CLAS 355
Apuleius, The Golden Ass (cont.)
April 20, 2023

Donkey & Farmers , Tomb of Panehsy, Upper Egypt, 13th century BCE

Response #2: due Friday, 11:59pm


Golden Ass, Books 7-9: Lucius's HTVT journey through Greco-Roman world of disorder, mistrust, corruption, cruelty

Bona (Good) Fortuna (Vatican Museums)

• Lucius awaiting Charite's grotesque entombment: Fortune's blindness (randomness), "It occurred to me that in the learned writings and great art of old, Fortune is blind—or has her eyes gouged out, which gives us no hope she'll ever see . . . why am I wasting more words on the perversity of Fortune, when she wasn't even ashamed of yoking me in slavery alongside my former slavish conveyance, the horse?" (7.2-3)
  
  
• Charite: Tlepolemus ("Haemus"), fiancé-in-disguise, joins robbers; embedded Greek novel plot (subverted)
  
  Golden Ass 7.10 (Ass-man misjudges Charite)
  As soon as she saw the young man and heard mention of a brothel and a pimp, she started to laugh and wiggle ecstatically, so that I felt justified in condeming the entire sex. This girl had pretended to be in love with an eligible youth and full of longing for a faithful marraige, and now she was suddenly exulting when the word whorehouse—a squalid, sordid whorehouse—reached her ears. At that moment, the character of all women, as a class, was subject to a donkey's censure.
  
  
• rescue, conclusion of Charite's story told by slave ("I want you to know the whole story, and I'll tell you from the beginning what happened. It's the kind of things better-educated people, Fortune's chosen authors, would be the right ones to commit to paper and make into your ideal tale", 8.1): Thrasyllus & Tlepolemus (boar hunt)?
  
  Golden Ass 8.6 (funeral after Thrasyllus's murder of Tlepolemus)
  He hugged the body he'd just made a cadaver, as if he couldn't get enough, and went through a whole roster of proper mourning; he was good at it, except his tears wouldn't appear and perform their function. As we were doing our sincere lamentations, he blamed the animal—but his own hand had done the crime.
  
  
  Worcester Hunt Mosaic (Byzantine, 6th century CE)
  
  
• Charite's mourning & ghost of husband, her "tragic" plot ("With a man's courage and a swoop straight out of hell, she moved on the murderer", 8.11)
  
  
• Lucius, Book 7: briefly pampered as savior-ass, handed over to herdsman, failed attempt to have sex with mares; hauling wood for boy in mountains ("quite certainly the worst boy in existence", 7.17)
  
  
  Fortuna Huiusce Diei (Fortune of the present day), ca. 100 BCE
  
  
• (Mala) Fortuna, commencement of random & calamitous events/wanderings: boy sets Ass-man on fire, false accusation of sexual assault, castration
  
  
  
  Golden Ass 7.24 (Ass-man's rescue by bear who dismembers boy)
  I dedicated myself wholeheartedly to fleeing that monstrous bear and that boy who was worse than the bear.
  
  
  1st century CE statue of Artargatis, Nabatean temple, Khirset Tannur (Jordan)
  
  
• Book 8, death of Charite & Tlepolemus: household slaves become refugees on perilous journey; mauled by farmers' dogs (8.17); Ass-man auctioned off to to priest (Philebus) of Syrian Goddess (= Atargatis) by "my personal sadistic goddess of Fortune" (8.24)
  
  
• grifting priests' travelling salvation show: divine inspiration, dancing & music, self-flagellation, prophecies, collections; sex-cult with young male sex-slave, prospect of bestiality (end of Book 8)
  

• Golden Ass 9: Ass-man escapes perils (dinner, rabies) with priests, hears story of pauper's wife (large storage jar, 9.5-7) > series of Milesian Tales (lurid world of infidelity, mistrust, superstition, etc.)
  
  L: Roman stone mill for grinding wheat
  
  
• priests arrested (temple robbery), Ass-man auctioned to baker: inhuman(e) work at the mill
  
  Golden Ass 9.11-13 (lived experience of slavery for men & beasts)
  I thought that if I pretended to be brainless, I could pass as unsuitable for this kind of service and useless at it. I would be assigned to some other task, which would have to be easier [severe beating with clubs follows] . . . Good gods, what sorry excuses for human beings I saw. The pale welts from chains crossed every patch of their skin like brushstrokes. Their flogged-up backs under sparse patchwork were no better covered than stretches of ground that shade falls on. Some of them had thown on an exiguous vestiture, which extended only to the loins, yet all were clad so that their scraps of tatters kept no secrets. Their foreheads were inscribed with brands, their hair half-shaved, their ankles braceleted with fetters, their pallor hideous, their eyelids gnawed by the gloomy smoke of the murky fumes, which left them less able to access light at all. Like boxers who fight bathed in fine dust, these men were filthy white with floury ash. And the beastly barracksful I now belonged to—what can I tell you? How would I put it? They were just indescribable, the ancient mules and the broken-down geldings gathered around the manger, their heads submerged as they demolished masses of chaff, the skin on their necks loose as bellows-leather from rotting, running wounds, their nostrils battered, by ceaseless coughing, into flaccid, yawning chasms, their chests covered in sores from the unending gouging of rush ropes, their ribs laid bare—bare to the bone—by perpetual chastisements, their hooves splayed to cover the grotesque amount of ground as a result of those multitudinous circular coursings, and their entire hides rough with inveterate dirt and mangy starvation.
  
  
  Fuller's shop scene, Pompeii
  
  
• baker's wife (9.14-31): old lady's recommendation of young lover, story of Barbarus & adulterous wife Arete (Myrmex & slippers); baker's wife & lover (husband dining at fuller's, wicker cage story), lover hidden under wooden trough, exposed by Ass-man, baker's sexual punishment, divorce, witch & murder
  
  Golden Ass 9.14 (lengthy condemnation of baker’s wife)
  There wasn't a single fault missing from that dame, who had nothing whatsoever to recommend her; on the contrary, every wicked passion, bar none, had flooded into a heart that was like some slimy privy. A fiend in a fight but not very bright, hot for a crotch, wine-botched, rather die than let a whim pass by—that was her . . . In place of the self-evident divinities we cultivate, she posited a god—sacreligiously and on no basis but her own lies—whom she proclaimed as the Only One.
  
  
• Ass-man auctioned to poor & kind garderner: story of householder's suicide & three sons (killed by landgrabbing aristocrat, "one-man government", 9.36) > backdrop of lawless, unjust & corrupt society
  
  
• Roman legionary (9.39-42): theft, beating, (mono)linguistic imperialism ("This man proved unable to control the bad attitude so often associated with his profession . . . [the soldier's] animalistic agression was aimed at annihilating him", 9.39-40); soldier loses sword
  
  
• Ass-man's curiosity in the attic? ("They hauled him off to prison, undoubtedly to pay with his life", 9.42)