The Golden Ass

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.