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Apuleius. The Golden Ass
Paperback
Published January 1, 1950
15 people want to read
About the author
Robert Graves
642 books2,071 followersRobert von Ranke Graves was an English poet, soldier, historical novelist and critic. Born in Wimbledon, he received his early education at King's College School and Copthorne Prep School, Wimbledon & Charterhouse School and won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. While at Charterhouse in 1912, he fell in love with G.H. Johnstone, a boy of fourteen ("Dick" in Goodbye to All That) When challenged by the headmaster he defended himself by citing Plato, Greek poets, Michelangelo & Shakespeare, "who had felt as I did".
At the outbreak of WWI, Graves enlisted almost immediately, taking a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He published his first volume of poems, Over the Brazier, in 1916. He developed an early reputation as a war poet and was one of the first to write realistic poems about his experience of front line conflict. In later years he omitted war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously "part of the war poetry boom". At the Battle of the Somme he was so badly wounded by a shell-fragment through the lung that he was expected to die, and indeed was officially reported as 'died of wounds'. He gradually recovered. Apart from a brief spell back in France, he spent the rest of the war in England.
One of Graves's closest friends at this time was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was also an officer in the RWF. In 1917 Sassoon tried to rebel against the war by making a public anti-war statement. Graves, who feared Sassoon could face a court martial, intervened with the military authorities and persuaded them that he was suffering from shell shock, and to treat him accordingly. Graves also suffered from shell shock, or neurasthenia as it is sometimes called, although he was never hospitalised for it.
Biographers document the story well. It is fictionalised in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration. The intensity of their early relationship is nowhere demonstrated more clearly than in Graves's collection Fairies & Fusiliers (1917), which contains a plethora of poems celebrating their friendship. Through Sassoon, he also became friends with Wilfred Owen, whose talent he recognised. Owen attended Graves's wedding to Nancy Nicholson in 1918, presenting him with, as Graves recalled, "a set of 12 Apostle spoons".
Following his marriage and the end of the war, Graves belatedly took up his place at St John's College, Oxford. He later attempted to make a living by running a small shop, but the business failed. In 1926 he took up a post at Cairo University, accompanied by his wife, their children and the poet Laura Riding. He returned to London briefly, where he split with his wife under highly emotional circumstances before leaving to live with Riding in Deià, Majorca. There they continued to publish letterpress books under the rubric of the Seizin Press, founded and edited the literary journal Epilogue, and wrote two successful academic books together: A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928).
In 1927, he published Lawrence and the Arabs, a commercially successful biography of T.E. Lawrence. Good-bye to All That (1929, revised and republished in 1957) proved a success but cost him many of his friends, notably Sassoon. In 1934 he published his most commercially successful work, I, Claudius. Using classical sources he constructed a complexly compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale extended in Claudius the God (1935). Another historical novel by Graves, Count Belisarius (1938), recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius.
During the early 1970s Graves began to suffer from increasingly severe memory loss, and by his eightieth birthday in 1975 he had come to the end of his working life. By 1975 he had published more than 140 works. He survived for ten more years in an increasingly dependent condition until he died from heart
At the outbreak of WWI, Graves enlisted almost immediately, taking a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He published his first volume of poems, Over the Brazier, in 1916. He developed an early reputation as a war poet and was one of the first to write realistic poems about his experience of front line conflict. In later years he omitted war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously "part of the war poetry boom". At the Battle of the Somme he was so badly wounded by a shell-fragment through the lung that he was expected to die, and indeed was officially reported as 'died of wounds'. He gradually recovered. Apart from a brief spell back in France, he spent the rest of the war in England.
One of Graves's closest friends at this time was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was also an officer in the RWF. In 1917 Sassoon tried to rebel against the war by making a public anti-war statement. Graves, who feared Sassoon could face a court martial, intervened with the military authorities and persuaded them that he was suffering from shell shock, and to treat him accordingly. Graves also suffered from shell shock, or neurasthenia as it is sometimes called, although he was never hospitalised for it.
Biographers document the story well. It is fictionalised in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration. The intensity of their early relationship is nowhere demonstrated more clearly than in Graves's collection Fairies & Fusiliers (1917), which contains a plethora of poems celebrating their friendship. Through Sassoon, he also became friends with Wilfred Owen, whose talent he recognised. Owen attended Graves's wedding to Nancy Nicholson in 1918, presenting him with, as Graves recalled, "a set of 12 Apostle spoons".
Following his marriage and the end of the war, Graves belatedly took up his place at St John's College, Oxford. He later attempted to make a living by running a small shop, but the business failed. In 1926 he took up a post at Cairo University, accompanied by his wife, their children and the poet Laura Riding. He returned to London briefly, where he split with his wife under highly emotional circumstances before leaving to live with Riding in Deià, Majorca. There they continued to publish letterpress books under the rubric of the Seizin Press, founded and edited the literary journal Epilogue, and wrote two successful academic books together: A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928).
In 1927, he published Lawrence and the Arabs, a commercially successful biography of T.E. Lawrence. Good-bye to All That (1929, revised and republished in 1957) proved a success but cost him many of his friends, notably Sassoon. In 1934 he published his most commercially successful work, I, Claudius. Using classical sources he constructed a complexly compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale extended in Claudius the God (1935). Another historical novel by Graves, Count Belisarius (1938), recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius.
During the early 1970s Graves began to suffer from increasingly severe memory loss, and by his eightieth birthday in 1975 he had come to the end of his working life. By 1975 he had published more than 140 works. He survived for ten more years in an increasingly dependent condition until he died from heart
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 31, 2024
Entertaining, no doubt. No shortage of obscenities here.
September 1, 2024
“Stupid people always dismiss as untrue anything that happens only very seldom, or anything that their minds cannot readily grasp; yet when these things are carefully inquired into they are often found not only possible but probable.”
I acquired this book in mysterious circumstances. I was walking through the assembled stalls of Winterfest in Thompson, Manitoba when an old woman approached me and pressed it into my hands. “Do you believe in witches?” She asked me. Before I had a chance to respond, she was away, moving with greater celerity than would be expected for her age, gliding, almost, away from the heart of the fair and away into a thicket of spruce over the snowy ground…
It sat in my collection for some time before, seeing it in a pile, I felt a certain call to retrieve it, and henceforth set about reading.
The Golden Ass, or Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, is a wonderful story, combining comedy which made this reader laugh out loud milenia after it was put to page, wild creativity (albeit often pilfered from existent short stories) and sexiness which will make anyone reconsider prudish notions you may have about historical times.
The story is of one Lucius, a Greek citizen of the Roman Empire who is traveling to Thessaly, apparently for business but also because he is intrigued by magic and wishes to learn something of this from the witches who notoriously operate in the shadows of Hypata.
By accident, he is transmogrified into an ass, and the moiety of the narrative consists of his misadventures in asinine form as he passes from owner to owner unable to return to human form, and both suffering and causing comic twists of fate along the way. Throughout, this narrative is interspersed with short vignettes about witchcraft, gods which are told by other characters.
Above all, The Golden Ass has this reader’s hearty recommendation simply because it is very funny and entertaining. As just one of many examples, the idea of Ass-Lucius being bullied and having his oats stolen by his own horse once they are both in equine form and in the service of bandits is just perfect.
There are also some ageless human observations well expressed: “if you shaved the head of even the most beautiful woman alive and so deprived her face of its natural setting [...] her baldness would leave her completely without attraction even for so devoted a husband as the God Vulcan.” Take note, Florence Pugh et al. Lucius said it, not me.
The Golden Ass is written with great joy and energy which is reflected in the reading experience and recommended to anyone with a sense of humor who would like to inhabit the Roman experience of the world: a vivid and whole-hearted life, with a magical and religious penumbra quite lost to the moderns.
I acquired this book in mysterious circumstances. I was walking through the assembled stalls of Winterfest in Thompson, Manitoba when an old woman approached me and pressed it into my hands. “Do you believe in witches?” She asked me. Before I had a chance to respond, she was away, moving with greater celerity than would be expected for her age, gliding, almost, away from the heart of the fair and away into a thicket of spruce over the snowy ground…
It sat in my collection for some time before, seeing it in a pile, I felt a certain call to retrieve it, and henceforth set about reading.
The Golden Ass, or Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, is a wonderful story, combining comedy which made this reader laugh out loud milenia after it was put to page, wild creativity (albeit often pilfered from existent short stories) and sexiness which will make anyone reconsider prudish notions you may have about historical times.
The story is of one Lucius, a Greek citizen of the Roman Empire who is traveling to Thessaly, apparently for business but also because he is intrigued by magic and wishes to learn something of this from the witches who notoriously operate in the shadows of Hypata.
By accident, he is transmogrified into an ass, and the moiety of the narrative consists of his misadventures in asinine form as he passes from owner to owner unable to return to human form, and both suffering and causing comic twists of fate along the way. Throughout, this narrative is interspersed with short vignettes about witchcraft, gods which are told by other characters.
Above all, The Golden Ass has this reader’s hearty recommendation simply because it is very funny and entertaining. As just one of many examples, the idea of Ass-Lucius being bullied and having his oats stolen by his own horse once they are both in equine form and in the service of bandits is just perfect.
There are also some ageless human observations well expressed: “if you shaved the head of even the most beautiful woman alive and so deprived her face of its natural setting [...] her baldness would leave her completely without attraction even for so devoted a husband as the God Vulcan.” Take note, Florence Pugh et al. Lucius said it, not me.
The Golden Ass is written with great joy and energy which is reflected in the reading experience and recommended to anyone with a sense of humor who would like to inhabit the Roman experience of the world: a vivid and whole-hearted life, with a magical and religious penumbra quite lost to the moderns.
January 26, 2024
Funny, sexy, awe inspiring, and in every way wonderful!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews