One of the earliest novels to survive, a hilarious and bawdy story of a young man turned into an ass and the adventures that follow. Gives the author a chance to chronicle different aspects of Roman society, and the characters you encounter certainly have their modern day counterparts. Graves' translation is extremely readable. Things slack off a little toward the end, but overall this is one book from Roman times that you can easily read for pleasure, and not just out of a sense of historical curiosity, in the 21st century. ( )

The Golden Ass is a bildungsroman. Lucius as a young man uses women like toilet paper. They are disposable objects. They are good for sex and useful as domestic appliances until they become inconvenient or he tires of them.

By and by his behavior offends The Goddess. She teaches him his lesson by transforming him into an ass, in which manifestation he is used by all and sundry in every conceivable manner. People steal him, work him nearly to death, starve him, buy him, sell him, you get the picture. Lucius learns what it is to be nothing but a convenience, and the experience is not pleasant.

After a whole series of terrifying, madcap adventures, Lucius learns his lesson and The Goddess changes him back into human form. As a man again, now having experienced his epiphany, he becomes a pillar of The Goddess's temple and a virtuous man -- by pagan lights.

Bible bangers who think Christianity is some kind of original sect -- if they think about what's actually happening in The Golden Ass (and most probably don't read at that level) -- are properly shocked by the story of Lucius. He sins. He is punished. He repents. He is reborn. He is baptized. He becomes a useful servant of The Goddess, and he does all of these things without the assistance of Mr. Jesus Christ.

So the whole truth is that all of 'Christianity' was lifted from one or another of the pagan sects that proliferated before the Christian era. There is nothing new or extraordinary about Christianity, including the virgin birth, the miracles, the martyrdom, the resurrection, the ascension, the trinity, and the rebirth -- those foundation stones of the Christian faith figured in pagan sects for many centuries before the birth of Christ.

Aside from its entertainment value (which is considerable), then, the true worth of 'The Golden Ass' today should be obvious to any modern reader. 'The Ass' is great stuff and we are lucky it survived an era in which so many other great books passed out of all knowledge. ( )

Transformations of Lucius, translated by Robert Graves. Limited to 2000 copies, in slip case Call No. PC 1.3 ( )

An incredible story that continues to entertain even after nearly 2000 years. Lucius's adventures and stories are the epitome of the storytelling art! If only we had more novels from this era survive, I can only wonder what incredible tales we have missed out on. The story about Cupid and Psyche is moving, so much tragedy yet with a happy ending and his conversion to Isis and Osiris worship incredibly interesting to read. Do not let this book pass you by without giving it a chance!! ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1225331...

I knew nothing about this book other than that it was very popular among the dead people whose libraries are catalogued on LibraryThing (including C.S. Lewis, Lawrence Durrell, T. E. Lawrence, William Faulkner, W.B. Yeats, Robert E. Howard, and Danilo Kiš). It turns out to be a very entertaining story of one Lucius, who witnesses (or hears about, or participates in) various fantastic escapades, most of them involving sex, mostly after he has been turned into a donkey, written some time around 160 AD and set in Thessaly (though the author lived in north Africa). The most famous bit is the story of Cupid and Psyche. It is apparently the only full novel to survive from classical times (which makes you think).

It was obviously a source for Bocaccio, who puts several incidents from it straight into the Decameron (and whose personal manuscript copy survives in Florence). It was also (from the list above) obviously popular in the early twentieth century, but skipped over by earlier celebrated bibliophiles - presumably too risqué for eighteenth and nineteenth century tastes.

It is less directly a source for Shakespeare. A lot of people see it as a direct source for A Midsummer Night's Dream, but I am not wholly convinced: Bottom is no Lucius to whom things just happen, but a glorious creation in his own right; only his head is transformed, as a result of a spell cast by someone else rather than a magic ointment administered by himself, and most crucially Titania's ridiculous infatuation with the semi-human Bottom has no real parallel - Lucius as donkey does become a sex object but the circumstances are completely different. Where I do see some direct influence on Shakespeare, it's the soap operas of fake poisons and sexual deception; Much Ado About Nothing seems to me the most Apuleian of Shakespeare plays, though there are bits of it in most of the middle period of comedies. ( )