The Golden Ass: of Lucius Apuleius

The Golden Ass has been a favourite of the private presses and illustrators since the invention of printing. Apuleius’ comic masterpiece originally composed in Latin in the second century AD, traces the hilarious misadventures of a young man a tad too curious about magic for his own good. Hoping to change himself into an owl, he turns into a donkey instead, and in this guise is sold, stolen, or otherwise shunted from one master to the next. Along the way, he sees the underbelly of the sprawling Roman Empire, with its saints and sinners, its venal merchants and greedy priests, until he’s transformed back to human form via divine intervention. Not only a story of comic redemption, it is also a self-conscious early example of storytelling that left an indelible mark on later literature - from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Boccaccio’s Decameron , and from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Pinocchio .