The Golden Asse

The Golden Asse is the classic English title of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius (c. 125-c. 170 AD), the only Latin novel to survive complete from antiquity. Apuleius was a North African Platonist philosopher and rhetorician who composed the work in eleven books in the second century AD. The novel follows the young man Lucius, whose curiosity about magic leads him to be accidentally transformed into a donkey, and his long wanderings through a Greco-Roman world of brigands, soldiers, priests, lovers, and at the close a revelatory initiation into the mysteries of Isis. The inset tale of Cupid and Psyche is one of the most influential love stories in Western literature. This edition presents the William Adlington English translation of 1566 which has shaped the English reception of the novel since the Renaissance. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.