The Golden Ass

by Peter Singer

  I didn’t forget my cleverness and wisdom, however, or give myself easily to the training in this business. Rather, even though I had often seen such machines circumrotating when I lived among men, I feigned bewilderment and just stood there rooted to the spot as if I had no experience and was ignorant of the way it worked. Naturally, I was thinking that if I proved less adept and fairly useless, I would be assigned to some other, definitely lighter, kind of work or, surely, sent off to be lazy and eat. But this turned out to be a pointless and counterproductive piece of cleverness; quickly a whole crowd of men stood around me armed with sticks. I didn’t know what was going on, since my eyes were covered. Suddenly they gave a signal and all yelled together and beat me with blows by the bushel. I was so violently disturbed by the noise that I discarded all forethought and leaned entirely into the rope harness like an expert and executed speedy rotations.

  With that swift switch in my philosophy, I made the whole crowd of men laugh.

  Finally, when most of the day was gone and I was utterly done for, they removed my rope harness, freed me from my bond to the machine, and sent me to my enclosure.

  Reader, although I was extremely tired, in dire need of restoring my strength, and totally dying of hunger, still, dumbfounded by my usual curiosity and feeling rather uneasy, I left my food alone—which was abundant—and observed the operation of this undesirable workshop with a sort of enjoyment. Good gods! What reduced men were there! All of their skin painted with livid gashes, their whiplashed backs not even covered, but rather shaded by torn patchwork, some wearing only a small scrap of fabric on their groins, but all so barely clothed that their bodies showed through their rags. Their foreheads were tattooed, their hair half shaved and their feet shackled. On top of that, their pallor was gruesome and their eyelids had been eaten away by the thick black smoke in the scorching murk so that they were nearly blind. And like boxers who sprinkle dust on their bodies when they fight, they were filthily whitened with flour dust.

  As for my fellow beasts of burden, my cohabitants, what shall I say, and how? What aged mules and decrepit nags! Gathered round the manger, their heads buried in the masses of husks, they were hacking away at the chaff, their necks sagging from the decay and putrefaction of their sores, their nostrils gaping loose from the constant pressure of coughing, their chests raw from the rope harness’s endless rubbing, their ribs bone-stripped from ceaseless beating, their hooves stretched wide to an enormous footprint from their multiple circumnavigations of the mill, and their hides irritated all over from neglect, scabies, and malnourishment.

  As I looked at the deathlike state of these mates-in-bondage, I feared the same for myself. Recalling the good fortune of that Lucius of old and how I was now driven to the very extremity of existence, I hung my head and mourned. I saw no solace at all in this life of torture except that I could restore my spirits by my natural curiosity, since people around me made little of my presence and did and said whatever they wished.

  And then I realized that Homer, that divine inventor of ancient poetry among the Greeks, was right. When he wanted to portray a man of the greatest intelligence, Odysseus, he recorded in song that he had acquired his outstanding abilities “by seeing many cities and knowing many peoples.” Likewise, I give grateful thanks to the ass I was, since, when I was hidden in his hide and subjected to a variety of adventures, he didn’t make me as wise as Odysseus, but certainly broadened my knowledge.

  So I decided to treat your ears to a really good story, elegantly arranged and sweet. Let me begin.

  My new owner, the miller, was in all respects a good man and extremely temperate, but was cursed with the worst wife—far exceeding every woman on earth in her immorality. He endured the ultimate torture of a miserable home life and marriage bed so that—by Hercules!—I, too, often groaned silently over his plight. This depraved woman didn’t lack a single vice; every last act of iniquity had flowed together into her soul as if into some filthy sewer. She was ferocious, contumacious, debauched and drunken, persistent and insistent, greedy in her shameless stealing, lavish in her monstrous spending, hostile to faithfulness, an enemy to righteousness. She spurned and trampled on all the divine gods, and in place of established religion, she lied irreverently about a fabricated god whom she called “the One.”* She fooled everyone with her meaningless and manufactured observances, and deceived her unfortunate husband while she surrendered her body to morning tippling and daylong adultery.

  This woman persecuted me with a spectacular hatred. Even before dawn, when she was still in bed, she shouted loudly that the new ass should be hooked up to the mill, and as soon as she had emerged from her bedroom, she stood there demanding that I be struck with countless blows in her presence. And when all the other pack animals were set loose for their regular meals, she would order me brought to my manger much later.

  That cruelty of hers vastly increased my natural curiosity about her habits and way of life, as I had noticed a certain young man constantly going in and out of her bedroom—quite openly. I was just dying to see his face; if only the blinders around my head could have given my eyes a clear view at some point, I would certainly have found the cleverness to expose this horrible woman’s crimes one way or another. But some old woman who served as facilitator for her perversions and go-between for her adulteries was her inseparable companion day in and day out. Together at breakfast and then over cups of undiluted wine, they took turns hurling abuse at the woman’s poor husband and crafting intricate schemes and deceitful plots to destroy him. Meanwhile, though I was furious at Fotis’s mistake in making me an ass while trying to make me a bird, I kept myself going with this one little consolation for my awful disfigurement: now that I was endowed with enormous ears, I could easily hear everything that was said, even at a fair distance.

  One day, I heard the miller’s wife complaining about her lover’s timidity: “Those lucky women who enjoy steadfast and unrestrained lovers, while I happened to get myself a ‘friend’ who’s even afraid of the sounds from the mill and the face of this mangy ass!” The old woman answered, “I know a crafty lover named Philesitherus who has shown an admirable cleverness in fooling cuckolded husbands. I’ll encourage and persuade him—he’ll jump at the chance—and I’ll set you up an appointment.” Then, promising to bring him back with her in the evening, the old woman left.

  So that faithful wife immediately started cooking up a lavish meal, decanting expensive wine and simmering a savory stew. With abundance on the table, she finally awaited the lover as if he were a god of some sort. Her husband was conveniently dining out at the home of a nearby fuller. And so, when the day was approaching its end and I was at last freed from my harness and given over to refreshing myself without a care, I wasn’t so much reveling in my liberty—by Hercules—as in my ability to observe freely all the devious arts of this evil woman now that my eyes were relieved of the blinders. The sun by now had slipped deep into the ocean and was brightening the tracts under the earth when the reckless adulterer arrived, clinging to the side of that depraved old woman. He was still a boy with cheeks smooth and beardless, still giving delight to male adulterers. The woman received him with effusive kisses and urged him to recline and begin the dinner she had prepared.

  But no sooner had the youth taken the first welcoming sip and tasted the first course than the husband returned much sooner than expected. The excellent woman invoked dire maledictions against him and asked the gods to break both his legs! Then she hastily hid the adulterer, quaking and pale with fear, under a wooden trough for cleaning mixed grains that happened to be lying nearby. She concealed her crime with her natural deviousness and assumed an unruffled appearance, asking her husband why he had deserted his close friend’s dinner party and come home early.

  He sighed and sighed and spoke in a spirit of utter dejectedness: “I couldn’t bear the utter outrage of that despicable woman, so I tore myself away and fled. Oh good god! That lady, hitherto so faithful and temperate, and now she has
defiled herself with the most shameful, disgraceful behavior! I swear by the goddess Ceres who oversees my mill that I just can’t believe the evidence of my own eyes when it comes to a woman like that.”

  These words from her husband fired up the impudent wife’s interest; she was passionate to know the whole affair and wouldn’t stop assailing her husband with demands to draw out the whole tale from the very beginning. She didn’t stop until her husband gave in to her demand and provided a detailed account of the misfortunes of another’s household, all the while ignorant of his own.

  “The wife of my friend the fuller seemed to be a woman of steadfast chastity, someone who managed her husband’s home with propriety and took pride in her good reputation. But, driven by secret lust, she lapsed into adultery and rashly took a lover. And since she was always engaged in stolen embraces, at that very moment when we were coming from the baths and looking forward to our dinner, she was entwined with this young man in the act of love. And so, confused by our arrival, she devised a precipitous plan and hid him under a wicker cage. It was woven from smooth bent sticks piled up in a rectangular mound and permeated with the white smoke of sulfur used to bleach garments spread out on top. Then, since he seemed to be quite safely hidden, she joined our meal without a worry. But after a while, when the young man had taken in the strong and bitter odor of sulfur and was overcome by the clouds of fumes and faint from lack of breath, the sulfur, as is the nature of these potent substances, induced a violent sneezing fit.

  “At first when the husband heard the sound of sneezing behind his wife, he thought it came from her and offered her the usual blessings for her health. But when the sound was repeated and came more often, he finally began to suspect what was going on by virtue of its very frequency. So he quickly shoved back the table and removed the cage and brought out the lover—who was barely gasping out short breaths. Burning with indignation at this insult, calling for his sword, the fuller was desperately eager to slit the man’s throat as he lay there dying. But out of consideration for our common danger, I just barely managed to restrain him from this reckless attack, arguing that in a short time and without any legal repercussions, his rival would die of his own accord through the virulence of the sulfur. He was pacified, not by my persuasion, but by the circumstances themselves, and he carried the young man, half dead, into the nearest alley.

  “After that, I quietly begged and pleaded with the wife to go away for a spell, to remove herself from the home workshop and stay for a while with a woman friend, until her husband’s boiling temper had cooled. At present, he was driven by such hotheadedness and madness that there was no doubt he was devising some very unhappy scheme for himself and his wife. Driven away in disgust from a dinner like that with my friend, I came back home.”

  While the miller was narrating all this, that impudent and impetuous woman kept on cursing the fuller’s wife with damning insults: she was faithless, shameless, a major disgrace to the whole female sex, a woman who put aside her own modesty and trampled on her marriage bed, who had stained her husband’s home with the reputation of a brothel, who had lost her right to the respectable name of “wife” and enrolled her name in the roster of prostitutes. She added that such a woman should be burned alive.

  And yet, cognizant of her secret vulnerability and her filthy conscience, she kept suggesting over and over (so that she could free the adulterer from the torture of his hiding place) that her husband should head off to bed early. But, given that his meal had been interrupted before he had fled, he was totally starving and politely requested dinner instead. So the woman laid it out in front of him, quickly but unwillingly—since obviously it was intended for someone else. As for me, my innermost vitals were being eaten away as I thought about this awful woman’s past misdeeds and her present audacity, and I was carefully deliberating in my mind whether there was some way to help my master by laying bare and revealing this woman’s deception. Perhaps I could push away the covering and openly expose the man lying underneath it like a tortoise.

  As I was feeling tortured at this affront to my master, heavenly providence finally looked kindly on me. It was the hour for the lame old man who was in charge of all us pack animals to lead us in a herd to a nearby watering hole to drink. This provided me with the opportunity for revenge that I so desired. For as I walked by, I noticed that the tips of the adulterer’s fingers were poking out from the narrow confinement of the hollow covering. So I ferociously stamped on them with the edge of my hoof and ground them down to nothing, until the unbearable pain drove him to raise a piteous cry and push away and throw off the trough. Thus revealed to the unaware, he laid bare this vile woman’s scheme.

  But the miller was not terribly upset by his wife’s unfaithfulness. As the boy stood there, pale and quaking with fear, the miller looked at him with a calm and comforting gaze and soothed him with these words: “You have nothing dire to fear from me, my son. I’m no barbarian and I don’t subscribe to the rough ways of country folk, nor will I, like my ferocious friend the fuller, kill you with the lethal fumes of sulfur, and I will not even invoke the severity of the legal system through the Law on Adultery to bring a capital charge against such a charming and beautiful boy! But I will treat you entirely as ‘community property’ with my wife. Under my power of attorney, I will not handle this as an inheritance to be distributed among the family, but as communal property to be distributed such that, without controversy or dispute, we come to an agreement among the three of us in one bed. For I have always lived so harmoniously with my wife that, as wise men advise, the same things are agreeable to us both—and yet equity per se should not allow the wife more authority than the husband.”

  Mocking and sweet-talking the boy like this, the miller led him to his bed; the boy was unwilling, but followed anyway. There, with his chaste wife locked up elsewhere, he alone slept with the boy and enjoyed the most gratifying revenge for his ruptured marriage. But as soon as the bright chariot of the sun brought in the day, he called in his two strongest slaves to lift the boy high into the air and beat his buttocks with a rod. “You,” he said, “so soft and tender and still a boy, you, cheating lovers of the flower of your youth while chasing women—free women at that—and ruining marriages sanctified by law, while you claim for yourself the name of adulterer before your time!”

  Driving him away with these curses and more, and adding yet more beatings, he threw him outside. And so, that boy, the bravest of all adulterers, fled in tears, unexpectedly escaping with his life, but with those white buttocks of his split apart both by night and by day. Nonetheless, the miller gave notice to his wife and immediately drove her from the house.

  But that woman, apart from her natural depravity, was also highly incensed and embittered by this indignity, so she returned to her bag of tricks and enlisted feminine arts. She diligently searched out a certain experienced woman who was reputed to be able to accomplish anything with her hexes and spells. She begged and prayed and stuffed the woman’s treasury with gifts, asking one of two outcomes: either her husband should be appeased and reconciled with her, or if that could not be done, then surely his life could be violently snuffed out by sending in a ghost or some other dread spirit. So first that divinely powerful witch exercised the weapons of her evil profession and tried to change the mightily offended husband’s mind and compel him to love his wife. But when this approach went awry and things turned out differently than expected, she grew angry at the divine powers that were obstructing her. So apart from the matter of the reward agreed upon, she was also motivated by frustration at her own vain efforts, and she began to threaten the very life of that wretched husband, and to incite the ghost of a violently murdered woman to destroy him.

  But perhaps, careful reader, you find fault with my narrative and object, “How could you, you cunning little ass, know what the women were doing in secret, closed up as you were inside the confines of the mill?” Listen, then, to how a curious man enduring the appearance of a pack animal knew eve
rything they did to destroy my master the miller.

  Around midday, a woman suddenly appeared at the mill. She was wearing the dreary clothes of a defendant in a lawsuit: half clothed in a pathetic cloak with bare, exposed feet, filthy, pale like beechwood, emaciated. Her torn gray hair, soiled with a sprinkling of ash, fell forward and covered her face. This woman gently took the miller by the hand as if she had some secret to share, and led him into his private room, pushed the bolt to, and remained there for a very long time.

  But when the workers had processed all the grain they had on hand and it was absolutely necessary to ask for more, the slaves stood outside the room and shouted to their master repeatedly, asking for more grain. And when the master failed to respond when they shouted over and over, they pounded hard on the door and, since it had been bolted very tightly, they began to suspect something was wrong. So they used great force to either break down the door or push it off its hinges, and finally they created an opening. Inside, they didn’t see that woman anywhere, but the master was hanging from a beam, bound tightly in a noose, and already lifeless. So they freed him from the knot around his neck and pulled him down. Then, with much lamentation and wailing, they bathed his body for the last time, performed the funeral rituals, marched to the cemetery amid a great crowd, and gave him over to burial.