The Golden Ass

Our narrator, Lucius, introduces himself and lays out his purpose: “Well, let me weave together various sorts of tales, using the Milesian mode as a loom, if you will” (1). After apologizing for his bad Latin—he’s a self-educated Greek—he tells the tale of a journey he took to Thessaly and of all the stories he heard on the road.

On the road to Thessaly, Lucius runs into two bickering fellow travelers. One, an unnamed skeptic, insists that the other, Aristomenes, can’t possibly have experienced what he claims to have experienced. Lucius rebukes the skeptic, telling him that it’s foolish to close one’s ears to even the strangest tale—and gives as evidence the time he saw a lithe young male dancer performing a kind of pole dance on a spear protruding from a sword-swallower’s mouth. Truth, he notes, is often stranger than fiction. He entreats Aristomenes to go on with his tale.

Aristomenes tells a strange story. On a visit to Hypata, a town in Thessaly, he once ran into an old friend, Socrates, whom everyone believed to be dead. Socrates was in a bad way, battered and filthy—the terrible, vengeful witch Meroe had captured him. Socrates tells Aristomenes tales of her power: She can “bring down the sky, hang the land in the air, turn springs to cement, wash away mountains, loft the dead, snuff out the stars, and light up the realm of Tartarus itself” (6).