The Golden Ass

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 159

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Themes

The Power and Purposes of Storytelling

In the early pages of The Golden Ass, Lucius thanks the traveler he meets on the road for making the journey feel much shorter and much less tedious with his stories, remarking, “I, for one, got free of this grating, long-drawn-out road with no effort or tedium. I think even my transport here is happy. Without fatiguing him, I’ve conveyed myself clear to the city gate, not on his back, but on my own ears” (15). This idea of “conveying” oneself on one’s own ears becomes a central idea in the novel: Stories become not just a way of transforming a long journey into a short one, but the way Lucius carries himself from one place to another spiritually.

The Golden Ass is structured around storytelling, suggesting that stories have a clear didactic purpose, holding up a not-tremendously-flattering mirror to life and educating those who know how to listen. Stories direct and comment on Lucius’s journey: the first stories pique his curiosity about magical power, the later stories teach him about the might of love and the tragedies of lust. The stories Lucius hears mirror his experiences. Getting excited about magic leads him to his humiliating metamorphosis into a donkey; tales of the terrible things people do to satisfy their animal urges reflect his own bestial predicament.

But the long interpolated tale of Cupid and Psyche, which is central to The Golden Ass, also suggests that stories have a more elevated and consoling purpose. The myth of the mortal princess marries who the love-god Cupid and becomes the goddess of the soul prefigures Lucius’s transformation a man of faith. Cupid and Psyche’s story is about turning error into wisdom, humbly admitting one’s own limits and failings, and somehow arriving at pleasure by setting one’s soul right with the heavens.

Storytelling can thus carry one along the road both literally and figuratively. Lucius’s story, a morality tale of selfish hunger transformed into selfless piety, reflects on the power stories have to change people in more wholesome and less power-hungry ways than mere magical spells.

Magic and Metamorphosis

Lucius takes an unhealthy interest in magic right from the get-go—an interest that suggests a hubristic grasping for power that can only ever harm.

Stories Lucius hears about magic range from the grotesque to the downright sadistic. Magic, in Lucius’s world, is the purview of people—women in particular—who use it for spite and personal satisfaction. The witch Meroe, for instance, might have the tantalizing power to “bring down the sky, hang the land in the air, turn springs to cement, wash away mountains, loft the dead, snuff out the stars, and light up the realm of Tartarus itself”—but she mostly uses this intense power to hideously torment ex-lovers (6).

Lucius’s hunger for magic—even after every story about it ends in tragedy—reflects a young man’s selfishness. Lucius ignores that exercising supernatural personal power tends to lead to horror: He only longs for the thrill of being the most powerful guy in the room. It’s thus fittingly ironic that his direct encounter with magic robs him of all power and status, making him into a literal beast of burden. As a donkey—essentially a breathing piece of farm equipment—he’s forced to reckon with the fact that even the powerful are at the mercy of Fortune.

Witchy magic, in this novel, stands for a destructive and seductive illusion of personal omnipotence. But Lucius’s metamorphosis is the converse of this illusion. It’s no coincidence that, at the end of the story, Lucius must humble himself and ask the goddess Isis for help—and that the joyful price he pays for that help is service to her. This novel’s parable of metamorphosis suggests that, to grow from a mere beast to an adult man, one must not grab for power, but know its limits and use it in the service of something greater than one’s own satisfaction.

Sex and Love

In the midst of the terrible tale of Charite, Tlepolemus, and the murderous Thrasyllus, the storyteller has this to say about passion: “when cruel love is still only a little flame, its early heat’s a delight. But the fuel of the beloved’s steady presence makes it blaze up, and then there’s no controlling how hot it gets, and it reduces its victims to hunks of charred flesh” (161). This dire warning underlies many of the interpolated stories in The Golden Ass. Even bawdy tales of cheerful adultery—those told for a laugh in later picaresque novels—end with horrors like ghosts murdering one of the parties. Playing with lust, this novel suggests, is like playing with fire—once it gets a foothold, it ends in disaster.

But the novel is also equivocal and sympathetic about those who fall prey to lust. Even the horrendous, quasi-incestuous murderess in the book’s final story-within-a-story gets a little initial sympathy: Lucius presents the agony of her desire for her stepson as something like a terrible sickness. There’s also plenty of respect for the delights of sex—for instance, Psyche’s goggle-eyed rapture when she catches a first glimpse of her godly husband, “Cupid himself, the gorgeous god, at gorgeous rest” (86). Cupid and Psyche’s love, like that of Charite and Tlepolemus’s, is a force for good, a redeeming and transforming power, even if it’s fraught with perils and beset by violent envy from the outside.

All of the novel’s cautionary tales about sex, fidelity, and lust suggest that learning a healthy respect for these central drivers of the human experience is a big part of transforming from a donkey-like young person into a wise adult. If there’s one thing The Golden Ass stresses repeatedly, it’s that lust is rarely satisfied without consequences—and that love demands as much renunciation and service as it gives satisfaction and pleasure.