Themes
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.
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.
Themes
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.
The evil stepmother has been a stock character for a long time, and the example here comes long before fairy tales like “Cinderella” were written down (although many of these fairy tales, including “Cinderella,” trace their origins back to ancient Greek and Roman stories that pre-date even The Golden Ass).
Themes
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.
The confusion of poison and sleeping potions is another storytelling trope with a long history—this example comes almost a millennium-and-a-half before the famous use of a sleeping potion in Romeo and Juliet.
Themes
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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 fact that the enslaved brothers treat Lucius better than any of his other owners suggests that perhaps people in a low position in society have more sympathy for lowly creatures like donkeys and are less arbitrarily cruel than wealthier people. Rather than punishing Lucius for stealing food, they find him amusing and even encourage him.
Themes
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.
Thiasus also treats Lucius well and as a result, Lucius is able to demonstrate some of his surprising skills. This reflects how the way people act is often influenced by the way they are treated and what expectations are set for them.
Themes
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.
The woman who wants to sleep with Lucius is yet another example of a character motivated by lust and greed. Though her desire to sleep with a donkey is strange, this perhaps only serves to highlight how powerfully lust can act to make people desire strange things.
Themes
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.
As with before, sex in The Golden Ass can be explicit and is often played for humor. Here the ridiculousness of the situation only serves to further highlight the extent of the woman’s greed.
Themes
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.
The story of the woman who sleeps with Lucius bears some resemblance to the earlier story about the lusty evil stepmother. Both stories involve complicated family relationships that center on a mother who neglects her duties to the family out of jealousy.
Themes
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.
The jealous wife has been driven mad by her own jealousy and this is what causes her to murder the totally innocent sister. Like Charite, the sister is punished for things that she didn’t even do, evoking the general unfairness of life for many people.
Themes
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.
Poison in this story also connects it to the earlier story of the evil stepmother. In this case, the poison perhaps symbolizes jealousy, which seems to infect the jealous wife like a poison, causing her to spread destruction to practically everyone else that she encounters in the story.
Themes
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.
The judgement of Paris is a famous scene in The Iliad, when Paris is presented with possible gifts from several goddesses and chooses the gift offered by Aphrodite (Venus): the most beautiful woman in the world (Helen of Troy). Just as Paris causes the Trojan War with his lust, the jealous wife has caused her own destruction through lust, making the pantomime of the judgement of Paris a humorous but fitting accompaniment to the events.
Themes
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.
Though The Golden Ass can be explicit about sex, this punishment for the jealous wife makes it clear that sex is still associated with shame in many respects.
Themes
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.
Perhaps after hearing so many stories about deception, Lucius has finally learned how to make his own escape without getting caught. The fact that he starts talking about his honor, only to admit that his real concern was for his own life, provides a humorous example of how even noble intentions can have an element of selfishness beneath them.
Themes
