Written in Gold (The Golden Ass, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on Apuleius's The Golden Ass, translator Ellen Finkelpearl returns to discuss the striking cover of the Norton Library edition, her favorite line from the text and the paradox of the title, and the ways Apuleius thinks of and comments on human and animal rights in the ancient world. 

Ellen Finkelpearl is the Helen Chandler Garland Professor of Ancient Studies at Scripps College, and a scholar of Apuleius.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of The Golden Ass, go to https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393428919. 

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host, Mark Cirino, with Michael Von Cannon producing. Today, we present the second of our two episodes devoted to The Golden Ass by Apuleius as we interview its translator, Ellen Finkelpearl. In part one we introduced Apuleius and his career, and the memorable incidents in this novel. In this the second part we learn about Ellen Finkelpearl's personal experience with Apuleius, her favorite sequence of The Golden Ass, what this novel has to tell us about the treatment of animals in antiquity, and more. Ellen Finkelpearl is professor emeritus of classics at Scripps College, Claremont. She has published several books and many articles about Apuleius and the ancient novel, including Metamorphosis of Language in Apuleius and Apuleius in Africa. She has also published an abridged edition of The Golden Ass with former Norton Library Podcast guest, Peter Singer. We're delighted that she could join us today. It's great to see you again, Ellen Finkelpearl. Welcome back to the Norton Library Podcast. 

[Ellen:] Good to see you again. 

[Mark:] It was great to speak with you about Apuleius's The Golden Ass and learn about the author, and the context, and something about the content of that book, and I'm looking forward to hearing more about this fascinating novel, but I'm happen to be holding the edition of the Norton Library. Ellen, is there anything about this color scheme that we need to know about? 

[Ellen:] It's sort of golden, because it's The Golden Ass, and then purple is my favorite color. So that's the other color there. They tried to make it some other color, but I insisted on the purple. 

[Mark:] Is that true? 

[Ellen:] Yeah! 

[Mark:] That's fantastic. 

[Ellen:] They wanted to make it match the earlier Peter Singer version a little bit more closely. 

[Mark:] And what was that? 

[Ellen:] It was kind of red. 

[Mark:] And you insisted on purple. That's the kind of editorial pull that not every Norton editor has, let me tell you. 

[Ellen:] Good. I'm glad to feel privileged. 

[Mark:] So, do you remember when you first read The Golden Ass? 

[Ellen:] Absolutely. Yeah. So, I was in college, freshman year at Princeton, and I was taking a course on Petronius and for a final paper I decided, because it's very ambitious, to read The Golden Ass because I knew it was the other Roman novel and to compare the narrative techniques of Apuleius and Petronius. So I read it there, first semester freshman year and then next semester I took a wonderful course in creative translation in Latin and the author of the Loeb Library edition, Arthur Hansen, was teaching there at Princeton. He came and talked about translating Apuleius, and so then I encountered Apuleius in Latin. Then later, if I can get to later, I didn't really read Apuleius much. But then in graduate school, I was having a lot of trouble coming up with a dissertation topic, largely because I really wasn't happy with the way that people were reading Latin at my graduate program. So I said, I remember that I really liked Apuleius. And a friend of mine and I just started reading Apuleius in Latin. And that's when I decided to work on Apuleius. And it was really a lucky thing because that was in the late 70s early 80s when Apuleius was not even on the reading list in my graduate program. There was no full length critical study of Apuleius. It was kind of the beginning of, or it was just after the beginning of Apuleius study. So I was really lucky to get in on the beginning there. 

[Mark:] So what was it about the late 70s/early 80s that would have lent itself to an interest in Apuleius? 

[Ellen:] You know classics is such a sort of entrenched field or it has been so connected. There are certain authors who are considered to be the canon and part of that was because they were pleasing to Germans and British people, right, in the 19th century. And the canon really didn't change but I think when more women entered the field, when everybody you know right in academia started to think about diversity and other voices suddenly people started to think about these works that had been really marginalized, disdained, right? Everybody thought Apuleius was no good and that the Greek novels were just trite, and then people started to say what, you know, what about this other literature? And then there was a major conference in 1989 that really—that was the second conference on the ancient novel—and everybody started to get excited about these works.  

[Mark:] It's really interesting to think about how feminists and women scholars would read Apuleius and The Golden Ass. We have a male author with a male protagonist. So, what is the entry into this work and a feministic reading? 

[Ellen:] Well, for one thing, the climax of the novel involves a goddess who says she's like in charge of everything, right? And so she doesn't just say I'm one of many mother goddesses. She says I'm the one goddess, and god, and I'm, it's all contained in me. Unfortunately there are those other two gods who come in later, but that's really kind of the climax. Also the Cupid and Psyche story, for example involves...is a very female story. So you have a female telling the story to another female. The protagonist, Psyche, is female. Psyche does these very female labors, separating grain, right, gathering wool, cooking, that kind of thing. And in the end, surprisingly, she gives birth to a girl. So, there are those aspects that are pleasing to feminists. But I think also the idea that this is a work, it's not the Iliad where people are killing each other, right? It's not the Aeneid, which is a very male work. It's about kind of ordinary people going about household chores and that kind of thing. 

[Mark:] How about the characterization of Photis? 

[Ellen:] Yeah, people fight about this. [laughter] I love Photis. Right. I mean, so there are a lot of women too, not just Photis, but all those women in Book Nine who are very much, they're going their own way. I mean, Photis desires Lucius and she's very forward. She's a slave, but she's very assertive. Some people, in the past especially, have demonized her because she just seems to be interested in sex or something, right? But she's a wonderful character. 

[Mark:] Are there challenges to reading The Golden Ass? 

[Ellen:] Yeah, very many challenges. But I think we didn't really talk much about the ultimate interpretation of the book last time. But it's very difficult to come to any conclusion about what this book really is about. So if that bothers people, that's a problem. And I know that a lot of people get stuck with all these endless adventures. But I think it's good to just keep reading. Just keep enjoying all the different adventures and don't expect it to be like other books because there's just so much to love about this book. 

[Mark:] You mean like a picaresque where episodes just happen one right after the other and there might not always be like a causal link between one to the other. 

[Ellen:] Right. Exactly. Exactly. Right. At a certain point after the Cupid and Psyche episode, some of these tales don't even—there's not even any pretense that they are linked to—I was standing around, I have big ears, and I happen to hear this story. Let me tell you this story. 

[Mark:] Right. Do you have a favorite line in the golden ass? 

[Ellen:] I think I have a favorite several sentences, right. I mean, I think this whole book is my favorite line. I always think of—my father was a Shakespeare scholar and he always would say, “Shakespeare is written in gold” and I think The Golden Ass is written in gold and there's no part that's not important or wonderful. But I picked out a passage, and this is at the beginning of Book Two, and this is when Lucius has just arrived in Thessaly and he's just completely blown away by the prospect that he's going to experience magic. And that is informing how he sees the world. So he says, this is page 19, "As I looked around, nothing in that city seemed to be what it really was, but absolutely everything had been translated into another form by some sort of hellish hex, so that the stones that I bumped against had hardened out of humans, and the birds I heard singing were likewise men who had become feathered, and the trees that lined the city limits were people with foliage, and the watery fountains had flowed, too from human bodies. Statues and pictures were going to walk forth. The walls would talk. Oxen and other cattle would utter portends. And from the very heavens and the orb of the sun, an oracle was going to break forth.” I just love that section because I think it also it's characteristic of the entire novel in the way that nothing is really what it seems or, right, everything is you have to take a close new look at everything  

[Mark:] And that's such an extraordinary sentence. It's so sprawling; we have semicolons. Is this unusual for this novel? 

[Ellen:] Latin is notorious for its long sentences and there's a way that the language is structured that allows Latin to create much longer sentences than we're used to. 

[Mark:] How about teaching this novel, Ellen? What are your techniques when presenting The Golden Ass? 

[Ellen:] I had a special technique when teaching it in Latin, right? I've taught it in Latin more than I've taught it in English. But I don't think that's what you're asking. It depends on what course you're teaching. So this book belongs in so many different courses that you might teach about the ancient world, or about the contemporary world. And so I wanted to give three examples if that's not too much. If you are teaching a course on religion or even you know ancient religion or early Christianity, the novel presents a form of piety in the pagan world that's really, pretty much unparalleled, right? Lucius's devotion to Isis as the only goddess and his utter devotion to her—you don't see that in, you know, say in the Aeneid when somebody's sacrificing to the gods. But throughout the novel, we also see in the Cupid and Psyche episode, those gods that we might sort of think of as those vengeful gods that are jealous of humans and want to get revenge on us. Or you could use this in a course on ancient sexuality and there are these various sex scenes right with Photis a couple of scenes, very graphic scenes with Photis and there's the question you know about what women felt about sex that are involved in those scenes but also right there's interspecies sex, there are these interesting—the cinaedi, the priests of the Syrian goddess who are presumably castrated who dress like women. There's a lot one can do on ancient sexuality. And then also kind of my favorite is to think about it as a text that that lets us think about ancient slavery as well. So there's the really interesting passage in Book Nine in which Lucius is standing around, as a donkey of course, and he's looking at the slaves in the mill the mill grinding flour for bread and there are animals and slaves who are described—just the horrific details of how the slaves are hardly dressed their eyes, you know, they're practically blind and the animals are also in a horrible state. And this is really pretty much unparalleled in the ancient world, right? Slavery was kind of taken for granted and you don't see very many sympathetic descriptions of slavery. But the book is also filled with, you know, Photis is a slave. There are slaves that are told to sleep outside the chambers when Photis and Lucius are having sex. There are slaves who are running around who just decide to leave the farm after Charite dies, right. So I just think I don't have special techniques for teaching it. There's so much for so many different classes. 

[Mark:] Do you think you can deduce Apuleius's personal feelings about slavery, personal attitudes based on his depiction in The Golden Ass? 

[Ellen:] The thing is Apuleius did apparently own a lot of slaves himself. So we can't say he was some kind of abolitionist by any means. But I think that in general the book portrays not only slaves but, right, people who are poor, people who are being oppressed by wealthy people, he portrays that very vividly. And what that actually means in terms of what he his personal beliefs is really hard to tell, but I like to think he's not just saying, "Oh, here are these slaves." Yeah, whatever.  

[Mark:]It's a sensitive treatment. 

[Ellen:] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that phrase. Yeah. 

[Mark:] Do you have a Golden Ass hot take? Something counterintuitive? Something swimming against the stream of conventional wisdom about Apuleius or this novel? 

[Ellen:] I like to think that most of what I say about Apuleius is kind of against the stream but now it's become part of the stream. So two things I think when I first started to think about Apuleius and Africa, everybody was just, you know, there's absolutely no relevance there right? So I've been trying in various ways to encourage people to think about Apuleius as an African and what that actually meant. But I also think in terms of animal rights, if we want to put it that way. And so, even before I collaborated with Peter Singer on that edition, I thought of this very much as a text about challenging ideas about animals’ irrationality and furthering thought about animals being sentient beings. We see Lucius, who's half man, half animal. At one point he and another donkey are walking along with the robbers and Lucius says, "Well, you know, I had the mind of a human." But then he and the other donkey basically do the same thing, right? So the other donkey does what donkeys do and the donkey didn't want to keep going with the robbers and so it just like refuses to go any farther. But Lucius had been thinking about doing that. So it kind of challenges us to think, well that other donkey, was the other donkey also thinking rationally? So I don't know, I don't know if that's a hot take. 

[Mark:] Well you mentioned this as part of the project that Peter Singer enlisted you to help with. So is looking at an ancient text as a way of illuminating modern ways of thinking about animal rights. Is this an innovation? Is this a common application of these texts? 

[Ellen:] No, I don't really think I think it's beginning to be. I think, you know, now animal studies has really taken hold in classics, but that's relatively new. And I would say also there are these other texts that I'm working on now that challenge ideas that the Stoics and other ancient thinkers were promoting, right, that animals were not rational. I think a lot of people don't think that The Golden Ass is really a sympathetic animal text and I don't know why they think that. 

[Mark:] When somebody who's interested in animal rights reads a text like The Golden Ass, what are you looking for? What are you observing in ways that maybe the common reader wouldn't? 

[Ellen:] I think what Peter Singer was mainly observing was the way that you have a first person narrative by somebody who was in the state of being an animal and who sees the treatment of animals rather differently. And so all these beatings that Lucius receives, and, you know, the meager food he gets, and so forth really exposes very clearly how animals were treated. Now there's the question, what did people in the ancient world think about that? Most people say, you know, there was no real concept of animal rights in that era, but certainly people were thinking about whether animals should be treated differently. And so, I think that Peter Singer was looking more at the treatment of animals. And I think more about this, kind of, the liminality that you see there: is Lucius an animal or is Lucius a human? And why do we make such a sharp distinction between animals and humans? So I think I kind of tend to look from a more literary point of view and he's looking you know from a more philosophical point of view I suppose. 

[Mark:] Why is the title The Golden Ass and not Lucius?  

[Ellen:] People who are in the field tend to call this the Metamorphoses because that's what it's actually called in the manuscripts. But it's confusing because Ovid wrote the Metamorphoses, right? So The Golden Ass is the title that St. Augustine used to refer to this book and it's not clear why golden. It might just have something to do with, right, gold is this is this precious metal, but an ass is the lowest animal. So, there's something really paradoxical and contradictory about an ass being golden. I think that's about all I would say about it. 

[Mark:] You mentioned this in your introduction, but I'd love to hear you talk about how this narrative has been adapted or repurposed over the centuries in ways other than the novel itself. 

[Ellen:] Yeah, I think you know, unfortunately, there's no movie of The Golden Ass. It would be nice. But when you start to think about what that movie would look like, it would have to look something like Fellini Satyricon, I think. It’d have to be something—it would have to be a film and not a movie, right? There was an opera of The Golden Ass produced by the Canadian Opera Company in I think that was 1999 and the Globe uh you know the new Shakespeare's Globe in London did a stage production um in maybe 2002. It's very difficult in these adaptations to get everything in, right, so they generally follow the plot of Lucius and they maybe slip in a few little of those embedded tales. I mean, I'm interested in Anthony Doerr's new book, Cloud Cuckoo Land, in which there's an ancient author, Antonius Diogenes, and Antonius Diogenes becomes a major figure, the influence of him becomes an important part of this book. But really, Antonius Diogenes, if you ask me, is Apuleius. And so that gets folded in here in that book. There are also many adaptations of the Cupid and Psyche story. I was also looking at music and I know, you know, there are lots of musical, right—so Scritti Politti—I know nothing about them—but they produce an album called Cupid and Psyche. From what I can tell it doesn't have a lot to do with Apuleius. I'm interested in some of the Algerian takes on The Golden Ass. I haven't actually read these but Apuleius has been embraced by many literary Algerians. For them, as well as for Salman Rushdie, Apuleius is a fellow colonial, right, not a postcolonial because he's still under the Roman Empire, but some of the Algerian authors have seen a, kind of—they feel an affinity for him as a fellow colonial. 

[Mark:] Can we also say like Pinocchio and Shrek where you have this invitation of donkey and human beings? In fact, when you mentioned it's originally called the Metamorphoses, is there something about the notion of the metamorphosis of characters changing identities or changing forms that was of particular interest to Apuleius or the ancient world or might be of interest to us? 

[Ellen:] Starting with the Shrek idea. I think the cartoon that most resembles this is The Emperor's New Groove. And The Emperor's New Groove involves, right, the Emperor gets the wrong potion and turns into a llama. And then he kind of learns how to be a human by being a llama. I think that one's akin. Metamorphosis, that's a huge question. Like, aren't we all interested in change, or how we could change, or maybe we're afraid that we might change into something else that might be sort of sinister. And changing into an animal or changing into a tree or something else can be metaphorical. You know, I was just doing a little yoga with my little grandson and you know, you have to be a tree like I'm being a mountain now or I'm being a tree, right? And I think aren't we all kind of interested in, what would it feel like to be a tree? The ancient world I'm not sure I mean clearly there's more literature or a larger percentage of literature in the ancient world is about metamorphosis perhaps because Ovid is you know such a huge presence. And perhaps there was really a greater belief that one could change into an animal in the ancient world there was more of a belief in magic than I think we generally have now and so that St. Augustine raises the possibility that maybe Apuleius himself might have changed into an ass right and St. Augustine was an important thinker. Yeah, so I think that there's a different resonance in the ancient world because possibly these things could have happened. 

[Mark:] You know, Ellen, maybe the final thing I'm going to ask you to think about is you were just saying how the ancient world treats magic versus how we do in the 21st century. And I think that one of the great leaps that some of our listeners may have is how do we take this ancient text and read it so that it's relevant and that it speaks to our current times? And I'm wondering if you've contemplated that and you say like this is what makes Apuleius's The Golden Ass relevant to our lives now. 

[Ellen:] Well, I just be contrary for a second and say, why does it always have to be relevant to the 21st century? We're so presentist. Isn't there a way that we actually like this text because it's from a different time and a different world? That having been said, I think this text is really important because in a way it shakes up our idea about what some ancient texts were like, right? It's really different from the epics that we might know about or the drama, right? It's sort of about everyday people. And I think it speaks to us more than some of those other texts—which I also love those other texts—but because it's so messy and because it's about this lost individual who finds some peace in the end. And because it's spoken by so many people, because we can think of it as a narrative of an immigrant, even, as somebody who right he's lost and he comes to Rome. So I think there are many many ways that it resonates with the issues that we think about now. 

[Mark:] Ellen Finkelpearl thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library podcast to discuss your wonderful edition of Apuleius's The Golden Ass. Thank you so much Ellen.  

[Ellen:] Thank you. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. 

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of The Golden Ass by Apuleius, translated by Ellen Finkelpearl, is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles. 

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