Thought on The Golden Ass by Apuleius

In her book Pompeii, Mary Beard counsels wisely, saying that no one can read confident, unequivocal significance into anything dug up in an archaeological site, since we do not know if this particular object was representative, a prized possession, rubbish, discarded, lost, cherished or whatever. What, then, is any contemporary reader to make of perhaps the only piece of Latin fiction from ancient Rome to have survived intact? The Golden Ass by Apuleius in its translation by Robert Graves is certainly readable. It is certainly farcical. But does it prove, for instance, that in ancient Rome, it was quite normal for human beings to change into asses? Or that Roman asses write good Latin?

Imagine an age, two millennia hence, when printed words have become irrelevant, since texts can be downloaded, pre-understood, directly into the brain. Suppose an archaeological dig in the remnants of the only twentieth century city to have been discovered unearthed only one book, a novel from the thriller or crime section of an airport bookshop. One wonders what contemporary readers might conclude about a society from millennia past that appeared to be obsessed with doing violence to young women, since that might appear to be a common thread in much pulp fiction. One is reminded of an episode of Star Trek where Kirk and Spock find themselves in a society where everyone dresses and behaves like film-set Chicago gangsters, because once upon a time a spaceship landed there to leave behind a book about Al Capone.

Perhaps we are missing something in the Golden Ass. Perhaps the regular references to different gods held real significance for the ancients that went beyond storytelling. Perhaps… and so what if it did? Our understanding of the text would be no deeper, our ability to read the book would not be enhanced.

What does strike a modern reader is just how much time Lucius, the book’s principle character, spends thinking about and pursuing opportunities for sex. Or perhaps Apuleius’s text survived from a particular section of the bookshop. Despite some obvious differences, what is very interesting about the Golden Ass is just how mundane and even familiar are many of the situations in the sitcom. Human beings to have seem to have very similar weaknesses within these pages from two millennia ago as they do today. And Lucius’s intensely moral destiny is perhaps similar to a Hollywood denouement, where a hero rides stoically into the sunset, eventually proving to be just too pure, too good for this world. Some things do not appear to change.