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Book 8
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
Desperate, Lucius considers how he can avoid being cooked. He breaks free and destroys the master’s dining room. News comes that rabid dogs have attacked the estate and that some of the other livestock are acting wild due to rabies. Everyone in Philebus’s group believes this is the reason why Lucius is mad as well. They lock Lucius in a bedroom so that he can either die from rabies without infecting anyone else or recover.
Lucius’s quite rational desire to protect himself is interpreted as madness by those around him. This section humorously looks at how sometimes the most reasonable course of action may look insane to people who hold different values.
Themes
Eventually, the men decide to test if Lucius is better by giving him water. Lucius drinks it normally, and they take this as a sign that he has recovered from rabies. Philebus and the other men decide to move on with Lucius and end up staying at a hostel where they hear a story about a pauper’s wife, who turns out to be unfaithful. Lucius recounts the story.
This section begins a whole cycle of stories that explore the idea of faithfulness, particularly in marriage, and question what the consequences are (if any) of choosing to be unfaithful.
Themes
In the story, there’s a pauper who is a poor artisan. The pauper’s wife has a reputation for sneaking out at night to have sex with other men. One night, she almost gets caught, so she has her young lover hide in a jar. The husband says he’s just sold the very same jar for six denarii, so the wife lies and says she’s actually already sold it for seven denarii. The husband asks where the buyer is, and the wife responds that he is actually in the jar inspecting it as they speak.
The pauper’s wife is a sly character, and the story does not necessarily make it clear whether she deserves to be punished for her deceptiveness or rewarded for her ingenuity. Though at times The Golden Ass seems to uphold very traditional ideas about faithfulness (by showing unfaithful characters being punished), this interpretation is complicated by the fact that other stories seem to celebrate the cleverness of unfaithful characters.
Themes
The lover comes out of the jar and pretends to be a buyer. The pauper’s wife makes her husband clean the jar while she and her lover have sex on top of it. The husband eventually goes and delivers the jar to the lover’s house. This is the end of the jar story.
The story of the pauper’s wife ends up in a clear victory for her, showing that not all unfaithfulness gets punished.
Themes
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Lucius’s owners keep coming up with new schemes to make money. Suddenly, however, they are apprehended and accused of stealing from temples and being perverts. Lucius is taken away and sold again, this time to a baker, where he is made to do mill work. Lucius pretends not to understand the work, hoping this will get him assigned to an easier task. But then he sees people around with cudgels and suddenly starts to do the work correctly, making everyone laugh.
Despite Lucius’s many changes in ownership, the people who own him as a donkey are generally all similar in that they treat him cruelly. Despite Lucius’s scheming and tactics, there is no way to get out of the drudgery that the baker has prepared for him.
Themes
Lucius despairs seeing the sorry state of all the other beasts around him. He decides to tell a story about his owner, the baker. The baker is normally a sensible man, but he has one of the worst wives in the world, with nothing redeemable about her. The baker’s wife is selfish and doesn’t pay respect to the gods, and she is particularly cruel to Lucius. Lucius sees that the wife is cheating on her husband with a young man and that there’s an older woman who helps her.
The deceptions of the baker’s wife mirror the deceptions of the pauper’s wife in an earlier story, although arguably the baker’s wife is portrayed less favorably. Perhaps her negative portrayal is influenced by Lucius’s own bad feelings towards both her and the baker, illustrating how stories can be shaped by the people who tell them.
Themes
The old woman gives the baker’s wife advice by telling her a story about Barbarus, who is on the town council and who keeps a close eye on what his wife, Arete, does. The baker’s wife is familiar with this couple. One day, when Barbarus has to go on a journey, he entrusts his loyal enslaved man Myrmex with watching over his wife.
A new story begins showing infidelity from yet another angle. Because the unfaithful baker’s wife is the audience, the old woman’s story will have interesting parallels with the baker’s wife’s own life.
Themes
A man named Philesitherus notices Arete and is tempted by how difficult it would be to reach her. Philesitherus confesses his passion to Myrmex and offers to pay him for his help. Myrmex is horrified at first, but eventually finds himself tempted by the money. He agrees to help.
Philesitherus is one of many characters who succumbs to temptation. His attraction in particular to getting things that are difficult to obtain highlights an interesting aspect of greed.
Themes
But that night, soon after Myrmex leads Philesitherus to Arete’s bedroom, Barbarus makes a surprise return trip. Barbarus can hear them having sex and demands to be let in, but Myrmex pretends he can’t find the key. He stalls until he can get Philesitherus out. But in his rush to leave, Philesitherus forgets his slippers. Barbarus finds the slippers and knows immediately what happened, but he hides the slippers away and doesn’t tell anyone what he knows.
Unlike some of the husband characters, Barbarus is not a complete fool. His decision to hide the slippers he finds shows that he himself is capable of deceptive behavior and so tricking him will not be easy.
Themes
Barbarus orders for Myrmex to be chained up without saying why. By coincidence, Philesitherus happens to be walking by and is shocked to see Myrmex tied up. Philesitherus gets angry at Myrmex and falsely accuses him of making up lies. The performance is so convincing that Barbarus himself believes it. Barbarus pardons Myrmex and then asks him to return the slippers to whomever he stole them from.
Despite having solid evidence of his wife’s infidelity, however, in the end Barbarus is still tricked by Philesitherus. The ending celebrates the ingenuity of Philesitherus, who despite his many mistakes and the evidence against him is nevertheless able to get away with his infidelity.
Themes
And so the old woman’s story ends. The baker’s wife wishes that she had a lover as capable as the one from the story.
The moral of the story seems to be that even intelligent husbands can be fooled by a little trickery—a moral that is perfectly suited to its target audience, the baker’s wife.
Themes
That night, Lucius is allowed to roam free, and he sees the baker’s wife attempting to cheat on her husband. But just as the wife and her young lover begin to kiss, the baker comes back sooner than expected. The wife pretends to be innocent and asks what’s wrong. The baker describes how his friend’s wife is unfaithful.
This scene of the baker’s wife attempting to be unfaithful mirrors the story that occurred just before it, and it prompts yet another story that examines the idea of infidelity.
Themes
In the baker’s story, the fuller comes home for dinner, and it turns out the fuller’s wife is having sex with a younger man. The wife tries to hide her lover by having him hide under a wicker cage. The trick works at first, and they begin to eat.
A fuller is a person who cleans wool. Because the baker is the one telling the story and because he potentially suspects his own wife of infidelity, it soon becomes clear that this story will take a more negative view of unfaithfulness than some of the previous stories.
Themes
Suddenly, sulfur from the laundry business makes the young lover sneeze. The fuller thinks it is his wife who sneezed. He soon realizes, however, that the lover is hiding under the wicker cage. The fuller rages, but the baker assures his friend that the lover will die soon anyway on account of the sulfur. The baker then advises the fuller’s wife to get away to give her husband some time to calm down. This is the end of the baker’s story.
In this story, the characters are punished for their attempts to be clever rather than rewarded for them. It becomes clear that the fuller’s wife is not as clever as she thinks, and by forgetting the sulfur, she shows she has not thought of all possibilities. The wicker cage is perhaps meant to correspond with the jar from the pauper’s wife’s story, and this story’s negative view of infidelity provides a rebuttal to the celebration of infidelity in that earlier story.
Themes
The baker’s wife calls the fuller’s wife a disgrace, but she has a guilty conscience because of her own infidelity. She feeds her husband, the baker, dinner that she had originally prepared for her lover. Lucius tries to find some way to expose her deceit. He sees that the lover’s fingertips are sticking out from his hiding place, so Lucius brings one hoof down on the lover’s fingers, causing the young lover to cry out and get caught.
The baker’s wife’s response to the story is an act to attempt to hide her own infidelity. The fact that Lucius is able to see through her act suggests that perhaps she is not as successful at deceit as some of the clever wives from the previous stories.
Themes
The baker promises the young man that, unlike the fuller, he won’t kill him with sulfur fumes. The baker locks his wife away and then has sex with the lover instead. Then he has the lover restrained and beaten but not killed. The baker makes plans to divorce his wife and throws her out of the house.
In this story, the baker gets the upper hand, and he cruelly uses his advantage to punish the wife and her lover. Perhaps he goes too far, foreshadowing the events that follow.
Themes
The baker’s wife plots revenge. She finds a witch and begins buttering her up, asking her to either make her husband more agreeable or to send some terrible spirit to haunt him. The witch tries to change the baker’s heart, but it doesn’t work. Frustrated, she instead sends the spirit of a murdered woman to haunt the baker.
While the baker’s wife was the one being unfaithful before, her husband’s extreme revenge has arguably changed the equation, and now the baker’s wife’s scheming is more justified than it might have been before.
Themes
One afternoon, a strange mourning woman shows up at the mill. She seems to want to discuss something with the baker. Soon after, the woman disappears, and the baker is found dead, hanging from a beam.
This is yet another story that seems to suggest the involvement of witchcraft without directly invoking magic. Presumably the mourning woman is a ghost who prompts the baker to kill himself, but this isn’t confirmed.
Themes
The baker’s daughter comes from a neighboring town to mourn him. She puts many of the baker’s goods up for a public auction, and this includes Lucius. He ends up being bought by a new farmer and again toils away for a full year.
Once again, Lucius finds that Fortune has sent him in a new direction, illustrating the strange way that his story is affected by the other stories occurring around him.
Themes
One night, the farmer has a visitor who is stopped by rain. The farmer offers him hospitality. In the middle of dinner, a geyser of what seems to be blood shoots up from out of the ground, but they learn that it’s wine boiling up from the vats in the cellar. They see this as a bad omen.
Bad omens occur throughout The Golden Ass, although they are not always this explicit. The stories’ heavy use of foreshadowing helps set the audience’s expectations while also occasionally upending them.
Themes
The bad omen is fulfilled when the farmer learns that a greedy landlord has sacked the land of a tenant who is friends with the farmer’s three sons, who are fully grown. The landlord wants to throw the pauper off the property and claim the property for himself, starting a lawsuit over where the property border lies.
All the previous stories about greed foreshadow how the landlord’s greed will potentially lead him to ruin. In this case, the landlord’s greed causes him to ignore justice for the sake of a quick profit.
Themes
The farmer gets some friends and associates to help testify where the property border should be. But the landlord is mad with greed and doesn’t care. In fact, this only causes the landlord to double down and insist that his enslaved people will soon physically carry the farmer off the property.
This escalation of events serves to highlight how truly greedy the landlord is and how this causes him to ignore normal morality. Though he is a wealthy man with power, his behavior resembles that of the thieves from the cave, showing how greed can make a wide range of people act the same way.
Themes
One of the farmer’s three sons says that the landlord shouldn’t be allowed to get away with acting like a one-man government just because he has a lot of money. He argues that all free men, even poor ones, should be protected by the law. But this speech only makes the landlord angrier and more determined.
This story highlights the conflict between the rich and the poor. As someone who was recently turned into a donkey, Lucius is perhaps more sympathetic to people in the lower class than he was before.
Themes
The landlord unleashes his giant dogs to attack the crowds. Many are bitten and wounded. The farmer’s youngest son trips in the confusion and is torn apart. The two surviving brothers out of the three sons help beat back the dogs with stones and then vow revenge. They try to attack the landlord directly, but he impales the one brother with a spear.
The biting of the dogs symbolizes the wild hunger and greed of the landlord. Though the cause of the three sons is just, the landlord is able to kill one of them, showing how wealth can sometimes give people the power to ignore justice.
Themes
One of the landlord’s enslaved men tries to attack the remaining brother from the three sons with a rock. The attack is ineffective, but the brother pretends his hand is maimed. The brother taunts the landlord, saying he’d chop his head off if his hand hadn’t been maimed. He says that the landlord can keep taking poor people’s land as much as he wants, but he’ll always have neighbors somewhere.
The brother who survives uses trickery to try to take the landlord down. Like Tlepolemus, the brother’s trickery is motivated by a just cause, and perhaps that is part of the reason why he is successful.
Themes
The landlord is enraged and goes to strike. But he finds out that the brother from the three sons is still able to move his hand. The brother slices the landlord up many times and then cuts his own throat to avoid being captured by the landlord’s remaining enslaved men.
Though the death of all three sons is tragic, the fact that the last son kills the landlord and dies on his own terms by suicide suggests that a certain sort of justice has been carried out.
Themes
The farmer is so distraught to hear about the deaths of his three sons that even the death of the oppressive landlord gives him no joy. He slits his own throat, just like his son did.
This section, however, questions the value of the justice from the previous passage, since the father of the three sons is so distraught by their deaths that any victory feels hollow.
Themes
The gardener is sad to see the collapse of the estate. He takes Lucius out and is confronted by a soldier. The gardener doesn’t speak Latin, so the soldier speaks in broken Greek and tries to take Lucius away for himself. The gardener responds by attacking the soldier. The soldier is humiliated to be beaten by a gardener, so at first, he says nothing. Ultimately, however, the soldier finds a way to get the gardener locked up in prison, and he claims Lucius for himself.
Fitting with the theme of unjust violence, Lucius finds himself seized by a soldier. The soldier symbolizes the cruelty and the arbitrariness of authority that is based on violence. He bends justice to suit his own interests, getting the gardener locked up in prison.
Themes
