The Golden Ass

“Turning to the other, I continued, ‘You, on the other hand, have got stopped-up ears and a totally closed mind. You spit back in his face what might be a true story. By Hercules, it’s not too shrewd of you to throw the weight of your bigotry around this way, calling lies whatever’s new to your ears or unfamiliar to your eyes, or maybe just seems to steep for your thinking to grapple up onto. […]’” 

Lucius’s rebuke to the skeptical traveler introduces some important themes: open-mindedness and curiosity. Lucius will be eager to hear every story that comes his way (and to believe in most of them). These lines are also a good introduction to Lucius’s inventive, sprightly voice. His characteristic figurative language here gives his riposte an extra dash of color.

“One of her lovers had a wife who made a glib joke about this woman. The wife was already hauling around the baggage of a pregnancy, so this witch sewed her womb shut and held the fetus up, condemning the mother to perpetual expectancy. The consensus count says she’s carrying eight years’ worth of load, and she’s as swollen as if she were on the verge of giving birth to an elephant.”

Socrates’s tale of the witch Meroe’s villainy sets the book’s tone. Her magical revenge is at once grotesque, sinister, and comical—and prepares us to expect some cruel physical jokes. It’s also just one example of the book’s dizzying layers of story: This is a doubly-embedded interpolated story, a tale that Socrates tells Aristomenes and Aristomenes tells Lucius.

“‘I don’t hold anything to be impossible,’” I said. ‘Whatever strange way fate’s ordained, that’s how everything will turn out for those of us who are not gods. You and I and all other people experience things that are amazing, things that we’d almost say couldn’t be. When they’re told to somebody who wasn’t there, however, they lack credibility. But Hercules is my witness, I do believe our friend here, and here’s a thousand thanks for the lively wit of his narration. 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.’” 

Lucius is interested in magic and the impossible. But he’s also making a point here about the everyday magic of stories. The Golden Ass is in part a story about storytelling itself—and here, storytelling has magical properties for the traveler in particular, making a long hard journey short and easy.