mortalem.
Thou hast a young and tender child couched in this young and tender belly of thine, who shall be made if thou conceal my secret, an immortal god, but otherwise a mortal creature.
Adlington.
Infantine as you are, you are pregnant with another infant which if you preserve my secret in silence, will be born divine, but if you profane it, it will be mortal.
Bohn's Victorian.
Though you are still only a child, you will soon have a child of your own which shall be born divine if you keep our secret, but mortal if you divulge it.
R.G.
When one tries to make the English rendering of any Latin text convey the sense of the original, the same problem of impersonation arises as when one tries to broadcast another's lecture or preach another's sermon. It is essentially a moral problem: how much is owed to the letter, and how much to the spirit. 'Stick strictly to the script', and the effect of authenticity is lost. Here I have sometimes felt obliged to alter the order not only of phrases but of sentences, where English prose logic differs from Latin; and to avoid the nuisance of footnotes I have brought their substance up into the story itself whenever it reads obscurely. Adlington often did the same.
Adlington was a pretty good scholar, but the text he used had not yet been critically examined and emended, and no reliable Latin dictionary had yet been published, so he often made bad mistakes. But at least he realized that The Transformations was, above all, a religious novel:
'Since this book of Lucius is a figure of man's life and toucheth the nature and manners of mortal man, egging them forward from their asinal form to their human and perfect shape (beside the pleasant and delectable jests therein contained)… I trust that the matter shall be esteemed by such as not only delight to please their fancies in recording the same, but also take a pattern thereby to regenerate their minds from brutal and beastly custom.'
However, though Lucius's conversion at the close of the story is a real and moving one (unlike the perfunctory conversions with which Defoe, for reasons of policy, ended his low-life novels of Roxana and Moll Flanders), it is unlikely that many readers have ever spent much time over it. The book's popularity, ever since it was written, has rested almost wholly on its 'pleasant and delectable jest', especially the bawdy ones.
The main religious principles that Apuleius was inculcating were wholly opposed to those of the Christianity of his day. The first was that men are far from equal in the sight of Heaven, its favour being reserved for the well-born and well-educated, in so far as they are conscious of the moral responsibilities of their station: that only such can be admitted into the divine mysteries and so mitigate their fear of death by a hope of preferential treatment in the after-world. Slaves and freedmen cannot possibly acquire the virtue, intelligence or discretion needed to qualify them for initiation into these mysteries, even if they could afford to pay the high fees demanded. Slavery carries a stigma of moral baseness; and Apuleius's slaves are always cowardly, wicked, deceitful or treacherous.
To be abjectly poor, though free, he regarded as a sign not necessarily of moral baseness but of ill-luck, and his second main religious principle was that ill-luck is catching. The virtuous nobleman does not set his dogs on the poor man, and there is nothing to prevent him from sending a slave round to relieve his immediate distresses; but, like the priest and the Levite in Jesus's parable of the Samaritan, he should carefully avoid all personal contact with ill-luck. Thus when Aristomenes the provision merchant, in Apuleius's opening story, found his old friend Socrates in such a shocking plight at Hypata, he should have been content to toss him a coin or two, spit in his own bosom for luck, and leave him to his fate; instead of officiously trying to rescue and reform him-actually dragging the reluctant wretch into the baths and scrubbing his filthy body with his own hands! Socrates was in any case fated to die miserably, and his bad luck fastened securely on Aristomenes, who soon found himself in Socrates's position-forced to change his name, abandon his wife and family, and become a hunted exile in daily terror of death.
The fault which involved Lucius in all his miseries was that, though a nobleman, he decided on a frivolous love-affair with a slave-girl. A slave-girl is necessarily base; baseness is unlucky; ill-luck is catching. He also transgressed the third main religious principle: he meddled with the supernatural. His ulterior motive in making love to the girl was to persuade her to betray the magical secrets of her mistress, who was a witch. Yet he had been plainly warned against this fault in Byrrhaena's house at Hypata by being shown a wonderful statue of Actaeon's transformation into a stag, his punishment for prying into the mysteries of Diana. A nobleman should not play with black magic: he should satisfy his spiritual needs by being initiated into a respectable mystery cult along with men of his own station; even then he should not thrust himself on the gods but patiently await their summons. Lucius's punishment was to be temporarily transformed not into an owl, as he had hoped, but into an ass.
The owl was a bird of wisdom. The ass, as the Goddess Isis herself reminded Lucius at Cenchreae, was the most hateful to her of all beasts in existence; but she did not account for her aversion. Adlington's explanation, that the ass is a notoriously stupid brute, does not go far enough. The ass was in fact sacred to the God Set, whom the Greeks knew as Typhon, her ancient persecutor and the murderer of her husband Osiris. In Apuleius's day the ass typified lust, cruelty and wickedness, and Plutarch-from whom he claimed descent-had recorded an Egyptian festival in which asses and men with Typhonic colouring (i.e., sandy-red like a wild ass's coat) were triumphantly pushed over cliffs in vengeance for Osiris's murder. When Charit?, in Apuleius's story of the bandits' cave, escapes and rides home on ass-back, he remarks that this is an extraordinary sight-a virgin riding in triumph on an ass. He means: 'dominating the lusts of the flesh without whip or bridle'.
Yet originally the ass had been so holy a beast that its ears, conventionalized as twin feathers sprouting from the end of a sceptre, became the mark of sovereignty in the hand of every Egyptian deity: and the existence of an early Italian ass-cult is proved by the cognomens Asina and Asellus in the distinguished Scipionian, Claudian and Annian families at Rome. That Lucius was eventually initiated into the rites of Osiris by a Roman priest called Asinius was an amusing coincidence. Asses are connected in western European folklore, especially French, with the mid-winter Saturnalia at the conclusion of which the ass-eared god, later the Christmas Fool with his ass-eared cap, was killed by his rival, the Spirit of the New Year-the child Horus, or Harpocrates, or the infant Zeus. That there was an eastern European tradition identifying Saturn's counterpart Cronos with the ass is proved by the anonymous Byzantine scholar of the twelfth century (quoted by Piccolomini in the Rivista di Filologia, ii, 159) who in drawing up a list of metals, colours, flowers and beasts appropriate to the seven planetary gods gives Cronos's attributes as lead, blue, the hyacinth, and the ass. This explains the otherwise unaccountable popular connection between asses and fools; asses are really far more sagacious than horses.
Until nearly the end of his life as an ass, in the course of which he gets involved in the hysterical and fraudulent popular rites of the Syrian Goddess, Lucius is a beast of ill-luck. And ill-luck is catching: each of his masters in turn either dies violently, is locked up in gaol or suffers some lesser misfortune. The spell begins to lift only when he enters the household of Thyasus, the Corinthian judge, and is there encouraged slowly to reassert his humanity.
The seasonal transformations of the variously-named god of the mystery-cults, the Spirit of the Year, were epitomized in the Athenian Lenaea festival and corresponding performances throughout the ancient world, including north-western Europe. The initiate identified himself with the god, and seems to have undergone twelve emblematic transformations-represented by Lucius's 'twelve stoles'-as he passed through the successive Houses of the Zodiac before undergoing his ritual death and rebirth. 'Transformations' therefore conveys the secondary sense of 'spiritual autobiography'; and Lucius had spent twelve months in his ass's skin, from one rose-season to the next, constantly changing his House, until his death as an ass and rebirth as a devotee of Isis.
The literal story of Apuleius's adventures in Greece can be re-constructed only in vague outline. It is known that he was a rich and well-connected young man born at Madaura, a Roman colony in the interior of Morocco, early in the second century A.D.; his father had been a duumvir, or provincial magistrate, who on his death left his two sons two million sesterces, about ￡20,000 in gold, between them. Apuleius went first to Carthage University, and afterwards to Athens where he studied Platonic philosophy. While still at Athens, if the story of Thelyphron the student is in part autobiographical, he ran short of money after a visit to the Olympic Games and was forced for awhile to live on his wits. Perhaps he had run through his allowance by drinking and whoring in the brothels and getting mixed up with the criminal classes like the debaunched young nobleman Thrasyllus (in the story of the bandits' cave). At all events, when he finally reached Corinth and was given a helping hand by Thyasus, he was pretty well down at heel and ripe for repentance and conversion.
After his initiation into the mysteries of Isis, he went to Rome where he studied Latin oratory and made a success at the Bar. Later he travelled widely in Asia Minor and Egypt, studying philosophy and religion. While on a visit to Alexandria by way of Libya, he fell ill at Oea, on the shores of the Gulf of Sirte, where a young man named Sicinius Pontianus who had been his contemporary at Athens University nursed him back to health. Apuleius grew friendly with Pontianus's mother Pudentilla, and Pontianus begged him to marry her, despite the great disparity of their ages, on the ground that fourteen years of widowhood had given her a nervous complaint for which the doctors assured her that marriage was the only remedy. Apuleius consented, but when Pudentilla, who was very rich, made over all her money to him and Pontianus died soon afterwards, the rest of the family charged him with having poisoned him and gained her affections by magic. Apuleius's successful and very amusing speech in his own defense, A Discourse on Magic, survives. I should like to have been present in court to hear him sum up a part of his argument with the ludicrously dry: 'I have now stated, Gentlemen, why in my opinion there is nothing at all in common between magicians and fish.'
Though the charge that he used magic failed, it was enough to make ignorant people, including many prominent Christians, believe later that The Transformations was to be read as literal truth. Even St Augustine writes doubtfully: 'Apuleius either reported or invented his transformation into asinal shape'; and Lactantius in his Divine Institutes is distressed that the miracles of Apuleius, like those of the gymnosophist Apollonius of Tyana, are quoted by anti-Christian controversialists as more wonderful than those of Jesus Christ.
Evidently St Augustine and his credulous contemporaries had not read Lucius of Patra's popular novel The Ass, now lost, or Lucian of Samosata's Lucius, or the Ass, still extant, which is based on it; otherwise, they would have realized that Apuleius had borrowed the plot of The Transformations from one or other of these two sources. (Lucius's date is unknown; but Lucian and Apuleius were close contemporaries). Lucian's novel[1] is shorter and balder than The Transformations. His slave-girl Palaestra has none of the charm that excuses Apuleius's intimate account of the love-affair with her counterpart Fotis; she merely plays the female drill-sergeant, initiating her recruit into the discipline of sex as one teaches arms-drill by numbers. Lucian includes none of Apuleius's incidental stories, such as the stories of Aristomenes, Thelyphron, Cupid and Psyche; nor the Festival of Laughter episode-there really was such a festival at Hypata-nor the hoodooing of the baker; and his hero returns to human shape at Thessalonica, not Corinth, during his exhibition in the amphitheatre, when without divine assistance he manages to grab some roses from one of the attendants. The comic climax of Lucian's story comes when the ex-ass returns hopefully to the rich woman who has recently played Pasipha? with him and proposes to renew their intimacy: she throws him out of her house, greatly aggrieved that he is now a mere man, quite incapable of satisfying her needs. Lucian's stories all leave a bad taste in the mouth; Apuleius's do not, even when he is handling the same bawdy situation. His rich Pasipha?, for example, is no mere bestialist, but shows her genuine love for the ass by planting pure, sincere, wholly unmeretricious kisses on his scented nose.
Apuleius constantly uses a device now known on the variety stage as the 'double take'. The audience applauds, but finds that it has applauded too soon; the real point, either funnier or more macabre than anyone expected, was yet to come. The brilliance of his showmanship suggests that he turned professional storyteller during his wanderings in Greece, using Lucius of Patra's Ass as his stock piece-he felt its relevance to his case and Lucius happened to be his own name-and stringing a number of popular stories to it. Perhaps one day Thyasus, the Corinthian judge, heard a huge shout of laughter from the servants' quarters of his house and, going along to investigate, stopped to listen to one of Apuleius's droll stories; and so befriended him without at first knowing who he was.
It is unlikely, by the way, that Apuleius really had relatives at Hypata; the incident of his meeting with Byrrhaena there is also found in Lucian's novel. It is equally unlikely that Greek was his mother-tongue, and his reference to family connections with Ephyra (Corinth), Mount Hymettus, celebrated for its honey, and Taenarus the main Greek entrance to the Underworld, are clearly allegorical. These places are chosen as ancient cult-centres of the Triple Goddess whom he adored in her successive aspects as the sovereign of Life, Love and Death.
He probably invented none of his stories, though it is clear that he improved them. The story of Cupid and Psyche is still widely current as a primitive folk-tale in countries as far apart as Scotland and Hindustan; but taking hints from passages in Plato's Phaedo and Republic he turned it into a neat philosophical allegory of the progress of the rational soul towards intellectual love. This feat won him the approval even of the better sort of Christians, including Synnesius, the early fifth-century Bishop of Ptolemais; and Cupid and Psyche is still Apuleius's best known, though by no means his most golden, story. His devotion to Platonic philosophy is shown in the God of Socrates, which St Augustine attacked violently.
St Augustine's dislike of his fellow-countryman Apuleius seems to have sprung from an uncomfortable recognition that they would one day come up together for the judgement of posterity. He was born near Madaura, Apuleius's birthplace, whose inhabitants he addresses in his 232nd Epistle as 'my fathers', and went to school there; then, like Apuleius, he went on to Carthage University. Book II of his Confessions begins: 'I will now call to mind my past foulness and the carnal corruption of my soul… In that sixteenth year of the age of my flesh, when the madness of unlicensed lust took rule over me and I resigned myself wholly to it… I walked the streets of Babylon and wallowed in the mire thereof as if in a bed of spices and precious ointments.' He goes on to describe how he took up with a gang of young Mohocks (like the ones that terrorized Hypata) and so fell into the mortal sin of theft. Still following the footsteps of Apuleius, he studied oratory at Rome. It is not until Book VIII that after a severe struggle with himself he hears a voice from Heaven directing him to read a text from St. Paul, becomes suddenly converted, once more like Apuleius, and determines to devote his life to God.
His father Patricius, a nominal Christian, was a violent, vulgar fellow from whom he inherited neither rank, money nor a predisposition to virtue; so that even had he wished to become a priest of Isis he could not have qualified for the houour. But the Christian mysteries were open to everyone, slave or noble, of good or evil life, and the greater the sinner the warmer his welcome to the fold. Though his conversion was as genuine as that of Apuleius, it does not seem to have made his life nearly so happy. Tormented by the memory of his sins, he flaunts his dirty linen for our detestation: 'Alas, terrible Judge, I began by robbing a pear-tree, I ended in adultery and the hateful Manichaean heresy!' Apuleius does nothing of the sort. His Transformations is as moral a work as the Confessions; but he presents his errors in humorous allegory, not as a literal record, and admits that he learned a great deal from them which has since stood him in good stead: granted, his love affair with Fotis was a mistake, and he paid dearly for it, but it would be hypocritical to pretend that it was not a charming and instructive experience while it lasted.
St Augustine described with horror the fascination that the amphitheatre and the study of oratory had held for him in his unregenerate days. Apuleius, though a priest of Osiris, continued to practise as a barrister and in later life organized the gladiatorial and wild-beast shows for the whole province of Africa. St Augustine rejected Platonic philosophy as insufficient for salvation; Apuleius was true to it and showed his scorn of contemporary Christianity by making the most wicked of his characters, the baker's wife, 'reject all true religion in favour of the fantastic and blasphemous cult of an Only God' and use the Christian Love-feast as 'an excuse for getting drunk quite early in the day and playing the whore at all hours.[2] One of St Augustine's biographers, E. de Pressensé, has written approvingly: 'He kept dragging along the chain of guilt… and unlike his fellow-country-man Apuleius whose greatest pleasure was to arrange words in harmonious order and who had no desire beyond that of calling forth applause… still felt sick at heart.' This is unfair to Apuleius. His greatest desire was not applause: it was to show his gratitude to the Goddess whom he adored, by living a life worthy of her favour-a serene, honourable and useful life, with no secret worm of guilt gnawing at his heart as though he had withheld some confession from her or mistrusted her compassion.
Recent researches into the history of witchcraft show that Apuleius had a first-hand knowledge of the subject. The Thessalian witches preserved the pre-Aryan tradition of a 'left-hand', or destructive, magic performed in honour of the Triple Moon-goddess in her character of Hecate; the 'right-hand', or beneficent, magic performed in honour of the same Goddess being now concentrated in the pure mysteries of Isis and Demeter. It must be remembered that in St Augustine's day the sovereignty of the indivisible male Trinity had not yet been encroached upon by Mariolatry, and Apuleius's splendid address to Isis could not therefore be read with indulgence as an anticipation of the Litany of the Blessed Virgin with which it has much in common. Apuleius did not deny the power of the left-hand cult, any more than the Christians denied the power of the Devil: but he knew that honourable men like himself ought to leave it alone and that if they kept strictly to the right-hand cult, the devotees of the left-hand could have no power over them. On one point, at least, besides the need for practising virtue in preparation for the after-life, he agreed with the Christians: his rejection of the official Olympian mythology, which Plato had long before discredited as a barbaric survival, appears in Cupid and Psyche, where the gods and goddesses behave like naughty children. But he wrote of them humorously and affectionately as Apollonius Rhodius had done in his Argonautica, not in the scoffing style of Lucian's Dialogues.
Nothing much more of importance remains to be said about Apuleius except that he became a priest of Aesculapius, the God of Medicine, as well as of Isis and Osiris, and was also a poet and a historian; unfortunately his histories and poems have not survived.
Now: LECTOR INTENDE, LAETABERIS.
R.G.
Deyá,
Majorca, 1947
