There is a scene in the Golden Ass that stays with me.
Lucius the hero has just gone to a fishmarket to buy some food for his tea. After haggling down the price of fish, he bumps into an old friend, grown important and a little pompous in his new role as Inspector-General of Markets. He greets his friend and they reminisce on student days in Athens.
His friend looks at the fish in Lucius’ hand and is disgusted. He drags Lucius back to the market seller with fish in hand and begins shouting at the fishmonger. He throws the fish on the floor and orders one of his constables to jump on it until it is smashed into a fine, smooth paste (remember they were likely wearing sandals).
“All is well now”, he tells Lucius “You need say no more. I am satisfied that the little wretch has been sufficiently humiliated”.
As a scene, it makes me ponder greatly at the closeness to antiquity: a free man going to the fish market to buy his own food. Yet it raises so many questions for a historically minded reader. Why did he not just send an enslaved human? Why is he buying his own food – did the ancient art of xenia (good hosting) fail? Was this a common experience in the markets? The distance is ultimately greatest at the points it initially feels closest.
It is also a funny scene.
Yet it haunts me for another reason: the absolute pettiness of some people in minor positions of power that seems to transcend time and space, operating as a universal human experience.
***
I first read the Golden Ass nearly 15 years ago, in an early penguin paperback edition, translated by Robert Graves, and picked up cheap. At the time, I was looking for a new job. I have picked it up again, on what may have been the 1900th anniversary of its author’s birth. So much has changed and yet I am again looking for a job.
It is a book I have returned to again and again, but not in its totality. In fact – with the exception of other favourites like John Milton, David Jones and Eli Goldstone – I probably know sections of this book better than any other book.
At the end of the novel, the hero has a vision of the goddess Isis and engages with her cult in the port of Corinth (Cenchrea) and later at Rome. When I first read the novel, the strangeness of the end struck me. It does not fit with the rest of the novel.
Robert Graves’ translation, published in 1950, provides a saucy Confessions of… tone that to my mind suits the novel’s structure and topic. The story begins with a young man, Lucius, on a trip to Thessaly. He and his partner (Photis, an enslaved human) bungle their attempt to copy a witch’s trick to turn into a bird and instead Lucius is transformed into an ass. He is then stolen by thieves in the night and so begins his adventures across Greece, owned by different people. He witnesses, hears or engages in cruelty, heroism and depravity. It follows an almost unrelenting pace with constant shifts of register from the heights of classical myth (‘Cupid and Psyche’) to what we can call racialized homophobia (‘With the Eunuch Priests’).
By contrast, the end is almost pious. The hero receives a vision of the goddess and is turned back into a man through her intervention. He witnesses a festival and then proceeds to become initiated into her mysteries. It has become an important source for scholars of Isis. It is also, in part, what inspired me to research the goddess at postgraduate level. This last section has a lot to answer for.
Reading the novel again, I realize just how much religion and how many divinities there are in the novel from Epona, the Celtic horse goddess, to the Cybele, the Magna Mater, and on to the Greeks gods. Lucius moves through an enchanted world. What we remember is the sex, but there is I realise another important theme: fate.
***
Many people talk about ancient novels and include The Golden Ass, in the list as the only fully surviving ancient Latin novel. This doesn’t have ‘scholarly consensus’. At the time of first reading the novel, I was also completing a course on literary modernism. In one class a teacher asked us to name the first novel. Answers came forth:
“Don Quixote” “No”
“Tale of a Genji” “No”
“Emma” “No”
“Madame Bovary” “No”
I suggested The Satyricon or Golden Ass. She turned it round in her mind and replied in the negative with noticeable scorn.
Very confidently she told us the answer: Robinson Crusoe. We all wrote it down.
The main character had an inner life, she explained, which we as readers could experience because he wrote lists and made plans for home improvement and productive expansion. Bourgeois realism. Such a story requires a character with a level of will and agency.
I have seen people use the term ‘main character syndrome’ on the internet. It always seems a slightly redundant term. Shouldn’t we all be the main character of our life? Ideally, leading a rags-to-riches Horatio Alger story in which hard work and dedication lead to material and emotional wellbeing. The popularity of the ‘main character syndrome’ concept, I think, points to the fact that many of us feel we are very much not the main heroes of our lives, or at least we are heroes of the wrong stories.
We turn to other stories to dramatise this tension, seeking whatever ‘reinforcement we may gain from Hope, If not what resolution from despare’. No one wants to think they have no power to change their lives, but like with most things, the veracity of this statement sits somewhere in the middle of a murky complexity. It is neither wholly true nor wholly false, and so we proceed in our best attempts at improvements and productive expansion, against the frustrations of the universe.
I struggle to think of a novel in which there is less of a hero than the Golden Ass. I do not mean Lucius is an anti-hero. Rather, he is someone who lacks almost every drive or restraining force that would guide most heroes, with the sole exception of eros and thanatos: the drive to sex and the drive from death. Yet even then he is hardly consistent. I will not ruin the experience of reading the book for the first time, the sex and death still have a power to shock, but sometimes even Lucius is like ‘meh, not feeling it, sorry’.
The novel works almost like a 90s TV series with single episodes joined by an overarching loose plot. The individual episodes are of different sizes and there are stories within stories, which extenuates the sense of’‘peril’ in the individual stories and drives the tension between the stories. Yet there is no sense in which Lucius becomes a better man, or that his previous adventures and missteps are some form of punishment. Sometimes he is up, sometimes he is down but the plot drives him on, without agency on his part, ultimately to the shores of Corinth.
This, on reflection, is what life feels like, certainly what job hunting feels like. We are ever hunting, ever proceeding, ever driven forward, creating stories after the fact to justify the momentum, the direction, as we head willingly or unwillingly towards our own Cenchrea. Whatever we find there, redemption or something else, it is ultimately the journey that has brought us there.
Rhakotis 