The golden ass comic

Apuleius, a writer and orator, followed a chequered but ultimately glorious career which took him from his native North Africa to Athens and Rome; from being tried for witchcraft to being appointed a priest of the Roman Imperial cult. To the ancients he was primarily famous as a neo-Platonist philosopher, but in later centuries his repuatation rests on a work which has had an incalculable impact on the subsequent development of Western literature. It tells the largely comic tale of a certain Lucius, a young man who - rather like his creator - leads an iternerant life full of action and incident which often lands him in trouble. His curiosity to discover the secrets of witchcraft results in his metamorphosis into the Ass of the title - leading to a succession of bruising, humiliating and hilarious exploits until he is returned to human form thanks to the goddess Isis.

There has been a wide divergence of judgments on the merit and the interpretation of Apuleius' Metamorphoses , or The Golden Ass , the Latin novel of the late second century of our era. Virtually lost during the Middle Ages, it came to be known and imitated in the fourteenth century as a work which undertakes to be both comic and serious, serio ludere. Beroaldus, the great Renaissance commentator on Apuleius, and Adlington , the first translator of the Metamorphoses into English, while delighting in the rhetoric and the comedy, saw the work as edifying and having religious depth. The repute of the work fell to its lowest point in the scholarship of the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, with the inappropriate application of an ideal of the modern novel. Major research was carried out on the text of the Metamorphoses and on its sources, but the work was largely condemned as chaotic and its author as an emptyheaded patcher. A few scholars, however, maintained that the Metamorphoses had artistic integrity, and this view has now come to be fairly widely accepted. The chief divide among more recent studies of the Apuleian novel has been over whether the comic or the serious is its more essential quality.

The protagonist of the novel is called Lucius. The plot revolves around the protagonist's curiosity curiositas and insatiable desire to see and practice magic. While trying to perform a spell to transform into a vulture, he is accidentally transformed into an ass. This leads to a long journey, literal and metaphorical, filled with inset tales.

The Golden Ass , also known by the alternative title, The Metamorphoses , is one of the greatest fantasies of the world. The latter name, The Metamorphoses , is found in the extant manuscripts, but Augustine, who studied some two centuries later at Madauros as well as at Carthage , says that Apuleius called his work Asinus aureus or The Golden Ass, which name I shall use hereafter the word 'golden' in this context denotes "a quality of excellence and admirability" rather than "the sense of being fashioned from gold". Apuleius informs us that he is adapting a Greek story. This is supposed by many scholars to have been a story possibly by the Greek author Lucius of Patrae. However, the splendour of the Golden Ass is original to Apuleius, as Lucious or the Ass lacks all imagination and style; it is nothing but the story of an ass, not an image of human life like Apuleius's tale.