The Golden Ass

by Peter Singer

  While she had been Romanized, Isis (and Egypt in general) was also seen as exotic; hence the elaborate descriptions of ritual in Apuleius. To Romans, the concept of theriomorphic (animal-form) gods was alien and sometimes ridiculed, but in a book that challenges our ideas about animals, these gods manifested in the form of animals may seem more at home. One such theriomorph is the evil Set, a god in the form of a hybrid donkey creature who killed and cut up Isis’s brother and lover, Osiris. When Isis tells Lucius that the donkey is the animal she most hates, she may be referring to Set.

  The Golden Ass as Animal Text

  Peter Singer, in his afterword, emphasizes the work’s representation of society’s mistreatment of animals and the surprising empathy Apuleius shows for the donkey protagonist. I, too, read the book as a remarkably sympathetic experiment in imagining the experience of an animal. Apuleius shows us what it feels like to carry heavy loads over steep mountain passes while being constantly beaten, to walk endless circles in the mill while blinkered, to be fed nothing but filthy chaff mixed with pebbles, and to be always at the mercy of new human owners. In particular Apuleius is perhaps unique in antiquity in presenting the perspective of the victim in the amphitheater at a time when gladiatorial games and staged animal hunts were such an important form of popular entertainment. In the scene where Lucius is to mate with the condemned woman, he imagines the beasts that will be sent in to mangle and devour not only the guilty woman, but also him, the innocent donkey. The same could be said of the Thrasyleon scene, where a man in a bear suit is hunted down and stabbed repeatedly; this would have been the fate of all the bears being kept for show by Demochares. While as many as nine thousand animals were killed to celebrate the opening of the Colosseum in its first one hundred days, perhaps the closest we come to any condemnation of this widespread slaughter of animals is a passage in the Elder Pliny (first century CE) that describes the dismayed reaction of the crowd when an elephant appears to be begging the emperor to be spared. Apuleius goes much further, directly offering us the subjective view of the victims.

  In addition to challenging us to face the cruelty that humans impose on nonhuman animals, Apuleius also raises questions about the lines we draw between ourselves and them, through the hybrid creature, Lucius. Lucius repeatedly insists that he has retained his human mind and has only the body of a donkey. In this respect, he resembles the transformed humans in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who remain painfully conscious and aware of their changed bodies. Actaeon, a man changed into a stag and hunted by his own dogs (whose statue stands in Byrrhena’s atrium) gains our sympathy in Ovid in part because he is a human inside a stag’s body. But the episode makes us further wonder whether the real hunted stag doesn’t, of course, feel the same fear and pain. Are we really that different? Lucius’s hybrid identity is also manifested in, for example, his abundant satisfaction in rolling in the dust or his sexual attraction to both mares and aristocratic women, such that his professed retention of a human mind is not so clear cut. The confusion reaches its height when Lucius becomes a famous performing donkey, dancing and drinking wine like a human among humans and even, in a sense, symbolically crossing the most important line by communicating meaningfully with his keepers.

  Apuleius also repeatedly asks us to reexamine animal behaviors and consider whether they might be a function of rational thought, as when Lucius deliberates very precisely about executing the very same “scheme” Milo’s donkey enacts when he lies down and refuses to get back up. When Lucius is first transformed and sent out to the stable with the horse and donkey, he attributes thoughts and motives to these new companions, as he does frequently elsewhere, using the Latin word scilicet, or “presumably,” to signal that he is guessing what the animals are thinking. In the amphitheater scene, however, he is fairly certain that whatever beast will be sent in to devour him will not be “so cleverly wise, so skilled in its trade, or so dutiful and restrained that it would tear apart the woman lying at my side, but would spare me as innocent and not guilty in a court of law”—and yet he raises the possibility. Earlier, he himself performs a moral act when he reveals the miller’s wife’s lover by stepping on his toes—human morality, perhaps, but executed with the hoof of a donkey.

  Apuleius was an eminent philosopher and clearly well versed in the ongoing debates about animal intelligence in the works of Lucius’s fictional ancestor, Plutarch, and others mentioned above. While The Golden Ass is surreal and comical, its explicit announcement that it is a work of entertainment should not blind us to its serious engagement with questions of animal intelligence and the porous boundaries between humans and animals.

  THE ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE GOLDEN ASS

  PETER SINGER

  If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals—our fellow brethren in pain, disease, death & suffering, & famine, our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements—they may partake from our origin in one common ancestor. We may be all melted together.

  Charles Darwin, Notebook B (1837)1

  Humans and Other Animals

  Seventeen centuries before Darwin hastily jotted down the thought that humans and other animals have a common ancestor, Apuleius attributed to an ass many of the elements Darwin observed. Apuleius reminds us that pain and suffering are the lot of a donkey, as they can be of humans. Death frequently threatens to cut the ass’s story short, though as befits the adventure fiction genre of which The Golden Ass is a pioneering example, our hero always narrowly escapes. Famine strikes both the donkey and his most impoverished owner, the market gardener, as they share the cold of winter with nothing more to eat than rotten lettuces. For most of his owners, the donkey is precisely a slave for the most laborious work, but toward the end of the story he becomes, for his master Thiasus, a companion in his amusements. Even Darwin’s final rhetorical flourish, “we may be all melted together,” is in keeping with the readiness with which, in The Golden Ass, humans can switch between animal and human forms.

  In a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, archaeologists have discovered a painting believed to have been made forty-four thousand years ago, of humans hunting local species of buffalo and pigs. It may be the world’s oldest recorded story. Alongside the animals are figures that look like humans but have tails and snouts. A similarly porous boundary between humans and animals reappears in the seventeen-thousand-year-old cave paintings in Lascaux, France, which include a painting of a bison charging a bird-headed human. A half-human, half-lion ivory figure found in Germany may be older still.2 Half-human, half-animal figures are present in Greek mythology—centaurs are the most famous example—and would have been familiar to Latin readers.

  Eastern religions, including Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, accept continuity between different species. Humans, they hold, can be reincarnated as animals, and animals have souls that can be reincarnated as humans. In contrast, the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, posit a sharp divide between humans and animals. The difference starts with the creation story. According to Genesis, God first made all the other living creatures and then, in a separate act of creation, made man in his own image. Later he gave man dominion over all the other animals.

  Christianity, which was a minor religion in Apuleius’s time, 3 dug the gulf between humans and animals deeper still. One key factor was the Christian belief that humans, but not animals, have immortal souls, and will survive the death of the body. This difference led major Christian thinkers to deny that we have any duties to animals.

  Augustine, who, as Ellen Finkelpearl points out in her afterword, came from the same region as Apuleius and frequently mentions him, refers to the gospel story of Jesus casting out devils and sending them into two thousand pigs, who then hurled themselves into a lake. Why, we might ask, did Jesus send the spirits into the pigs, rather than just destroy them, as it was within his power to do? The answer, according to Augustine, is that Jesus was teaching us that we do not have to refrain from killing animals, o
r more generally, to govern our actions toward them by moral rules, as we do with humans.4

  Thomas Aquinas, the medieval theologian whose philosophical outlook dominated Roman Catholic thinking until well into the twentieth century, was equally explicit. Sins can only be against God, against oneself, and against one’s neighbor. There are no sins against animals. Nor is it charitable to be kind to animals, because charity is based on “the fellowship of everlasting happiness,” which animals, not having immortal souls, cannot attain. The only reason for not being cruel to animals, according to Aquinas, is that because animals can feel pain, people who have pity on suffering animals are more likely to take pity on their fellow humans.5

  In accepting that animals can feel pain, Aquinas was at least closer to one important truth about animals than the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes, who argued that animals are merely very complex machines, like clocks, but far more complex still because clocks are made by humans and animals are made by God. For Descartes, it was important to draw a clear distinction between humans and animals because the idea that the souls of animals are of the same nature as our own could lead people to deny that we are immortal and will be rewarded or punished in the afterlife. That in turn would lead to immorality. As animals lack an immortal soul, Descartes argued, they must also lack consciousness. This view, Descartes thought, has the additional benefit of absolving us from “the suspicion of crime” when we kill and eat animals—or at least, he wrote, “those not given to the superstitions of Pythagoras,” by which he meant vegetarians. Finally, Descartes pointed out that accepting his view of animals would neatly dispose of a problem that has baffled Christian theologians for centuries (and still awaits a convincing answer): Why would a good and all-powerful God allow animals—who cannot sin, and have not inherited Adam’s original sin—to suffer?6

  If Descartes were right, there could be no Golden Ass, for there would be nothing that it is like to be a donkey, and hence no story from a donkey’s point of view. Granted, Lucius, as a donkey, still has the mind of Lucius the man, who was turned into a donkey. But the richness of The Golden Ass depends on its empathy with the donkey, which in turn relies on the assumption that the lives of donkeys can go well or badly for them. Contrast this with, for example, the statue of Diana that so impresses Lucius in the atrium of his aunt Byrrhenna’s house. Now imagine that Lucius were to magically turn himself into the statue. There would be no story to tell, or at best a most impoverished one, like Andy Warhol’s film Empire, eight hours straight of an unchanging view of the Empire State Building. For there is nothing that it is like to be a statue (or a building). For Descartes, turning oneself into a donkey would, in that respect, be exactly like turning oneself into a piece of marble.

  Animals in The Golden Ass

  Apuleius views animals as living subjects of experiences, on a continuum with us, sharing many of our needs and desires. I have already mentioned the common suffering from cold and hunger endured by the donkey and the market gardener (pp. 129–30). Similarly, in the mill, the conditions of the animal and human slaves working there are both appalling (p. 116). A different set of common desires is evident when the donkey is put in a field and starts to take an interest in “the most serviceable mares.” The stallions see him as a threat and fight him off, in much the same way that the fuller and the miller attack their wives’ lovers. The male desire for exclusive sexual possession of their females crosses the species boundary. More tenuously, Lucius attributes to the stallions a concern that their line will be debased by interbreeding with an ass, a parallel with racist attitudes to interracial relationships (p. 87).

  As Ellen Finkelpearl notes, Apuleius and other preChristian writers sympathetic to animals, such as Plutarch and Porphyry, were challenged by the Stoic view that humans have a higher status because we alone are capable of reason and language. Apuleius did not, however, have to contend with the Christian belief that only humans have immortal souls and are made in the image of God. He was therefore able to look at animals in a way that was alien to the Christian mind-set that dominated Europe for the next fifteen hundred years. Today we find that the view of animals taken by the most enlightened Greek and Roman thinkers accords both with common sense and with the scientific understanding of our evolutionary origins and the mental lives of animals. (Putting aside, of course, the magical ability to transform ourselves into animals, in which Apuleius may, or may not, have believed.)

  In choosing an ass—an animal ranked low by Romans and described by the goddess Isis as “that worst of beasts, so long loathed by me”—Apuleius leads us to imagine ourselves in the place of an animal not high on our list of beloved creatures. Thus he ensures that the lessons of his story are applicable not only to noble beasts, like lions, and those animals with whom we have bonds of affection or companionship, like dogs and horses, or regard as cute and cuddly, like kittens, but to all suffering animals. If Apuleius had wanted to suggest that all animals have interests that we ought to consider, he could not have chosen a better animal for his purpose. It would be anachronistic to suggest that Apuleius was an animal rights advocate in the modern sense, but we should not overlook the significance of the fact mentioned by Ellen Finkelpearl that Lucius claims to be related to Plutarch. Of all the ancient writers Apuleius would have read, it is Plutarch who most closely foreshadows the arguments that I and other philosophers have offered in support of what today is most commonly expressed as a demand that we recognize that animals have rights.7

  That animals needed advocates in Roman times is apparent from the travails of the ass, which no doubt were drawn from places and incidents Apuleius had observed, or heard about. On the very day Lucius is turned into a donkey and led down to Milo’s stables, the slave in charge beats him with a knotted cudgel, ceasing only when the robbers break in. They then load him up with as much as he can carry and lead him up a steep mountain path. The other ass the robbers have taken from Milo’s stables is so overburdened that he collapses and won’t or can’t rise. The robbers beat him severely, and when they see that they are not going to get him moving again, they neither allow him to recover nor even inflict a quick death on him, instead cutting through his knees with a sword and hurling him, still alive, off a cliff.

  After Lucius escapes from the robbers, he is forced to carry wood down a steep and stony mountain path with a slave boy in charge who hits him so frequently with clubs on his right hip as to create an open wound, and even then does not stop hitting him on the same, now very painful, spot. The boy devises other tortures, like tying stinging thorns to his tail, and finally, setting fire to a bundle of hemp Lucius is carrying, so that Lucius is lucky to escape being burned to death.

  The slave boy’s ingenuity in finding ways to torment the donkey suggests that his motivation is sadistic pleasure in making another being suffer. In contrast, the beatings administered by the slave in Milo’s stable, by the robbers, and by several others appear to be motivated not by sadism, but by brutality, anger, or vindictiveness. They are grossly excessive forms of discipline that might, in a more moderate form, serve a purpose, such as ensuring that the exhausted donkey continues to move forward with his heavy load. Such savage beatings are doubtless counterproductive, risking the loss of a valuable asset, the donkey, without getting as much work out of him as could have been obtained by gentle handling and reward for work done. Nevertheless, there is some misconceived purpose to the beatings, other than finding pleasure in causing pain.

  Neither sadism nor anger nor vindictiveness motivates the miller who buys Lucius and puts him to work in the mill, walking all day in circles to turn the millstone. Apuleius describes how in the mill “continuous orbits of numerous pack animals turned the mechanisms at varying speeds. Not in daytime alone, but all night long, they manufactured round-the-clock flour by lamplight through the machine’s dizzying revolutions.” Harnessing the power of donkeys and horses in that manner was, we can assume, the most efficient way of producing flour at the low
est possible cost. This is, however, a form of efficiency that takes no account of the costs imposed on those who keep the millstones turning. As Lucius indicates, the mill’s human slaves are shackled, branded, and carry the scars of whippings on their backs. For slaves who misbehave, being sent to a mill was a dreaded form of punishment, and in this remarkable passage, unique in the ancient world in its picture of the horror of slavery, Apuleius makes it clear why. The slaves, eyelids eaten away and nearly blinded by the thick black smoke, are being worked to death. So too are the animals, working in the same conditions, and getting beaten if they shirk the constant labor that is their lot. Presumably the mill owner nevertheless has an eye on maximizing the value gained for the price of the asset, whether a slave or an animal, and the conditions implement that aim. That does not prevent them from being a prolonged form of torture, every bit as bad for the victims as the sadism of the slave boy or the excessive brutality of the robbers.

  Do We Treat Animals Better Than the Romans Did?