Asinine Aspirations

Hoofing It Through the Human Condition in Apuleius’ Golden Ass

Lucius Apuleius was a second-century North African provincial who wore his Roman citizenship and Greek education like a suit of finely tailored armor. Born in Madaurus, he was a self-styled Platonist philosopher, a rhetorician of staggering confidence, and, famously, a man once tried for using magic to woo a wealthy widow (Harrison 1). It is this intersection of the mystical, the legal, and the absurd that informs his only surviving novel, The Golden Ass, or Metamorphoses. This work is not merely a piece of ancient pulp fiction; it is a sophisticated, first-person exploration of the human condition trapped in the animalistic, which Apuleius navigates with a wink to the reader and a sharp eye for the grotesque.