The Golden Ass

by Peter Singer

  The next day, his daughter came rushing in from a nearby town where she had moved long ago to be married, mourning and shaking her unbound hair, and beating her breasts with her fists. She knew everything about the misfortunes of the household, though none had informed her. Her father had appeared to her in a dream, weeping and with the noose still bound around his neck, and revealed to her the stepmother’s entire crime: the adultery, the dark arts, and how he had been bewitched and descended to the underworld. When she had tormented herself with extended wailing, finally, restrained by the family slaves, she desisted from her mourning. Then, when the rites at the tomb had been completed on the ninth day, she consigned the slaves, the furniture, and all the pack animals that she had inherited to auction.

  I was sold to a poor market gardener for fifty sesterces,* a high price for him, but enabling him to make a living through our joint labor.

  I think circumstances require that I should lay out the routine of this servitude of mine as well. In the morning, my master would lead me to the next town loaded with vegetables, and when he’d sold his wares to the merchants there, he returned to his garden riding on my back. While he was digging, while he was watering and slaving away, or bent over other work, I enjoyed myself in placid quiet, free from labor. But then the year passed through all the ordered rotations of the stars and through the set number of days and months and past the delights of autumn winemaking, and turned to the frosty winters of Capricorn. Then I was tortured by unremitting cold, ceaseless rains, and nightly dew, since I was enclosed in a roofless stable in the open air. But of course, my master, due to his extreme poverty, wasn’t even able to provide himself, let alone me, with any straw bedding or scanty covers, but spent the winter closed up and content in the shelter of his hut, made of leaves and twigs. On top of that, in the morning when I walked on the frozen mud and stepped on extremely sharp fragments of ice with my bare feet, it was killing me. Besides, I couldn’t even fill my stomach with my usual food, since both my master and I had the very same dinner, and not much of it: old and unappetizing lettuces, the ones that have grown so old that they “bolt” and look like brooms, decayed into a bitter rot of muddy juice.

  One day, my master visited a wealthy landowner to collect a much-needed gift of grain and olive oil, but as he returned, he ran into trouble, for a tall man crossed our path, clearly a soldier from the Roman legion, judging by his dress and deportment. He asked my master in a disdainful and arrogant voice where he was taking that load-free ass. But my master, not knowing the Latin language, walked past him in silence. The soldier couldn’t restrain his military hauteur and, taking the gardener’s silence as an insult, struck him with the staff he was holding and pitched him forward off my back. Then the gardener answered submissively that he couldn’t understand what the soldier was saying because he didn’t know the language. So the soldier resumed in halting Greek, saying, “Where you take that ass?” The gardener answered that he was heading for the next town, to which the soldier said, “But I need his help. He must carry our commander’s luggage from the garrison along with other animals.” And he instantly reached out his hand to grab me by the bridle that was guiding me, and began to drag me along. But the gardener was wiping the blood off his head flowing from the wound already inflicted, and pleaded with this “fellow soldier” to behave more gently and with more civility “as he hoped for the man to prosper for many years ahead,” adding, “Anyway, this one is a lazy ass, less than nothing, afflicted with that falling disease. As a rule, he can hardly carry a few small handfuls of vegetables from my nearby garden without getting tired and out of breath, let alone seeming fit to bear bigger things.”

  When the gardener realized, however, that the soldier was not going to be placated by any pleas—in fact, was growing wilder, was going to kill him, and had flipped over his staff to split open his head with the large knot of a handle, he turned to extreme measures to save himself. He pretended that he wanted to clasp the soldier’s knees in a humble gesture to elicit pity, and, lowering himself down and bending over, he grabbed both of the soldier’s feet, lifted him high in the air, and body-slammed him to the ground. Then, quickly, with his fists, his elbows, his teeth, and even with a rock seized from the road, he beat the soldier’s face, hands, and sides all over. As the soldier lay there flat on the ground, he couldn’t fight back or protect himself at all, but naturally he kept threatening that if he got back up, he would chop the gardener into little pieces with his saber. Taking that warning, the gardener tore the sword away and threw it as far off as he could, then resumed beating him even more fiercely. So the soldier had little recourse, lying there on his back and beset by his wounds, except to do the one thing left: he played dead. Then the gardener picked up that sword, climbed on my back, and hurried straight off at a quickened pace to his town. He chose not to visit his garden, but made a detour to a friend’s house. There he told him the whole story and begged him to help a friend in peril and to hide him along with his ass for a bit until, after two or three days in hiding, he might evade an indictment on a capital charge. The man honored their long friendship and took him in. He bent my legs and hoisted me rapidly up a ladder into an attic space, while the gardener crept into a chest downstairs right in the workshop itself and waited there with the lid drawn over him.

  But that soldier, as I later learned, when he emerged from a drunk-like state, tottering and suffering from the pain of so many blows, barely supporting himself with a cane, finally reached town. He was ashamed to tell any of the townspeople of his weakness and helplessness, so he swallowed down the injustice, but when he came across some bunkmates, he told them alone about his defeat. They advised that he should secrete himself for a while in the barracks, since, apart from his own disgrace, he was afraid that he might be punished for violating the military oath, as he had lost his sword. Meanwhile, they would take note of all the evidence and provide vigorous help with the investigation and prosecution.

  Then the inevitable treacherous neighbor came forward and instantly reported where we were hiding. So the bunkmates called in the magistrates and lied that they had lost a very valuable silver vessel belonging to the governor along the road, and that some gardener had found it and didn’t want to give it back, but had hidden it for himself at a friend’s house. So the officials, when they heard the words “lost” and “governor,” came to the door of the house where we were staying and loudly commanded our host to hand over the two of us—he was certainly hiding us there—rather than risk the death penalty. But he was not at all frightened and kept his word to his friend, not giving us away, and swearing he had not seen the gardener for several days. But the soldiers kept insisting that he was hiding there and not somewhere else, swearing by the sanctity of the Emperor. Finally, the magistrates decided that, to expose his denials, they would subject him to a search. So they sent in the police and other public servants, and ordered them to search every corner with the utmost thoroughness. In the end, it was reported that nobody was found, not even an ass.

  Then the dispute grew even more violent on both sides; the soldiers insisted that they had indisputable information about us, and swore as much in the name of the Emperor, while our defender kept up his denials and called on the gods as witnesses. I could hear all this contentiousness and noisy shouting from above. I’ve always been curious, but, as an ass, I was endowed with restless unruliness, so I bent my neck and tried to see through a little window what all the hubbub was about. By chance, one of the soldiers turned his eyes toward my shadow and called the others to witness it for themselves. Instantly a great clamor arose and several men climbed the ladder and laid hands on me and dragged me out like a captive. So now they put aside any doubt and looked over the whole place more carefully, even removing the lid from the chest. That was how the poor gardener was discovered, brought out, and taken before the magistrates. They led him off to a public prison, doubtless to pay with his life, and never stopped joking about my peeking out, from which originate
s that common proverb about the “peeping ass” and “the ass’s shadow.”

  * Many see here a reference to Christianity.

  * Later, Lucius is sold for eleven denarii. The silver denarius was the basic unit of money in Roman Imperial times. There were four sesterces in a denarius. So this is a slightly higher price (12.5 denarii) than Lucius garners later. For reference, a soldier in Apuleius’s day earned three hundred denarii per year.

  I DON’T KNOW WHAT BECAME OF MY MASTER, THE gardener, but the next day that soldier, who had so very beautifully taken a beating in return for his flagrant lawlessness, took me from my stall and led me off. Nobody stood in his way. When he had loaded me up with his own baggage and brought me from what I assume were his quarters, I was entirely fitted out and armed in the military style. I was the bearer of a splendidly shining helmet and a shield casting its light far and wide, and I also had a spear with a remarkably long shaft. The soldier had carefully compiled all this, not because of military regulations, but to terrify poor travelers with the sight of the high stacks of baggage on baggage—like an army.

  When we had made our way over a fairly easy country road, we arrived at a small town where we turned in at the house of some official or other, rather than at an inn. The soldier handed me right over to a slave boy while he, anxious to please, reported to his superior, a man in charge of a thousand troops.

  He was obligated to fulfill a mission in obedience to an official order: he had to carry a letter to the Great Emperor at Rome. So although he never bought me, he sold me to two brothers in the neighborhood, slaves of a wealthy master, for eleven denarii. One of them was a pastry chef, skilled in making bread and sweet delicacies; the other a cook who knew how to prepare tender meat on the fire, seasoned with juicy gravies. They maintained a life together in this singular partnership, and my role was to carry all those vessels required for various purposes on the master’s travels around the region. Thus was I enrolled as the third housemate along with those two brothers, and I don’t think I ever enjoyed such good fortune, for in the evenings my masters would return to their small quarters with lots of leftovers from the lavish dinners with their splendid trappings. One brother brought copious cullings of pork, chicken, fish, and every kind of meat; the other brought breads, tarts, fritters, crescent pastries, lizard-shaped cookies, and all sorts of sweet delicacies. So when they closed up their quarters to go refresh themselves at the baths, I gorged on all these, as at a banquet divinely proffered. Obviously I wasn’t so stupid or so entirely an ass that I would leave all these delicious foods untouched and dine on coarse hay.

  This tricky thievery went on beautifully for quite a while, since I was still timidly and sparingly plucking small bits from such a large buffet, and they didn’t suspect any mischief from an ass. But when I grew more confident and started to devour all the richest bits and lick up the choicest sweets, the brothers grew very suspicious and disturbed. While they hadn’t yet considered me, still they stayed vigilant and tried to track down the culprit. But finally they started accusing each other of this dishonorable plunder, and they began to direct more careful attention, sharper protection, and strict numeration of the leftovers. Finally, one of them abandoned his restraint and accused the other:

  “It isn’t fair and positively inhuman of you to abscond daily with the choicest leftovers and sell them secretly to build up your freedom fund, then demand an equal division of the rest. If you no longer like this partnership, we can remain brothers in all other respects, but we can walk away from this connection of common ownership. For I see that this quarrel over our losses is proceeding disastrously and generating a monstrous discord between us.”

  The other responded, “By Hercules, congratulations on your fearlessness! Here you are secretly stealing the leftovers on a daily basis, and you get in ahead of me on the complaint. I’ve been holding back for a long time, keeping my anguish to myself, so that it wouldn’t look like I was accusing my brother of theft! But it’s good that we’re having this conversation and looking for a way to fix our losses, so that our fight doesn’t end in fratricide!”

  After disputes like this and more of the same, they both swore that they had absolutely not practiced deceit or committed theft, and agreed that the thief responsible for their mutual loss must be discovered by any means possible. Clearly the ass, the only one inside, could not be interested in such food, and yet all the best feed was nowhere to be found. “Certainly it couldn’t be huge flies invading our quarters, as big as the Harpies of old that swooped down and seized people’s dinners!”

  Meanwhile, since I was eating gentlemen’s meals and gorging on human food, I had filled out my body to an obese roundness, softened my hide with juicy fatness, and nourished my hair to luxuriant sleekness. But my body’s beauty brought disgrace to my honor, for as they were surprised by the unusual vastness of my back, and saw that my hay stayed completely untouched every day, they turned all their attention to me. At an appointed time, they closed the door as usual as if they were heading to the baths, and spied on me through a little opening, while I was entirely absorbed in the outlay of food. Suddenly they didn’t care at all about their losses, but gazed in wonder at the unnaturally delicate tastes of the ass. Then they broke out in uproarious laughter and called one, then another, then many of their fellow slaves, to show them the indescribable appetite of a dumb pack animal. The group’s laughter was so loud and free-flowing that it reached their master’s ears as he passed by.

  So he asked the slaves what was the good joke, and upon learning what it was, he too looked through the opening and was totally delighted. Then he was reduced to such long and intense laughter that his stomach hurt, and they opened up the cubicle so that he could sit near me and witness it all up close. As for me, now that I was looking at Fortune’s face smiling at me somewhat more softly, and the present joy boosted my confidence, I wasn’t disturbed and kept on eating without a care. Shortly the master of the house ordered me to be led—actually he led me with his own hands—to the dining room, where he had a table set out and made them place all sorts of full dishes and untouched platters before me. Now, although I was already nicely stuffed, I hungrily attacked the food laid out, as I wanted to make myself agreeable and ingratiate myself further. To experiment with the extent of my tameness, they kept meticulously contriving to think which foods would be especially distasteful to an ass and offered them to me: meats drenched in asafoetida, fowl sprinkled with pepper, fish flooded with exotic gravy. Meanwhile, the whole party was resounding with laughter. Then a joker in the company said, “Give this comrade of yours a touch of wine.” The master followed up on this speech, saying, “That’s not such a crazy joke, you scumbag! Our companion seriously might accept a cup of honey wine with pleasure,” and he called the slave boy over and said, “Hey, wash out that gold cup carefully, fill it with wine, and offer it to my dinner guest! And further, let him know I’m toasting him!”

  Then there was great suspense among the guests, but I wasn’t worried at all; I took my time and behaved politely. Then, twisting my lower lip so that it was cupped like a tongue, I downed the huge vessel in one draft. A cheer arose from all the guests, wishing me good health!

  At that, the master was simply overflowing with joy. He called his slaves, the ones who had bought me, and ensured that they were recompensed with four times my purchase price. Then he handed me over to his most highly prized freedman, a man of some means, and instructed him to take good care of me. The freedman did, indeed, treat me quite humanely and sociably, and in order to make himself more agreeable to his patron, he took great pains to create new pleasures for him through my clever tricks. First he drilled into me how to recline at table leaning on my elbow, then how to wrestle, and even how to dance standing on my hind legs, and, what was most remarkable of all, how to use a gesture in place of words, so that I showed what I didn’t want by raising my head and what I wanted by lowering it. And when I was thirsty, I was to ask for a drink by looking at the
cupbearer and blinking my eyes in alternation. Obviously it was easy for me to obey all these commands, which I could have done without guidance, but I was afraid that if I performed too much in the human manner without a teacher, they would regard it as a bad omen and a monstrous manifestation of evils to come, and would throw my beheaded corpse to the vultures as rich fodder.

  Soon, stories about me had spread from city to city, which made my master eminent and famous—through my miraculous abilities. “Here is the man who has an ass as a comrade and dinner companion, a wrestling ass, a dancing ass, an ass that understands human speech and expresses meaning with gestures.”

  But first let me tell you, as I should have done before, who this man was and where he came from. Thiasus—that was my master’s name—had his origins in Corinth, the capital of the whole province of Achaia. As the dignity of his lineage required, he had progressed in order through the ranks and had now been appointed to the highest office: quinquennial magistrate. So to reflect the glory of the duties he was undertaking, he promised the people three days of spectacular gladiator shows, exhibiting his generous patronage far and wide. In his eagerness for popularity, he had come to Thessaly to purchase the most outstanding beasts and famous gladiators. After buying them and making arrangements to his satisfaction, he was preparing his journey home. He rejected all his fine wagons and put aside carriages with elaborately ornamented wheels, which were pointlessly being pulled along at the end of the procession, some open to the air, some closed. And he rejected his Thessalian horses and Gallic mounts, whose noble lineage broadcasts wealth and eminence. It was me he rode, decked out in a golden breast collar, a painted pack saddle, purple coverlet, silver bit, embroidered saddle strings, and a row of tinkling bells. As he sat on me, he often addressed me in the most loving terms with friendly conversation, and among much else, declared he took particular delight in having in me both a friend and a transporter.