Author: Graves, Robert

Synopsis
In the ancient world of Thessaly, a young adventurer betrays a priestess of the White Goddess and is turned into an ass. How he resumes human form makes up this tale abounding in lusty incident and bawdy wit. In all of literature, there are few books with the vitality of THE GOLDEN ASS. Here is Robert Graves's masterful translation from the original Latin.

Synopsis
A unique, entertaining, and thoroughly readable Latin novel--the only work of fiction in Latin to have survived from antiquity--The Golden Ass tells the story of the hero Lucius, whose curiosity and fascination with sex and magic results in his transformation into an ass. This new translation is faithful to the meaning of the Latin, while reproducing all the exuberance of the original. 2 maps. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Description from The Reader's Catalog
A humorous, first-person account of one man's "conversion" to the worship of the goddess Isis and his initiation into her mysteries in the second-century Roman empire

From The Publisher
The Golden Ass by Apuleius is a unique, entertaining, and thoroughly readable Latin novel - the only work of fiction in Latin to have survived in entirety from antiquity. It tells the story of the hero Lucius, whose curiosity and fascination for sex and magic results in his transformation into an ass. After suffering a series of trials and humiliations, he is ultimately transformed back into human shape by the kindness of the Goddess Isis. Simultaneously a blend of romantic adventure, fable, and religious testament, the Golden Ass is one of the truly seminal books of European Literature, of intrinsic interest as a novel in its own right, and one of the earliest examples of the picaresque. It includes as its famous centrepiece the myth of Cupid and Psyche, the search of the human soul for union with the divine, and has been the inspiration for numerous creative works of literature and art since the Renaissance. This new translation is at once faithful to the meaning of the Latin, whilst reproducing all the exuberant gaiety of the original.