The Worship Of Isis: painting from Herculaneum (mid first century A.D.). Lucius' conversion to the Egyptian
which enjoyed such success in late-Hellenistic and early-imperial times forms a rather uneasy conclusion to
Apuleius's rumbustious novel The Golden Ass.
The work begins, indeed, with an explosion of zest and hilarity: the narrator presents himself in ingratiating and
persistent tones, almost as though he were a huckster pressing dirty postcards on a passer-by:
At ego tibi sermone isto Milesio uarias fabulas conseram auresque tuas beniuolas lepido susurro
permulceam-modo si papyrum Aegyptiam argutia Nilotici calami inscriptam non spreueris
inspicere-figuras fortunasque hominum in alias imagines conuersas in se rursum mutuo nexu
refectas ut mireris.Now then, I would like to stitch together a variety of stories in this Milesian tale and soothe your
kindly ears with an elegant whisper-so long as you do not scorn to examine this Egyptian
manuscript written with the neatness of a pen of the Nile-so that you may marvel at men's forms
and fortunes changed into new shapes and then one with the other restored to themselves again.Suddenly there is an interruption from the audience: 'exordior. "quis ille?" paucis accipe' (Til begin. "Who's this
fellow?" I'll tell you briefly'). In elaborate and eccentric language the narrator explains that he is a Greek who
learnt Latin at Rome in his adolescence. 'Lector intende; laetaberis', he concludes ('Reader, attend; you will be
entertained'). All this passes in a very few sentences; everything speaks of briskness, energy, entertainment. And
entertainment indeed is what we get, though often of a grotesque sort. Sex and magic, comedy and horror,
elegant romance and coarse bawdy are blended into an intoxicating mixture: men are soused in urine or spattered
with excrement; cuckoldry, castration, copulation are recurrent themes; the entire work is drenched in blood,
torture, and hideous death.
The cement that holds this strange diversity together is provided by Apuleius' idiosyncratic style; it is his style,
again, which prevents the work turning, as the Greek romances sometimes do, into mere vulgar titillation, by
giving to the whole the gloss of an elaborate sophistication. The vocabulary is a weird blend of archaism,
poeticisms, colloquialism, and neologism, elements which are curiously reminiscent of the babu English spoken
in the last century by Indians who had educated themselves from a mixture of Shakespeare, newspapers, and
modern slang imperfectly understood. That analogy is not as far-fetched as it may at first appear, for the narrator
reveals that he is a Greek and apologizes for his imperfect command of the Latin language. 'Fabulam
Graecanicam incipimus,' he explains ('I am beginning a Grecian tale'); characteristically he replaces the ordinary
word for Greek, 'Graecus', with an uncommon form.