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Book 9
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Golden Ass, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Power of Stories
Faithfulness and Loyalty
Identity, Transformation, and Curiosity
Consequences of Greed
Summary
Analysis
The soldier loads Lucius up with his armor and begins to travel. They stop, and the soldier leaves Lucius with an enslaved person. A couple days later, a terrible crime occurs there, and Lucius retells the story.
Even when in the service of a cruel owner like the soldier, Lucius keeps up his interest in stories, perhaps showing how stories can entertain or even help people endure hardships.
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Themes
In the story of the crime, there is an unfaithful stepmother who begins to lust after her stepson. She tries to hide her extreme lust by passing it off as illness, but eventually she can’t anymore, and so she summons her stepson and tells him everything. He is upset but doesn’t want to provoke her with a quick refusal. He then retreats to talk the matter over with an old teacher and decides that the best option is to run away.
Like the marriage stories from earlier, this new story focuses on a woman who is unfaithful to traditional family obligations. The association of lust with illness recalls the earlier story of Cupid and Psyche where the love god Cupid was portrayed as frequently drunk.
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The stepmother secures poison to give her stepson, but her biological son drinks some by accident and dies. She then uses this as an opportunity to attempt to frame her stepson. The stepson ends up on trial for murder. He is almost condemned to death, but one member of the judicial council, a doctor, tells everyone that the stepson didn’t buy the poison from him.
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In fact, the doctor had suspected the poison might be used for murder, so he sold the stepmother’s enslaved servant a sleeping potion instead. Everyone goes to the biological son’s tomb and finds that he is still alive. The stepmother’s enslaved servant is crucified and the stepmother is exiled. And so the story ends.
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The soldier who owns Lucius sells him to some local enslaved people, two brothers who serve a rich man. One is a pastry chef, and the other is a cook. They bring back leftovers from lavish dinners, and Lucius eats some of them while the brothers are out. The brothers argue about which of them is stealing the food, only to catch Lucius in the act. Rather than punish him, they find this so funny that they can’t stop laughing. They give Lucius some alcohol.
The enslaver of the two brothers buys Lucius and then hands him over to a wealthy freedman named Thiasus. Thiasus treats Lucius well and even teaches him how to recline at a table. Rumors spread about what an intelligent donkey Lucius is.
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Thiasus travels to Thessaly to buy wild beasts and gladiators. He then comes back to Corinth, where crowds of people are eager to see the clever ass, Lucius. One of the visitors to Lucius is a wealthy lady who develops a lust for Lucius and pays a high price to spend a night in bed with him.
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That night the wealthy lady comes to Lucius and gets naked. He worries about how he’ll have sex with her now that his legs and mouth and penis are so much bigger. But the woman has sex with him and is satisfied enough to arrange to pay the same price for another night.
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It turns out, however, that the wealthy lady who has sex with Lucius is a condemned woman. She has committed crimes and has been sentenced to be devoured by wild animals. Her story begins years ago, when she’s still married to a young man. Her father-in-law left his wife (mother of the young man), but the wife secretly gave birth to a daughter, meaning that the wealthy woman’s husband has a secret sister.
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The mother reveals to her son that she has been hiding the existence of his sister. The son agrees to keep the secret and marries his sister off to a friend. But the son’s jealous wife (the condemned woman, who is doomed to be torn apart by wild animals and who sleeps with Lucius in donkey form) believes that her husband’s secret sister is actually his mistress. She prepares a trap, first beating the girl and then shoving a torch between her legs to kill her.
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The girl’s husband and the jealous wife’s husband are both outraged. The jealous wife decides she needs to procure poison from a crooked doctor to give her husband. She does so, and he dies. The doctor also dies in the process. The jealous wife decides to obtain even more poison from the dead doctor’s wife. She kills her baby daughter so that she won’t inherit her dead father’s money. She also tries to poison the doctor’s wife, and succeeds, but the doctor’s wife is able to tell part of her story to the governor before dying.
Because the governor hears the story, the jealous wife is condemned to death by wild beasts. The day arrives for the gladiatorial show where the woman will be executed. It starts with a grand spectacle where attractive actors pretend to be the gods. They pantomime the Judgment of Paris. Lucius gives a brief philosophical aside about the limits of human judgment and how the Athenians condemned Socrates to death before apologizing for interrupting the tale.
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After the Judgement of Paris, they bring out the jealous wife, who is condemned to death by wild beasts. First, however, they have set things up so that Lucius, still a donkey, can publicly have sex with the woman—there is even a bed for them.
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Lucius fears at first for his honor if he has sex with the wicked jealous wife before ultimately admitting that he fears even more for his life, since if he stays, he runs the risk of getting torn apart by the same wild animals intended for the woman. He decides to run away and makes it six miles to another town before deciding to stop for sleep.
