The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Apuleius · the Metamorphoses, a novel in prose in eleven books · told in the first person by Lucius, a man turned into an ass · c. AD 160, the date disputed · scored on Apuleius’s Latin as transmitted, read from knowledge, with J. Arthur Hanson’s Loeb (1989) beside it for sense; no text in hand, and no translation quoted
Mode
Comic novel of transformation in prose; Milesian tale, fairy tale, picaresque and religious confession in one first-person narrative
Mythos
The man made a beast by curiosity and restored by a goddess; the soul forbidden to look, who looks, falls, wanders, descends and is raised; Actaeon in marble; the roses
Phase
From Lucius’s ride into Thessaly to his initiation at Rome as a shaven priest, by way of seven books and more in an ass’s hide
Presentation
Prose; eleven books under a prologue that promises Milesian tales, with tales set inside the narration and the tale of Cupid and Psyche, about two books long, at the centre
Register
From the prologue’s mock apology, Plautine dialogue, legal pleading and epic battle to the plain opening of a fairy tale, a hymn and a goddess’s litany; rhyme, assonance, archaism, diminutive and coinage
Scale
One creature’s passage through the provinces of the Roman world, from magistrates and usurers to slaves at the mill, and from witches to the Queen of Heaven
Governing Proposition
A young man who meddles with witchcraft in Thessaly is turned into an ass, carried by robbers, priests, millers and gardeners through the whole society of the Roman provinces, and restored by the goddess Isis, whose priest he becomes. The wager of the book is that a soul bound to pleasure and curiosity is bound to blind Fortune and is freed only by grace, and that a comic tale which delights its reader in the very things it condemns can carry that truth: at its centre a fairy tale of Psyche, the soul, tells the whole in small, and at its close the narrator becomes a man of the author’s own city.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book opens on a voice that does not say whose it is. It promises varias fabulas (“various tales”), strung together sermone isto Milesio (“in that Milesian style”), the manner of the bawdy tales of adultery and magic, and it ends its promise with a command and an assurance: “Lector intende: laetaberis.”
“Reader, attend: you will be delighted.” The book that ends in a temple begins by offering pleasure, and the reader who accepts it is drawn into the appetite the last book will rebuke. Then the narrator gives himself a name and a family. He is Lucius, a young Greek of good birth, descended through his mother from Plutarch, and he is riding into Thessaly, the country of witches, on business, with a curiosity about magic that he does not trouble to hide.
On the road he falls in with two travellers and hears Aristomenes tell of his friend Socrates, who took up with an innkeeper who was a witch, Meroe. In the night Meroe and her sister Panthia came into the room, cut Socrates’ throat and stopped the wound with a sponge, and the next day, at a stream, the wound opened and he died. Lucius hears it as entertainment. At Hypata he lodges with Milo, a usurer and a miser, and visits his kinswoman Byrrhena, in whose atrium stands a marble group of Diana at her bath and Actaeon, the hunter who saw what he should not have seen, already turning into a stag. Lucius admires the carving. At her dinner Thelyphron tells how he was hired to watch a corpse against the witches and lost his nose and ears to them. Lucius hears that too, and goes on.
He courts Photis, the maid of Milo’s house, to come at the arts of her mistress, Pamphile, Milo’s wife, a witch. Coming home drunk one night he kills three robbers at the door, and in the morning the town tries him for murder, until the dead men are uncovered and are wineskins: it is the Festival of Laughter, and he has been its sport. Then, through a crack in a door, he watches Pamphile anoint herself and become an owl. He begs Photis for the same, and she brings him the wrong box. He becomes an ass, with a man’s mind inside it, and learns from her that roses will undo the change. Before he can find any, robbers break into the house and carry him off loaded with Milo’s goods.
Movement II
The robbers take him to their cave in the mountains, where they tell the deaths of their comrades in the manner of epic: Lamachus, Alcimus, and Thrasyleon, who went into a rich man’s house sewn into a bear’s hide and died in it. They bring in a captive, Charite, carried off as a bride, and to quiet her weeping the old woman who keeps their house tells her a story. The ass listens. It opens as fairy tales open: “Erant in quadam civitate rex et regina.”
“There were in a certain city a king and a queen.” For about two books of the eleven, near the middle of the whole, the narrator of a comic novel gives the floor to an old woman telling a girl about the soul.
The youngest of the king’s three daughters, Psyche, is so beautiful that men worship her in place of Venus, and the goddess, offended, sends her son Cupid to make her love the lowest of men. She is left on a crag as if for a monster, carried off to a palace where voices serve her, and married to a husband who comes only in the dark and whom she is forbidden to see. Her sisters, jealous of her palace, persuade her that he is a beast. One night she raises a lamp over him and finds the god of love asleep, and a drop of burning oil falls from the lamp on to his shoulder. He wakes, and leaves her.
She wanders. Venus takes her as a servant and sets her tasks no mortal could perform, and the last sends her down to Proserpina to bring back a box of beauty. Told not to open it, she opens it, and falls into a sleep like death. Cupid wakes her, and Jupiter calls the gods to council, makes Psyche immortal and marries her to her lover; their child is born and is named Voluptas, Pleasure. The tale is the book told small: a forbidden look, a fall, trials, a descent among the dead and a rescue by a god. It is told to a captive by an old woman, overheard by an ass, and retold by a man who will become a priest. When it is done Lucius tries to carry Charite away on his back, and they are taken.
Movement III
Rescue comes from inside. Charite’s bridegroom, Tlepolemus, joins the robbers disguised as a famous brigand, Haemus, makes them drunk and frees his bride, and the ass carries her home. His reward is a herd boy who torments him, and worse. Then the story of Charite turns tragic. Thrasyllus, who wanted her, kills Tlepolemus on a hunt; she learns it from her husband’s ghost in a dream, draws Thrasyllus to her husband’s tomb, blinds him with a pin, and kills herself there. Her servants scatter and the ass goes with them, from owner to owner, and the book begins to go down through the society it passes.
He is sold to the priests of the Syrian Goddess, eunuchs who go about the villages with her image, whipping themselves for show and selling her oracles, and who are caught at their vices. While he is with them he hears of an adulteress who hides her lover in a tub and sells the tub to her husband with the lover still inside it. He passes to a baker who keeps a mill, and the narrator who once admired marble now sees men worked to ruin: the slaves of the mill scarred and branded, half naked in rags, and the beasts beside him galled and failing at the wheel. Few works of the ancient world look at labour from below, and this one looks through the eyes of a beast who is also a man. No one troubles to hide anything from a donkey, and so he sees everything.
Around the mill the tales thicken. The baker’s wife has her lover and her go-between, and tales of adultery pass between them in the ass’s hearing; he brings about her exposure, but he is present at more of these stories than he lives through. He passes to a market gardener, and a soldier on the road commandeers him and beats his owner. The pleasure the prologue promised is given in full here, and in these books the ass is more audience than hero.
Movement IV
The tenth book brings him to the top of the society he has seen from the bottom. He hears the tale of a stepmother whose love for her stepson turns to an attempt at poisoning, and of the trial that undoes her. He is bought by a cook and a pastry cook, found eating their dishes, and taught tricks; his master, Thiasus of Corinth, makes him a show. A wealthy matron of Corinth hires him for her bed. Then he is to couple in the arena with a woman condemned for poisoning, and while the crowd watches a pantomime of the Judgment of Paris, he slips away and runs to the sea at Cenchreae, the port of Corinth.
He sleeps on the shore and wakes at night under the moon, rising from the sea. He prays, and the prayer is a hymn: “Regina caeli”
“Queen of Heaven.” He calls her by her names and asks for death or his human shape. The goddess rises from the sea, crowned and robed, and answers him, naming herself by the names the nations give her before the name that is her own, Isis. She tells him that in her procession the next day a priest will carry roses, and that he will be restored if he eats them; the rest of his life is to be hers.
In the morning the procession comes down to the shore, and the priest holds out a garland of roses. The ass eats them, and his shape falls away; he is a man again, naked in the crowd. The priest speaks to him, and the speech is the book’s first plain statement of what it has been about. Lucius, he says, has had the reward of curiositatis improsperae (“luckless curiosity”), carried about by a blind Fortune, and is now under a Fortune sed videntis (“but one who sees”). The roses promised in the third book have been eaten in the eleventh, and the festival of laughter that made him a fool has been answered by the festival of a goddess.
Movement V
He stays by the temple, and after a time he is initiated. The rite is told with reserve: what was said and done may not be told, and he gives only what he may: “accessi confinium mortis”
“I came to the boundary of death,” and “nocte media vidi solem”
“at midnight I saw the sun.” The book that has shown appetite in every form reaches its height in a sentence that withholds almost everything. The young man who wanted to see a witch become a bird has seen what it is forbidden to say, and he does not say it.
Then the narrator changes. He goes to Rome, and before a second initiation a priest is told in a vision of a man who is coming to him, and the man is called Madaurensem (“a man of Madauros”). The Lucius who began the book was a Greek of Corinth, descended from Plutarch; Madauros is the African city of Apuleius himself. The Greek’s fiction becomes, in a word, something like the author’s own confession, unless it is the last joke of a writer who had once been tried for magic and had spoken his own defence. The book does not say which, and the question has not been settled.
He is initiated again, into the rites of Osiris, and pays again, as each fresh initiation requires; he is made a pastophor, one of the bearers of the sacred shrines, and shaves his head. The last sentence leaves him at Rome, going about his office with his head bare, gaudens (“rejoicing”). The comic book of Milesian tales ends in a convert’s joy, and whether the joy is the answer or the last of Lucius’s credulities, the convert still counting his fees, is left to the reader the prologue promised to delight. The book itself came through by a thread: one manuscript, written at Monte Cassino in the eleventh century, on which every later copy depends.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and this is an accretive book: a short Greek ass story, filled. Much of the filling is required. Aristomenes’ tale and Thelyphron’s warn a man about to meddle with witchcraft, and Lucius hears both and goes on; the Actaeon group in Byrrhena’s atrium is the punishment of curiosity in marble, set before the curiosity begins; Cupid and Psyche, a forbidden look and a fall redeemed by a god, is the frame told small, and the eleventh book cannot be read rightly without it. Remove these and the book loses its argument. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the slack of the ninth and tenth books: the stepmother’s tale and some of the baker’s wife’s adulteries run on the Milesian appetite the prologue promised, not on the book’s need, and could go with little loss.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: the world seen from beneath, by a creature everyone speaks freely before because he cannot repeat it, is a world of appetite, fraud and cruelty, and the soul bound to pleasure and curiosity is bound to blind Fortune. The mill is the plainest proof, slaves scarred, branded and half naked and the beasts galled, seen by a beast who is a man: one of the few views of ancient labour from below that ancient literature gives. The eleventh book states the counter-truth through the priest: Lucius has had the reward of curiositatis improsperae (“luckless curiosity”) and stands now under a Fortune sed videntis (“but one who sees”). Held below the gate because the book will not let its chief truth stand without doubt: whether the conversion is the answer or the last of Lucius’s credulities is left open.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Height is reached, but not often, for the book’s native register is comic and grotesque. The ceiling is the epiphany, Isis rising from the sea at Cenchreae, crowned and robed, naming herself by the names of the nations; and the initiation, told with reserve: accessi confinium mortis (“I came to the boundary of death”), nocte media vidi solem (“at midnight I saw the sun”). Psyche raising the lamp over the sleeping god, and the drop of oil that wakes him, is the warm height. The dreadful: Meroe and Panthia cutting Socrates’ throat and stopping the wound with a sponge; Charite blinding Thrasyllus at her husband’s tomb before she kills herself. Between them stretch long passages of farce, beating and bawdry that are not meant to lift, and the axis counts how often height comes.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Myth built, at two scales, and both load-bearing. The man made an ass by his own curiosity, carried through the whole of society and restored by a goddess through the roses he has sought since the third book, is an archetype of the fallen and redeemed soul that never stops being a particular, comic young man with an ass’s appetite. Inside it Psyche, whose name is the soul, is forbidden to look on her lover, looks, falls, wanders, is set impossible tasks, descends to Proserpina and is raised by a god’s grace: the frame told as a fairy tale, and the earliest full telling of a pattern that became a tale type of its own. Held below the top because parts of the myth are evoked as spectacle, as in the Judgment of Paris in the arena, and because the link between ass and goddess is made by the priest’s speech more than by the story.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance: a Greek comic ass story, which the short Onos among Lucian’s works shares; Milesian tales of adultery and witchcraft; and the Greek ideal romances of lovers parted and reunited. The turn: Apuleius kept the comic ass and broke its ending, putting an epiphany, an initiation and a shaven convert’s joy where the Greek version, as the Onos shows it, ends in a sexual joke; he set at the centre a fairy tale of the soul in mannered Latin; and at the close he let his narrator become a man of Madauros, the author’s own city, turning a Greek’s fiction into something like a confession, unless it is the last joke. The stake was real: a Platonist sophist who had been tried for magic, and answered the charge in his Apology, wrote a novel about a man undone by magic and saved by a cult. Held below the top because the materials were inherited and the frame was the Greek writer’s.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The first person in an ass’s hide is the instrument: Lucius hears and sees what no free man could, because no one guards speech before a donkey, and a human mind trapped in a beast’s body is the book’s image of the soul under appetite. The double narrator, the curious young man who suffers and the initiate who tells, lets the book enjoy every adultery tale and then condemn the enjoyment; the prologue’s laetaberis (“you will be delighted”) draws the reader into the pleasure the priest rebukes, so the form implicates its reader. Held off the top because in the ninth and tenth books the frame becomes a container: the ass is present at tales rather than living them, and for stretches the form loosens to an anthology.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence, over eighteen centuries. Augustine asked in the City of God whether the transformation was true or a fiction; Fulgentius allegorised Psyche as the soul; Beroaldo’s commentary (Bologna, 1500) read the book as moral allegory; Merkelbach read it as a mystery text; the Jungians, Neumann on Psyche and von Franz on the whole, as individuation; Winkler’s Auctor and Actor (1985) as a book built to defeat any single reading; and the Groningen commentaries have worked through it book by book. The questions stay open and are in the text: whether the eleventh book is conversion or satire, given the fees for each fresh initiation; who the man of Madauros is; who speaks the prologue. Formal depth yields too, and the echoes between the insets and the frame keep being found. Held a step below the top because some of what is found is ingenious rather than deep.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The field is Latin literature of the second century and the prose fiction of the ancient world. The intrinsic force is high: the one Latin novel to survive whole, it joined comic picaresque, Milesian tale, fairy tale and religious autobiography in one book, made a beast’s eye a way of seeing a whole society, and wrote the most extravagant Latin prose of its age. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is discounted for delay, since in antiquity the book drew a few notices and no known imitator, and in the Middle Ages survived in one manuscript line and near silence. From Boccaccio on it is large. He copied it and took the tale of the tub into the Decameron; Boiardo and Adlington translated it; a debt in the picaresque and in Cervantes, the wineskins of Don Quixote among them, is argued; Psyche passed to Raphael’s Farnesina loggia, La Fontaine, the Psyché of Molière and Corneille, Keats, Pater and C. S. Lewis. The reach is real but late and dispersed, which holds it below the top.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: eleven books, with small lacunae and no lost part, which is rare for ancient fiction; Petronius beside it survives in fragments. But it survived by a thread, one manuscript line from Monte Cassino, so that in the early Middle Ages the work’s existence hung on very few copies. Presence: read in late antiquity, then long unread from about the sixth century to Boccaccio, save for the copying; continuous since the Renaissance, in print from 1469, in the major European languages from the sixteenth century, in scholarship and, through Psyche, in the visual arts; taught less widely than Virgil or Ovid, and long kept from schools for its obscenity. Eighteen centuries count heavily; the medieval silence and the single line of transmission are charged against them, and the text’s coming through complete is weighed first.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged on the Latin; its sound at length is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged. The range: the prologue’s mock apology, Plautine dialogue, legal pleading at the Festival of Laughter, epic battle in the robbers’ tales, the fairy tale’s plain opening, the hymn of Lucius’s prayer to the Regina caeli (“Queen of Heaven”) and the goddess’s litany of her names. It works by rhyme and assonance, paired clauses, archaism, diminutive and coinage, the furthest-reaching prose style in Latin. The construction is exact where it matters: Cupid and Psyche at the centre, the Actaeon group before the fall, roses promised in the third book and eaten in the eleventh, a Festival of Laughter in the third answered by the festival of Isis in the eleventh. Charged: an overloading that sometimes becomes display for its own sake, and the loose joins of the ninth and tenth books.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the matron of Corinth bedding the ass, and the initiate at midnight seeing the sun. The book’s case is that one law governs them: servile pleasure and curiosity make the beast, and the goddess’s grace unmakes him. The priest names the law, and Psyche’s tale, the Actaeon statue and the long-promised roses have prepared it. The range is very wide, from bawdry and slapstick through murder and grief to theophany, and the law is legible across it. But it is announced at the end more than felt throughout: for long stretches of the middle books the stories obey the Milesian law of pleasure, and the break of tone at Cenchreae is the most argued question about the work. The voice holds across the break, for the convert still counts his fees and is pleased with his shaven head, and that keeps the axis well above the floor.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Many orders, held by one device: the ass passes through the society of the Roman provinces from the top to the bottom and back. Consciousness: a man’s mind inside a beast, and the shame of it. The family: Psyche’s sisters, Charite’s marriage and widowhood, a stepmother’s lust and a father’s grief, the adulterous households of the ninth book. Labour: the mill, the herdsmen, the market gardener, the baker, the pack beast’s own work. The state and the law: the magistrates of Hypata, the soldier who commandeers, the stepmother’s trial, the arena at Corinth. Money: Milo the usurer, the price of an ass, the fees for initiation. The sacred: witches, frauds in the Syrian Goddess’s train, the council of the gods, Isis and Osiris. Nature: the beast’s body, Thessaly, the sea at Cenchreae under the moon. Held a step down because the people met are mostly tale types, and history is a ground, not an agent.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.2, The Bottomless Well at 9.1, The Archetypal Deep and The Made at 9.0. A text of eighteen centuries that came through whole on one manuscript line; a book whose questions, conversion or satire, author or narrator, have stayed open from Augustine to Winkler; a myth built at two scales, Psyche’s tale carrying the frame; and the furthest-reaching prose style in Latin, laid over a construction exact where it matters.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.8, held by the slack of the ninth and tenth books, where the stepmother’s tale and some of the baker’s wife’s adulteries run on the appetite the prologue promised and could go with little loss. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.0: heights at the epiphany, the initiation and Psyche’s lamp, between long stretches of farce not meant to lift. Then The Unconcealment at 8.3, a disclosure of the world from beneath that the book will not let stand without doubt. The sound of Apuleius’s Latin at length is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5, by three tenths. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.2, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3 falls two tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 103.7, an average of 8.64, which rounds to 8.6: the work stands in Tier IV on its aggregate, short of the 9.0 that the summit requires, and would stand there with the Gate met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius of Madauros, called Asinus aureus, the Golden Ass, since Augustine (City of God 18.18), scored as one novel in eleven books as transmitted. The Latin text descends from one surviving early manuscript, Laurentianus 68.2 (F), written at Monte Cassino in the eleventh century, on which all later copies depend; a second, Laurentianus 29.2 (φ), was copied from it before it was damaged. Subscriptions record a revision of the text at Rome and Constantinople in the 390s. There are small lacunae and no lost books; the first printed edition appeared at Rome in 1469. The text judged is that of Helm’s Teubner and Zimmerman’s Oxford text (2012). The obscene passage in the tenth book found only in late copies, the spurcum additamentum, generally held a later forgery, is not part of the work scored. The Greek source is lost: Photius, in the ninth century, describes a Greek Metamorphoses by Lucius of Patrae, and the short Greek Onos, transmitted among Lucian’s works, shares it. The date is disputed: most place the book after the Apology of about 158 to 159, and so in the 160s or 170s, and some earlier; the date given above is a convention. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Apuleius’s Latin. Latin is quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own literal English, and everything else is paraphrased. Translations · J. Arthur Hanson’s Loeb (1989), with the Latin facing, for sense, because it keeps closest to the Latin; E. J. Kenney’s Penguin (1998) and P. G. Walsh’s Oxford version (1994) for how the book reads in English; William Adlington’s (1566) and Robert Graves’s (1950) as the historic English versions. None is quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the book. The sound of the prose at length, its rhyme and rhythm sentence by sentence, is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged. Citations are by book, since the chapter divisions could not be checked here. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the notice of the book by Macrobius and a debt in Shakespeare; the book’s part in the picaresque and in Cervantes is stated as argued.