Lucius Apuleius. The Golden “Donkey.” Trans. William Abington. Ed. Donal O’Danachair and David Widger. 1639. Project Gutenberg. 26 Jan 2013. Kindle E-book.

I picked up The Golden “Donkey” out of curiosity because it contained the extant version of the Cupid and Psyche story which was retold in Till We Have Faces. It was not at all what I expected. It was not a collection of myths like Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Hesiod’s works. As others have described it, it is indeed a picaresque novel, probably the oldest still in existence.

First it is a novel, or perhaps better described as a romance in the traditional sense, because it is prose fiction. Unlike Ovid or Hesiod, Apuleius wrote in prose. And it is picaresque because the main character, Apuleius himself, travels throughout the ancient world from Syria to Rome having a variety of adventures along the way.

The beginning comes across like something from the seventeenth century—Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, or Tom Jones. Apuleius presents himself as a respected gentleman who has well-connected friends and makes more friends. Like Tom Jones, he is attractive to women and takes advantage of that.

Then his luck changes. He gets a little too curious about witchcraft and is turned into—a yellow-haired donkey, a golden animal. The major part of the story continues his observations of people and communities on his travels, but from the perspective of a donkey.

He gets traded and sold and stolen a number of times. He encounters farmers and city dwellers, soldiers and thieves, and narrowly escapes death on several occasions. At times people burden him to the point that he can hardly move. Others treat him as a pet. Through it all, we get a sense of everyday life in the Greek speaking parts of the Roman Empire. (Apuleius wrote some time around A.D. 180).

A fan of Shakespeare might find The Golden “Donkey” worth reading. I suspect that Shakespeare was familiar with it, whether in Latin or in this translation which first appeared in 1566. Venus gets so mad at Psyche that she conjures Cupid to make Psyche fall in love “with the most miserable creature living, the most poore, the most crooked, and the most vile,” (1142) not unlike Oberon’s spell on Titania. (In this story, Cupid falls in love with Psyche.)

At one point Psyche visits a temple of Juno, the goddess of marriage, and outside the temple “she saw pretious riches and vestments ingraven with letters of gold hanging upon branches of trees.” (1439) It seems that the Forest of Arden in As You Like It with its trees decorated by poems dedicated to Rosalind echoes this.

Another person is tortured by being tied to a fig tree near ant hills and covered with honey until he was consumed by the ants—reminiscent of one of the Roman tortures in Titus Andronicus. (2067)

Apuleius is not restored to his human form until the very end. Venus restores him, but she is revealed with popular Roman syncretism similar to what we see in The Aeneid. She tells him that she goes by many different names: Hera, Juno, Minerva, Venus, Diana, Ceres, Hecate, but her original “proper” name is Isis. Herodotus says that the Greeks got the gods from the Egyptians. Apuleius is suggesting the same thing. (2837)

Although Cupid and Psyche is the centerpiece of The Golden “Donkey”, most of its stories do not come from the myths but are the stuff of fabliaux and märchen. Many of the episodes involve conflict between neighbors or family members like the stories of The Decameron or The Canterbury Tales. A number involve evil stepmothers, thieves, and witches like many of the Grimm fairy tales.

Most are quite brief. Even the longest, the tale of Cupid and Psyche, has some of the features of fairy tales: an angry mother-in-law, a seemingly impossible quest in which simple lesser creatures like ants play a helpful part.

Like some of the stories of Boccaccio and Chaucer, some of the tales in The Golden “Donkey” are risqué. I have noted that the story of Cupid and Psyche is available by itself both in book form and online for those who are mainly interested in that story. While I cannot say that Chaucer directly retells any of the stories, it appears that some of his fabliaux may have had their origins with Apuleius. The tale of the tub from The Golden “Donkey” did remind me of the Miller’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales.¹ They are certainly entertaining if not exactly profound.

The version from Project Gutenberg is a translation originally done in 1566. It does have variant spellings (like pretious) and a few archaic words, notably baine for public bath. Some readers would no doubt be more comfortable with a more modern translation, and there are a few available.

¹ After reading The Golden “Donkey”, I was curious about the connections, so I consulted the authoritative work on Chaucer’s influences, Benson and Andersson’s The Literary Context of Chaucer’s Fabliaux. Benson and Andersson note this similarity as well, and include this episode from Apuleius in their book. (6-9)

Benson, Larry D. and Theodore M. Andersson. The Literary Context of Chaucer’s Fabliaux. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971. Print.

N.B.: The original translation and most versions use the older synonym for donkey, which, alas, now is also a crude anatomical term. Shortly after we posted this review, the blog was hacked by a porn troller bot that looks for such terms. The writers are not especially offended by this “King James” language, but we do not appreciate being hacked.