Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Golden Ass
    The Golden Ass
    The Golden Ass
    Ebook307 pages

    The Golden Ass

    By Robert Graves

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Translated from the Latin by the poet and author of I, Claudius, this ancient Roman novel follows the many adventures of a man who transforms into an ass.
     
    Driven by his all-consuming curiosity, a young man of good parentage named Lucius Apuleius takes a trip to Thessaly. Along the way, amidst a series of bizarre adventures, he inadvertently offends a priestess of the White Goddess, who promptly turns him into an ass. How Lucius responds to his new misfortune, and ultimately finds a way to become human again, makes for a funny and fascinating tale.
     
    The Metamorphosis of Apuleius, referred to by St. Augustine as The Golden Ass, is the oldest novel written in Latin to survive in its entirety. Originally written by Lucius of Patrae, this translation by Robert Graves highlights the ribald humor and vivid sense of adventure present in the original. Providing a rare window into the daily lives of regular people in ancient Greece, Robert Graves’s translation of this classic tale is at once hilarious, informative, and captivating.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMar 6, 2014
    ISBN9780795336751
    The Golden Ass
    Author

    Robert Graves

    Robert Graves (Indianapolis, IN) is the owner of Fox Hollow Farm. Since learning of the farm’s past, Robert has devoted himself to understanding the tragic events that took place there.

    Read more from Robert Graves

    Related authors

    Related to The Golden Ass

    Related ebooks

    Classics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Find A New Home For Your Hauntings

      Oct 1, 2020

      Dark Moon Books editorial team promotes dark fiction by publishing multi-author anthologies and single author collections plus the occasional novel. They want ‘unusual and invigorating dark fiction’ which is ‘experimental, innovative, or progressive…

      1 min read

    • Article

      Love’s Labour’s Found

      Dec 6, 2020

      From late summer 1592 until the end of the following year, the plague was rife in London, and to stop packed crowds from spreading infection, theatres were closed. William Shakespeare, who had just begun to make a name for himself as a playwright, tu

      7 min read

    • Article

      Brimming with Curiosity: On Philip Pullman’s ‘La Belle Sauvage’

      Nov 16, 2017

      Pullman is first and foremost an extremely skillful storyteller—the warmest, fuzziest kind that takes readers by the hand and guides them with sharp prose and a fast moving plot. The post Brimming with Curiosity: On Philip Pullman’s ‘La Belle S

      9 min read

    • Article

      Brimming with Curiosity: On Philip Pullman’s ‘La Belle Sauvage’

      Nov 16, 2017

      Pullman is first and foremost an extremely skillful storyteller—the warmest, fuzziest kind that takes readers by the hand and guides them with sharp prose and a fast moving plot. The post Brimming with Curiosity: On Philip Pullman’s ‘La Belle S

      9 min read

    • Article

      “Medieval Christians Were Capable Of Imagining Goddess-like Beings That Looked Thoroughly Pagan”

      May 12, 2022

      Rhiannon Davies: Your new book. Queens of the Wild, explores four goddesses who evolved into hugely popular cultural figures in the Middle Ages. Can you introduce us to them? Ronald Hutton: First up, there’s the figure of Mother Nature, or Mother Ear

      9 min read

    • Article

      How New Gods Are Made

      Mar 24, 2022

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine Anna Della Subin Granta Books 2022 Hb, £20, 460pp, ISBN 9781783785018 Many of the subjects of this delightfully curious book had no

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Grueling, Painful, Beautiful Fiction of László Krasznahorkai

      Aug 8, 2017

      To misread Krasznahorkai as merely, or primarily, a political writer is to risk squandering the profoundly personal nature of his stories. More tragically, it is to foist a kind of sloppy activist, and determinately secular métier onto one of contemp

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Devil’s Taxi

      Oct 6, 2022

      The Devil’s Taxi
      26 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Matt Seidel

      Dec 9, 2017

      I tend to buy used books in bunches, which means the haul from some expeditions stays buried for weeks, months, years even. For this entry, I highlight three finds that, breaking custom, I bought and read almost immediately this year: Hugo Charteris’

      6 min read

    • Article

      Five Non-Fiction Books for Writers in an Emergency

      Jul 14, 2017

      I read non-fiction books that I thought might indirectly tell me something about fiction, even though they were really about something else. The post Five Non-Fiction Books for Writers in an Emergency appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      What Kind of Angel: On Percy Shelley

      Nov 21, 2022

      Shelley saw himself as a conduit for the electricity of the universe. The post What Kind of Angel: On Percy Shelley appeared first on The Millions.

      15 min read

    • Article

      Remastering The Mythos: Questions For Ruthanna Emrys

      May 4, 2017

      When Ruthanna Emrys first read H.P. Lovecraft's classic tale "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," her sympathies were squarely with the monsters — and that sympathy was the seed of her new book, Winter Tide.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Wonderful Call Of The Wild

      Nov 26, 2020

      Wonderful Call Of The Wild
      3 min read

    • Article

      Happily Ever After

      Jul 11, 2022

      Happily Ever After
      7 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jul 1, 2022

      After centuries of deferralto the white sky cloud cover God, who kept me on orange alert,babbling for mercies that were batted away sloppilylike dustballs in the wake of a sock, I turned to the Divine Creatrix,who built the short night, I was convinc

      2 min read

    • Article

      Intriguing And Diverse

      Jun 16, 2022

      Genius of the Fern Loved Gully Amy Hale Strange Attractor Press 2020 Pb, 336pp, £20, ISBN 9781907222863 Ithell Colquhoun’s star is in the ascendant. Born in India in 1906, she lived a life amongst the Surrealists in the Thirties and early Forties, ha

      9 min read

    • Article

      Mark Haddon’s Latest Curious Incident Sails the High Seas

      Jul 18, 2019

      Sex and attraction feature prominently throughout, as do birth and death, terror and violence—the stuff of life that hasn’t changed one bit over the eons. The post Mark Haddon’s Latest Curious Incident Sails the High Seas appeared first on The Millio

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Iľja Rákoš

      Dec 12, 2021

      As long as there are authors, translators, publishers large or small committed to the deliberate word deliberately committed to the page, and so many who still need those words on pages, legal or illegal, right, left, or center, we’ll find our feet a

      8 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Golden Ass

    4/5

    581 ratings28 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Apuleius' comedic romp is a gentle, breezy tale told through in the 3rd person P.O.V. He manages to touch on many characters, settings, and themes in his work and the component parts all serve to augment the whole. Apuleius is quite a writer, and the old fashioned language rather serves to accentuate the power of the language rather than serve as a detriment to it. All in all, a good show! 3.5 stars!
    • 4/5
      The Robert Graves tranlation. Wonderful for it's showcasing of daily life and characters in the late Roman world.
    • 5/5
      Fantastic read. A blend of ancient myth and reality, not sure which one is stranger. Just the fact that it was written long before Medieval times is mind boggling
    • 3/5
      Echte schelmenroman, maar het slothoofdstuk is heel anders van toon, veel ernstiger en beschrijvender. Globaal beeld van een heel harde, soms gruwelijke samenleving. Interessante informatie over Oosterse mysteriegodsdiensten.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this earliest of novels right up till the end. The preposterous scenes, the ribald stories, and the beautiful Cupid and Psyche story- it's one of those books that made me grin time after time. I'm sure if I were a better Classics scholar it would be an even richer experience, as the notes after the text give me to understand.

      That being said, the last chapter made me think of those early Weekly Reader pictographs of 6 things, 5 of which belonged together in some way, and 1 of which did not. Maybe after I go to class today, I will learn more about why this odd appendage hangs on the end of the book. I suspect it's more my lack of scholarship than the book's fault.

      Recommended.
    • 4/5
      A witty book, full of raunchy and crass humor as you'd expect from Greek comedy. If it rambles and goes on wild digressions, it does so in much the same way as other great novels for centuries to come. Although I've never seen an analysis of The Golden Ass as an influence on Don Quixote, I believe I see the seeds of it there, from the times when chapters are spent on one character telling a story to another to the fact that our hero (before his metamorphosis) gets into a fight with some wineskins.
    • 5/5
      a masterpiece ,so interesting and entertaining as a read. for beneath the humorous and the sharp ironies lay a religious and philosophical thoughtful mind.
      Amusing tales within tales, recollections of characters of various misadventures and misfortunes ....
      Lucius A wandering spirit Suffering in his heedless traveling over the world in order to work out his salvation.

      Interesting how magic plays a prominent role in the everyday life.

      His deep love of life with his eager and curiosity , and mocking personality,And interest on magic transmogrifications,leads him to asks his new mistress to apply one of the forbidden magic spells on him. He aimed to become a bird, flying everywhere...

      She applies the wrong potion and Lucius turns into an ass.

      And here begins a series of adventures from which Lucius repeatedly changes masters while still an ass. The masters are invariably cruel, abusing Lucius , He is eternally beaten and degraded, and threatened with death and castration more than once .


      The novel serves a window into Roman society, one sees every level and division of society, which produces a more accurate view of life for the common man.the problems of misused power ,and wives whom cheat on husbands, and husbands who many times kill their wives' lovers.

      The importance of religion, especially for Lucius, comes to light upon Lucius rebirth into his human form by the work of the goddess Isis. After this rebirth Lucius seems to find his final and ultimate purpose for his life and realizes how the events that have taken place, leads him to what he was searching for..

      The myth of Psyche and Cupid is what I admired most in the novel
      A fascinating and exciting love story that can overcome all barriers and be blind to faults.
      Psyche’s beauty gives her no pleasure, but separates her from others. Her father, unable to find a husband for her, goes to the oracle for advice.
      Cupid falls in love with Psyche but conceals his identity from her, visiting her only at night. Fearing he is an evil person, she looks at him, although forbidden to do so. Cupid then abandons her.




    • 3/5
      A collection of stories which are bound together under the theme of the travels of Lucius Apuleius.
    • 5/5
      One of the funniest works I have ever read. Apuleius puts contemporary humourists to shame.
    • 5/5
      My first reading of any Latin literature. Cupid and Psyche were my favorites and remain still.
    • 4/5
      The tales of Lucius Apuleius, whose adventures form the framework for storytelling at each of the locations along his journey, and there are many. Early in the tale, Lucius, because of his curiosity about magic, is transformed into an ass. As he is passed from owner to owner, he suffers beatings and cruelty and constant threats of death, but he is somehow within earshot of the stories he tells, most of which have to do with cuckoldry, and are humorous, although the punishments to the unfortunate, especially if they are slaves, are extreme. The most well-known of the tales is the Tale of Cupid and Psyche. At the end, however, Lucius is transformed back into human form, and becomes a devoted initiate into the cults of Isis and Osiris, and also has a career as a successful barrister.Robert Graves' translation is both readable and entertaining. The wry telling of the unfortunate but sympathetic narrator's adventures invites the term picaresque, although that particular designation for novels came much later. It's easy to see the influence of Lucius on world literature. This work from the 2nd century AD seems to have influenced Chaucer, and Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream ia perhaps the most well-known instance of a human turning into an ass. Other borrowers include Milton, Boccacio, Cervantes, Dekker, Kyd and Kafka.The description of Isis, the Mother Goddess, is adoration itself: "so lovely a face that the gods themselves would have fallen down in adoration of it." Long thick hair falling in ringlets, crowned with a garland of flowers, and a disk on her forehead, held by vipers. A multi-colored linen robe; and a black mantle covered with stars. Her left hand holds suspended a boat-shaped gold dish, and on the handle there is an asp ready to strike. She is accompanied by all the perfumes of Arabia. She tells Lucius, "I am Nature, the Universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses that are. My nod governs the shiny heights of heaven, the wholesome sea breezes, the lamentable silences of the world below." Perhaps an invocation of Graves' White Goddess?
    • 4/5
      "Bestiality. Kidnapping. Mugging. Ye olde carjacking. Burglary. Assault. Murder. Female paedophiles. Incest. Male rape. Adultery. Animal cruelty. Serial killers in the making. Poisonings. Homosexual priest gangbangs. Shapeshifting. Gods and goddesses. The Seven Deadly Sins. Evil mother-in-laws. Drama. Comedy. Tragedy. Adventure. Romance. Horror. Urban legends. Stories within stories. Inspiration for that Hannibal episode where a person was sewn into a dead horse's belly."What more can you ask for?
    • 5/5
      This is one of my favorite books. I read it for a class on the origins of the cult of the Virgin Mary. As a graduate student in the History of Art, I was using this class to better understand the early Christian representations of the Virgin (pre 8th century).The professor had placed it on reserve so I had to read it within the library. I never expected to be able to read it in one sitting, but once I started the book I just could not put it down. I had to move to a corner where there were no students because I could not help myself from laughing out loud quite frequently. No one prepared me for this delightful, sideways walk on the wild side of the Roman Mediterranean in the 2nd century.Apuleius became a devout worshiper of Isis. For the class, we were instructed to pay close attention to the attributes of Isis, since Mary would eventually take on these same abilities a few centuries after this was written. After all, Isis was the Egyptian mother goddess whose son, Horus, died and was reborn (only his birth/death cycle happens every year -- corresponding with the seasonal flooding of the Nile, if I remember correctly), so it was only logical that Mary would become her in many ways.Jesus took on the many attributes associated with Mithra (his feast day being Dec. 25th for one), as well as Horus, Osiris and even a little bit from Apollo too. Mary's cult developed much later (somewhere in the 6th century). As Christianity spread across the globe, it was famous for learning about the local deities, and if the priests were not able to directly convert the population, the priests would in effect say "that god you are worshiping is just like saint so & so, and if you pray to him or her to intercede for you to Jesus & God the Father, your prayers will be answered". This type of absorption/conversion by taking a local deity and transforming it into a saint is responsible for why it is very difficult to trace the original roots of some of the early saints to an actual person. Yes, there were flesh and blood people who were martyrs, and some of them became saints that developed into cults, but there is a large group of early saints who have conflicting origin stories, and therefor many religious historians doubt they were actual people but were created to absorb, and transform the local deities into a saint to Christianize the area.At the time this book was written, the Isis cult was one of the major faiths, if not the most popular throughout the Mediterranean. In fact, as an art historian, the familiar mother & infant poses of Mary and Jesus that were so popular during the Middle Ages, were direct copies of the poses used to depict Isis and Horus together.The professor also told us to notice Apuleius' treatment of the other popular religions of his day, but especially the degrading way he portrayed a female worshiper of Jesus Christ. Apuleius clearly had no respect for Christians. In general, this view of Christians is typical in 160 AD. The portrayal of the initiation into the Cult of Isis at the end of the book, is believed to be accurate, and offers great insight into mystery cults of the 1st & 2nd centuries. The rituals have similarities with those that would later be adopted by Christianity, especially the purification by water.Apuleius' raunchy romp is meant to be absurd, but also shows great truths of the Roman world, as well as prejudices and stereotypes from the perspective of a worshiper of Isis. This is why the ending is not out of joint from the rest of the book (as some people have suggested - they have only been reading on the superficial, sensual level) -- Lucius has struggled with his inappropriate behavior & faith, He has in essence gone through the trials of Job, and has prevailed and been rewarded and then purified and welcomed into the fold of the Isis cult.As others have mentioned, this book was known throughout the centuries to the well educated and clearly influenced numerous works, including: The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, some of Shakespeare's Comedies, Dante's Divine Comedy, even Kafka's Metamorphosis (although the humor is strained in his world view), among many others. The Golden Ass needs to return to the required reading list for a complete education. I believe that a critical reading of this book cannot help but expand the reader's mind and general world perspective; and because of all the farcical sexual encounters, the process will be a fun one too. Sadly, this country's extreme conservative temperature will not tolerate returning this book to its rightful place of required reading until perhaps at the University level (and some would not even have it there...probably wishing to burn it -- especially for the way Apuleius portrays the Christian woman).
    • 4/5
      The oldest book I've read. If it wasn't for the language used and the spellings, you'd be hard put to realise that this book dates from the 2nd Century AD. By turns funny, dark, entertaining and just downright enjoyable this book puts many of today's blockbusters to shame.
    • 5/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed Quentin Blake's artwork as well as the book. One of my all-time fave books is the Decameron and I picked up where the girl over the barrel/pot story came from....The Golden Ass. Twas an easy fun read watching the metamorphosis of the material Lucius (human to ass) into the spiritual Lucius (one who would diddle with the slave girl becomes one following the religion of Isis).
    • 3/5
      My review refers to Robert Graves translation. The narrative drags in the way that most classics do to the modern reader, but it does offer a lot of insight to Roman society.
    • 4/5
      Picked this off the shelf again when looking for something to read in bed while convalescing. Pleased to see that I bought it in Gloucester Road, April 1989. I love it when I find these reminders in my books – I know just the shop, one I used to visit often, when I was working in the Imperial College Chaplaincy. That was the last time I read it, and judging from my recollection of the work I was rather less mature at the time than I believed – aren’t we all at 24? I remembered it as a rather saucy tale of a man who is somehow transformed into an ass and has a rare old time before managing to reverse the transmogrification. Well, Lucius is made an ass, through taking a magic potion, stolen for him in mistake for one that will make him an owl by his slave girl lover. But his life as an ass is not exactly a jolly romp, as animals, (and especially the ass) in the 2nd century AD were not afforded the consideration which we now consider their right. Lucius has to endure beatings and hard useage during his 12 month journey, although he does acquire a great store of tales to pass on to the reader - including Cupid and Psyche. His transformation, as Graves points out in his introduction, is his punishment for his unseemly interest in black magic, and the secrets that properly belong only to the gods. The book is the story of his return to the goddess’ favour and her eventual pity for him. He becomes one of the ‘twice born’, an initiate and then a priest of Isis. It is, in fact, a very moral book, although it is not a Christian morality, and Apuleius has a very poor opinion of Christians. I was fascinated to find in Lucius’ struggles to find the money for his priestly initiation an echo of the parable of the pearl of great price: “If you wanted to buy something that gave you true pleasure, would you hesitate for a moment before parting with your clothes? Then why, when about to partake of my holy sacrament, do you hesitate to resign yourself to a poverty of which you will never need to repent?” Lies breathed through silver, indeed.
    • 4/5
      Superficially, this is a silly book, written to entertain the reader with its farce, spectacle, tragedy, myth, and the various digressions into other brief stories with little obvious relevance to the main plot, other than that the author heard them told and wants to recall them for our pleasure. If the reader is attentive though, as he is told to be in the preface, then there are moral messages, philosophical reflections, and theologising also. The main theme that runs throughout the story concerns the penalties of indulging curiosity, which may be severe, but often in the end can lead to reward, if the character is strong enough to struggle through his difficulties. Not only is this in the main plot of the story, but also features in at least one of the small stories contained within it, illustrated in a slightly different way. Although Platonic theory is mentioned only once during the novel, the whole story is meant, I believe, to represent the searching for higher ideas above the earthly representations which we commonly see. This is compounded with some mystic religious stuff at the end, but in those days philosophy, knowledge, and religion, were all confused together by most people and not easily separated, but I suspect to some extent that the author was deliberately using allegories that could be easily understood to illustrate his more abstract reflections. Still, the book is amusing enough even if all the edifying stuff in it is ignored or not understood, and is surprising readable considering it was written nearly two thousand years ago. I have perhaps either not done the book justice in my reading of it, or alternatively have read things into it which are not there, but I'm sure it would stand up to a second reading, as it is short enough, for all to become clear.
    • 5/5
      One of the earliest novels to survive, a hilarious and bawdy story of a young man turned into an ass and the adventures that follow. Gives the author a chance to chronicle different aspects of Roman society, and the characters you encounter certainly have their modern day counterparts. Graves' translation is extremely readable. Things slack off a little toward the end, but overall this is one book from Roman times that you can easily read for pleasure, and not just out of a sense of historical curiosity, in the 21st century.
    • 5/5
      An incredible story that continues to entertain even after nearly 2000 years. Lucius's adventures and stories are the epitome of the storytelling art! If only we had more novels from this era survive, I can only wonder what incredible tales we have missed out on. The story about Cupid and Psyche is moving, so much tragedy yet with a happy ending and his conversion to Isis and Osiris worship incredibly interesting to read. Do not let this book pass you by without giving it a chance!!
    • 3/5
      I read this in the Adlington translation and if I was a drug taker (I am not- this is better I would imagine), I would describe this as a trip. As I understand this edition was translated about 1566. Yes, that was the date of the translation. We are told that he used the second century original words along side the French edition and took us with him on this translation.I am as much delighted with this translation as I am with the stories. Much of the charm, if that is appropriate for much of the subject matter, come from this translation. This is definitely not appropriate for our current crop of censors but find a way to read it instead. It is a fancy after all and a very Roman one at that.I read this in the Kindle edition and it was one of the books that is available for no cost at all.Where have we come that some of the best literature can be delivered in our humble hands for a soft click? OK, we are in a Golden Age but we don't deserve it. Admit it. Imagine showing a Kindle to Thomas Jefferson and downloading this work at no cost. He would have made no time for his salons of music.
    • 3/5
      This one was interesting. I enjoyed the playful language and the premise of the pickle in which the protagonist found himself. I presume the carnality would be considered shocking for the time, but it's inclusion added to the intrigue. This could certainly stand to be updated to a modern version in books and/or film. I suppose Pinocchio is a version of it.
    • 4/5
      The Golden Ass often gets described as the only complete Ancient novel in Latin, but it’s more of a collection of stories, myths and anecdotes held together by a thin framing device. The plot is well-known. A well-off Roman Citizen in Greece messes around with black magic and gets transformed into a donkey. Cue a picaresque series of owners as he gets bought, sold, stolen and adopted by ambitious robbers, effeminate priests, greedy millers, cruel boys, and lusty upper class women. Each owner has comedic things happening to them and plenty of bawdy and tall tales anecdotes to tell -- or they know people who do. It’s all rather flimsily tied together, but the cohesion, of course, is much less important than the accumulation of humorous stories. Although several of the episodes in Lucius' life as a donkey and the anecdotes he overhears are genuinely funny, much of the humour is of the slapstick-meets-satire kind, which is not really up my street, and stereotypes and black-and-white morality reign, which I'm not too keen on, either. But that is not to say The Golden Ass isn't a great deal of fun to read; it is, albeit not in the way that it was originally intended: many of the things I liked (apart from the ribaldry) are things I doubt were meant as such by the author.For one thing, I liked the openly appreciative attitude towards sexuality: sex, not as a foul practice to be ashamed about, but as something that people willingly admit to doing frequently. Another thing I found fascinating is the snippets of daily life casually mentioned as part of the background: how streets were lighted at night, how towns were planned, and how various tradespeople ran their businesses. All of these were glimpses into a fully functional civilization whose everyday life and whose bureaucracy I know very little about. I was also intrigued by how violent a place the Empire seems to have been to live in: corporal punishment is standard practice, and brutal attacks on and indifferent cruelty towards slaves, animals, women and non-citizens is presented as normal. Morality, as it appears in this book, serves to further a fundamental double standard: one standard for the male citizen (wealthy and good-looking), and another for everyone and everything else. These, and other parts of the “world building” in this book, were what almost interested me more than the actual story.In all, The Golden Ass is quite entertaining as a book of bawdiness and mild satire, though I couldn't help but view it as anything but an 1800-year old book, and enjoyed it primarily as such.
    • 2/5
      Once again I face the situation in which I don't know why this book is in the list of the "1001 books to read before you die". I'm not dismissing the whatsoever historical importance of this book, I just don't see the big deal in it. Is it the archaic language? The metaphors? The writing style, maybe it was the responsible for consolidating a new literature trend or something like that? Regardless, I'm not particularly proud for having read this book simply because I did not understand what's so good about it. The story was... okay. If you take it for a fantasy book, it's about a random guy who got himself turned into a... donkey and lived lots of adventures while hearing several mythological stories. Ehrm... nice?
      I do have a problem with older books: their writing style. Like in Heart of Darkness, this book sews together several occurrences in such a way that you can't really "take a break" from what you're reading (meaning you'll have paragraphs that last for two or three pages and have little to no punctuation, for they are part of one single idea). As a result, it's very, very easy to get lost with everything that's going on, which also means you'll probably have to do some re-reading of several paragraphs. Well, at least unlike Heart of Darkness, this book is slightly easier to understand in spite of the archaic English writing style.
      I didn't absolutely hate this book, but if my friend hadn't chosen it blindly for me to read it, I would never, ever have picked it.
    • 4/5
      A collection of tales, mostly of the damages caused by adulterous and otherwise wicked women, collected together as being heard or experienced by the "author" while he was transformed into an ass. The occasional tale features brigands or lascivious man as misfortune's agent. The longest tale, Psyche's, is the exception if one excludes Venus from the company of adulterous and otherwise wicked women because she's a goddess, is rather boring as Psyche just wanders about being an utter dishrag and the very architecture tells her what to do next.
    • 4/5
      Reason read: African challenge (North Africa),Reading 1001.This is the only ancient Roman novel to survive. It is full of story of goddess/gods and mythology and very full of sexual content. Proof that there is nothing new under the sun. The narrator is changed into an ass and the story is an adventure as seen by the ass (Reminds me of Balaam and the Ass in the Bible).The protagonist, Lucius, at the end of the novel, is revealed to be from Madaurus, the hometown of Apuleius himself. The plot revolves around the protagonist's curiosity and insatiable desire to see and practice magic. While trying to perform a spell to transform into a bird, he is accidentally transformed into an ass. It really is a series of stories such as stories about Cupid and Psyce. An episodic picaresque novel and reminding me of the other picaresque novels found on the 1001 books list.
    • 4/5
      In a nutshell - this is a story about a man who gets turned into an Ass, spends some time as a beast of burden, than has a religious epiphany and is turned back to a man.I liked it. However, the ending was a bit too rapturous as Lucius discovers religion, however, I found it interesting that religious ferver is the same, regardless of age or religion. Its pure comedy, as Lucius goes from one problem, to another, with his way of becoming human again always just out or reach.
    • 4/5
      Transformations of Lucius, translated by Robert Graves. Limited to 2000 copies, in slip case Call No. PC 1.3

    Book preview

    The Golden Ass - Robert Graves

    Introduction

    The original title of this book, The Transformation of Lucius Apuleius of Madaura, was early shortened to The Golden Ass because Apuleius had written it in the style of the professional story-tellers who, as Pliny mentions in one of his letters, used to preface their street-corner entertainments with: ‘Give me a copper and I’ll tell you a golden story.’ So ‘golden’ conveys an indulgent smile rather than genuine appreciation.

    William Adlington, in whose vigorous early-Elizabethan translation the book is still best known, remarks in his introduction that Apuleius wrote ‘in so dark and high a style, in so strange and absurd words and in such new invented phrases, as he seemed rather to set it forth to show his magnificent prose than to participate his doings to others’. Adlington has missed the point: Apuleius, who could write a good plain prose when he chose, as his Discourse on Magic and his God of Socrates prove, was parodying the extravagant language which the ‘Milesian’ story-tellers used, like barkers at country fairs today, as a means of impressing simple-minded audiences. The professional story-teller, or sgéalai, is still found in the West of Ireland. I have heard one complimented as ‘speaking such fine hard Irish that Devil two words together in it would any man understand’; but this hard Irish, like Apuleius’s hard Latin, is always genuinely archaic, not humorously coined for the occasion.

    Why did Apuleius choose to write in this eccentric style? For the same reason that Rabelais did. The parallel is close. Both were priests—pious, lively, exceptionally learned, provincial priests—who found that the popular tale gave them a wider field for their descriptions of contemporary morals and manners, punctuated by philosophical asides, than any more respectable literary form.

    In my translation I have made no attempt to bring out the oddness of the Latin by writing in a style, say, somewhere between Lyly’s Euphues and Amanda Ros’s Irene Iddesleigh; paradoxically, the effect of oddness is best achieved in convulsed times like the present by writing in as easy and sedate an English as possible. Here is the same sentence from Cupid’s address to Psyche as translated by Adlington, by the anonymous Victorian author of the Bohn’s Classical Library version (1881) and by myself:

    Et hic adhuc infantilis uterus gestat nobis infantem alium, si texeris nostra secreta silentio, divinum, si profanaveris, mortalem.

    Thou hast a young and tender child couched in this young and tender belly of thine, who shall be made if thou conceal my secret, an immortal god, but otherwise a mortal creature.

    Adlington.

    Infantine as you are, you are pregnant with another infant which if you preserve my secret in silence, will be born divine, but if you profane it, it will be mortal.

    Bohn’s Victorian.

    Though you are still only a child, you will soon have a child of your own which shall be born divine if you keep our secret, but mortal if you divulge it.

    R.G.

    When one tries to make the English rendering of any Latin text convey the sense of the original, the same problem of impersonation arises as when one tries to broadcast another’s lecture or preach another’s sermon. It is essentially a moral problem: how much is owed to the letter, and how much to the spirit. ‘Stick strictly to the script’, and the effect of authenticity is lost. Here I have sometimes felt obliged to alter the order not only of phrases but of sentences, where English prose logic differs from Latin; and to avoid the nuisance of footnotes I have brought their substance up into the story itself whenever it reads obscurely. Adlington often did the same.

    Adlington was a pretty good scholar, but the text he used had not yet been critically examined and emended, and no reliable Latin dictionary had yet been published, so he often made bad mistakes. But at least he realized that The Transformations was, above all, a religious novel:

    ‘Since this book of Lucius is a figure of man’s life and toucheth the nature and manners of mortal man, egging them forward from their asinal form to their human and perfect shape (beside the pleasant and delectable jests therein contained)… I trust that the matter shall be esteemed by such as not only delight to please their fancies in recording the same, but also take a pattern thereby to regenerate their minds from brutal and beastly custom.’

    However, though Lucius’s conversion at the close of the story is a real and moving one (unlike the perfunctory conversions with which Defoe, for reasons of policy, ended his low-life novels of Roxana and Moll Flanders), it is unlikely that many readers have ever spent much time over it. The book’s popularity, ever since it was written, has rested almost wholly on its ‘pleasant and delectable jest’, especially the bawdy ones.

    The main religious principles that Apuleius was inculcating were wholly opposed to those of the Christianity of his day. The first was that men are far from equal in the sight of Heaven, its favour being reserved for the well-born and well-educated, in so far as they are conscious of the moral responsibilities of their station: that only such can be admitted into the divine mysteries and so mitigate their fear of death by a hope of preferential treatment in the after-world. Slaves and freedmen cannot possibly acquire the virtue, intelligence or discretion needed to qualify them for initiation into these mysteries, even if they could afford to pay the high fees demanded. Slavery carries a stigma of moral baseness; and Apuleius’s slaves are always cowardly, wicked, deceitful or treacherous.

    To be abjectly poor, though free, he regarded as a sign not necessarily of moral baseness but of ill-luck, and his second main religious principle was that ill-luck is catching. The virtuous nobleman does not set his dogs on the poor man, and there is nothing to prevent him from sending a slave round to relieve his immediate distresses; but, like the priest and the Levite in Jesus’s parable of the Samaritan, he should carefully avoid all personal contact with ill-luck. Thus when Aristomenes the provision merchant, in Apuleius’s opening story, found his old friend Socrates in such a shocking plight at Hypata, he should have been content to toss him a coin or two, spit in his own bosom for luck, and leave him to his fate; instead of officiously trying to rescue and reform him—actually dragging the reluctant wretch into the baths and scrubbing his filthy body with his own hands! Socrates was in any case fated to die miserably, and his bad luck fastened securely on Aristomenes, who soon found himself in Socrates’s position—forced to change his name, abandon his wife and family, and become a hunted exile in daily terror of death.

    The fault which involved Lucius in all his miseries was that, though a nobleman, he decided on a frivolous love-affair with a slave-girl. A slave-girl is necessarily base; baseness is unlucky; ill-luck is catching. He also transgressed the third main religious principle: he meddled with the supernatural. His ulterior motive in making love to the girl was to persuade her to betray the magical secrets of her mistress, who was a witch. Yet he had been plainly warned against this fault in Byrrhaena’s house at Hypata by being shown a wonderful statue of Actaeon’s transformation into a stag, his punishment for prying into the mysteries of Diana. A nobleman should not play with black magic: he should satisfy his spiritual needs by being initiated into a respectable mystery cult along with men of his own station; even then he should not thrust himself on the gods but patiently await their summons. Lucius’s punishment was to be temporarily transformed not into an owl, as he had hoped, but into an ass.

    The owl was a bird of wisdom. The ass, as the Goddess Isis herself reminded Lucius at Cenchreae, was the most hateful to her of all beasts in existence; but she did not account for her aversion. Adlington’s explanation, that the ass is a notoriously stupid brute, does not go far enough. The ass was in fact sacred to the God Set, whom the Greeks knew as Typhon, her ancient persecutor and the murderer of her husband Osiris. In Apuleius’s day the ass typified lust, cruelty and wickedness, and Plutarch—from whom he claimed descent—had recorded an Egyptian festival in which asses and men with Typhonic colouring (i.e., sandy-red like a wild ass’s coat) were triumphantly pushed over cliffs in vengeance for Osiris’s murder. When Charitë, in Apuleius’s story of the bandits’ cave, escapes and rides home on ass-back, he remarks that this is an extraordinary sight—a virgin riding in triumph on an ass. He means: ‘dominating the lusts of the flesh without whip or bridle’.

    Yet originally the ass had been so holy a beast that its ears, conventionalized as twin feathers sprouting from the end of a sceptre, became the mark of sovereignty in the hand of every Egyptian deity: and the existence of an early Italian ass-cult is proved by the cognomens Asina and Asellus in the distinguished Scipionian, Claudian and Annian families at Rome. That Lucius was eventually initiated into the rites of Osiris by a Roman priest called Asinius was an amusing coincidence. Asses are connected in western European folklore, especially French, with the mid-winter Saturnalia at the conclusion of which the ass-eared god, later the Christmas Fool with his ass-eared cap, was killed by his rival, the Spirit of the New Year—the child Horus, or Harpocrates, or the infant Zeus. That there was an eastern European tradition identifying Saturn’s counterpart Cronos with the ass is proved by the anonymous Byzantine scholar of the twelfth century (quoted by Piccolomini in the Rivista di Filologia, ii, 159) who in drawing up a list of metals, colours, flowers and beasts appropriate to the seven planetary gods gives Cronos’s attributes as lead, blue, the hyacinth, and the ass. This explains the otherwise unaccountable popular connection between asses and fools; asses are really far more sagacious than horses.

    Until nearly the end of his life as an ass, in the course of which he gets involved in the hysterical and fraudulent popular rites of the Syrian Goddess, Lucius is a beast of ill-luck. And ill-luck is catching: each of his masters in turn either dies violently, is locked up in gaol or suffers some lesser misfortune. The spell begins to lift only when he enters the household of Thyasus, the Corinthian judge, and is there encouraged slowly to reassert his humanity.

    The seasonal transformations of the variously-named god of the mystery-cults, the Spirit of the Year, were epitomized in the Athenian Lenaea festival and corresponding performances throughout the ancient world, including north-western Europe. The initiate identified himself with the god, and seems to have undergone twelve emblematic transformations—represented by Lucius’s ‘twelve stoles’—as he passed through the successive Houses of the Zodiac before undergoing his ritual death and rebirth. ‘Transformations’ therefore conveys the secondary sense of ‘spiritual autobiography’; and Lucius had spent twelve months in his ass’s skin, from one rose-season to the next, constantly changing his House, until his death as an ass and rebirth as a devotee of Isis.

    The literal story of Apuleius’s adventures in Greece can be re-constructed only in vague outline. It is known that he was a rich and well-connected young man born at Madaura, a Roman colony in the interior of Morocco, early in the second century A.D.; his father had been a duumvir, or provincial magistrate, who on his death left his two sons two million sesterces, about £20,000 in gold, between them. Apuleius went first to Carthage University, and afterwards to Athens where he studied Platonic philosophy. While still at Athens, if the story of Thelyphron the student is in part autobiographical, he ran short of money after a visit to the Olympic Games and was forced for awhile to live on his wits. Perhaps he had run through his allowance by drinking and whoring in the brothels and getting mixed up with the criminal classes like the debaunched young nobleman Thrasyllus (in the story of the bandits’ cave). At all events, when he finally reached Corinth and was given a helping hand by Thyasus, he was pretty well down at heel and ripe for repentance and conversion.

    After his initiation into the mysteries of Isis, he went to Rome where he studied Latin oratory and made a success at the Bar. Later he travelled widely in Asia Minor and Egypt, studying philosophy and religion. While on a visit to Alexandria by way of Libya, he fell ill at Oea, on the shores of the Gulf of Sirte, where a young man named Sicinius Pontianus who had been his contemporary at Athens University nursed him back to health. Apuleius grew friendly with Pontianus’s mother Pudentilla, and Pontianus begged him to marry her, despite the great disparity of their ages, on the ground that fourteen years of widowhood had given her a nervous complaint for which the doctors assured her that marriage was the only remedy. Apuleius consented, but when Pudentilla, who was very rich, made over all her money to him and Pontianus died soon afterwards, the rest of the family charged him with having poisoned him and gained her affections by magic. Apuleius’s successful and very amusing speech in his own defense, A Discourse on Magic, survives. I should like to have been present in court to hear him sum up a part of his argument with the ludicrously dry: ‘I have now stated, Gentlemen, why in my opinion there is nothing at all in common between magicians and fish.’

    Though the charge that he used magic failed, it was enough to make ignorant people, including many prominent Christians, believe later that The Transformations was to be read as literal truth. Even St Augustine writes doubtfully: ‘Apuleius either reported or invented his transformation into asinal shape’; and Lactantius in his Divine Institutes is distressed that the miracles of Apuleius, like those of the gymnosophist Apollonius of Tyana, are quoted by anti-Christian controversialists as more wonderful than those of Jesus Christ.

    Evidently St Augustine and his credulous contemporaries had not read Lucius of Patra’s popular novel The Ass, now lost, or Lucian of Samosata’s Lucius, or the Ass, still extant, which is based on it; otherwise, they would have realized that Apuleius had borrowed the plot of The Transformations from one or other of these two sources. (Lucius’s date is unknown; but Lucian and Apuleius were close contemporaries). Lucian’s novel¹ is shorter and balder than The Transformations. His slave-girl Palaestra has none of the charm that excuses Apuleius’s intimate account of the love-affair with her counterpart Fotis; she merely plays the female drill-sergeant, initiating her recruit into the discipline of sex as one teaches arms-drill by numbers. Lucian includes none of Apuleius’s incidental stories, such as the stories of Aristomenes, Thelyphron, Cupid and Psyche; nor the Festival of Laughter episode—there really was such a festival at Hypata—nor the hoodooing of the baker; and his hero returns to human shape at Thessalonica, not Corinth, during his exhibition in the amphitheatre, when without divine assistance he manages to grab some roses from one of the attendants. The comic climax of Lucian’s story comes when the ex-ass returns hopefully to the rich woman who has recently played Pasiphaë with him and proposes to renew their intimacy: she throws him out of her house, greatly aggrieved that he is now a mere man, quite incapable of satisfying her needs. Lucian’s stories all leave a bad taste in the mouth; Apuleius’s do not, even when he is handling the same bawdy situation. His rich Pasiphaë, for example, is no mere bestialist, but shows her genuine love for the ass by planting pure, sincere, wholly unmeretricious kisses on his scented nose.

    Apuleius constantly uses a device now known on the variety stage as the ‘double take’. The audience applauds, but finds that it has applauded too soon; the real point, either funnier or more macabre than anyone expected, was yet to come. The brilliance of his showmanship suggests that he turned professional storyteller during his wanderings in Greece, using Lucius of Patra’s Ass as his stock piece—he felt its relevance to his case and Lucius happened to be his own name—and stringing a number of popular stories to it. Perhaps one day Thyasus, the Corinthian judge, heard a huge shout of laughter from the servants’ quarters of his house and, going along to investigate, stopped to listen to one of Apuleius’s droll stories; and so befriended him without at first knowing who he was.

    It is unlikely, by the way, that Apuleius really had relatives at Hypata; the incident of his meeting with Byrrhaena there is also found in Lucian’s novel. It is equally unlikely that Greek was his mother-tongue, and his reference to family connections with Ephyra (Corinth), Mount Hymettus, celebrated for its honey, and Taenarus the main Greek entrance to the Underworld, are clearly allegorical. These places are chosen as ancient cult-centres of the Triple Goddess whom he adored in her successive aspects as the sovereign of Life, Love and Death.

    He probably invented none of his stories, though it is clear that he improved them. The story of Cupid and Psyche is still widely current as a primitive folk-tale in countries as far apart as Scotland and Hindustan; but taking hints from passages in Plato’s Phaedo and Republic he turned it into a neat philosophical allegory of the progress of the rational soul towards intellectual love. This feat won him the approval even of the better sort of Christians, including Synnesius, the early fifth-century Bishop of Ptolemais; and Cupid and Psyche is still Apuleius’s best known, though by no means his most golden, story. His devotion to Platonic philosophy is shown in the God of Socrates, which St Augustine attacked violently.

    St Augustine’s dislike of his fellow-countryman Apuleius seems to have sprung from an uncomfortable recognition that they would one day come up together for the judgement of posterity. He was born near Madaura, Apuleius’s birthplace, whose inhabitants he addresses in his 232nd Epistle as ‘my fathers’, and went to school there; then, like Apuleius, he went on to Carthage University. Book II of his Confessions begins: ‘I will now call to mind my past foulness and the carnal corruption of my soul… In that sixteenth year of the age of my flesh, when the madness of unlicensed lust took rule over me and I resigned myself wholly to it… I walked the streets of Babylon and wallowed in the mire thereof as if in a bed of spices and precious ointments.’ He goes on to describe how he took up with a gang of young Mohocks (like the ones that terrorized Hypata) and so fell into the mortal sin of theft. Still following the footsteps of Apuleius, he studied oratory at Rome. It is not until Book VIII that after a severe struggle with himself he hears a voice from Heaven directing him to read a text from St. Paul, becomes suddenly converted, once more like Apuleius, and determines to devote his life to God.

    His father Patricius, a nominal Christian, was a violent, vulgar fellow from whom he inherited neither rank, money nor a predisposition to virtue; so that even had he wished to become a priest of Isis he could not have qualified for the houour. But the Christian mysteries were open to everyone, slave or noble, of good or evil life, and the greater the sinner the warmer his welcome to the fold. Though his conversion was as genuine as that of Apuleius, it does not seem to have made his life nearly so happy. Tormented by the memory of his sins, he flaunts his dirty linen for our detestation: ‘Alas, terrible Judge, I began by robbing a pear-tree, I ended in adultery and the hateful Manichaean heresy!’ Apuleius does nothing of the sort. His Transformations is as moral a work as the Confessions; but he presents his errors in humorous allegory, not as a literal record, and admits that he learned a great deal from them which has since stood him in good stead: granted, his love affair with Fotis was a mistake, and he paid dearly for it, but it would be hypocritical to pretend that it was not a charming and instructive experience while it lasted.

    St Augustine described with horror the fascination that the amphitheatre and the study of oratory had held for him in his unregenerate days. Apuleius, though a priest of Osiris, continued to practise as a barrister and in later life organized the gladiatorial and wild-beast shows for the whole province of Africa. St Augustine rejected Platonic philosophy as insufficient for salvation; Apuleius was true to it and showed his scorn of contemporary Christianity by making the most wicked of his characters, the baker’s wife, ‘reject all true religion in favour of the fantastic and blasphemous cult of an Only God’ and use the Christian Love-feast as ‘an excuse for getting drunk quite early in the day and playing the whore at all hours.² One of St Augustine’s biographers, E. de Pressensé, has written approvingly: ‘He kept dragging along the chain of guilt… and unlike his fellow-country-man Apuleius whose greatest pleasure was to arrange words in harmonious order and who had no desire beyond that of calling forth applause… still felt sick at heart.’ This is unfair to Apuleius. His greatest desire was not applause: it was to show his gratitude to the Goddess whom he adored, by living a life worthy of her favour—a serene, honourable and useful life, with no secret worm of guilt gnawing at his heart as though he had withheld some confession from her or mistrusted her compassion.

    Recent researches into the history of witchcraft show that Apuleius had a first-hand knowledge of the subject. The Thessalian witches preserved the pre-Aryan tradition of a ‘left-hand’, or destructive, magic performed in honour of the Triple Moon-goddess in her character of Hecate; the ‘right-hand’, or beneficent, magic performed in honour of the same Goddess being now concentrated in the pure mysteries of Isis and Demeter. It must be remembered that in St Augustine’s day the sovereignty of the indivisible male Trinity had not yet been encroached upon by Mariolatry, and Apuleius’s splendid address to Isis could not therefore be read with indulgence as an anticipation of the Litany of the Blessed Virgin with which it has much in common. Apuleius did not deny the power of the left-hand cult, any more than the Christians denied the power of the Devil: but he knew that honourable men like himself ought to leave it alone and that if they kept strictly to the right-hand cult, the devotees of the left-hand could have no power over them. On one point, at least, besides the need for practising virtue in preparation for the after-life, he agreed with the Christians: his rejection of the official Olympian mythology, which Plato had long before discredited as a barbaric survival, appears in Cupid and Psyche, where the gods and goddesses behave like naughty children. But he wrote of them humorously and affectionately as Apollonius Rhodius had done in his Argonautica, not in the scoffing style of Lucian’s Dialogues.

    Nothing much more of importance remains to be said about Apuleius except that he became a priest of Aesculapius, the God of Medicine, as well as of Isis and Osiris, and was also a poet and a historian; unfortunately his histories and poems have not survived.

    Now: LECTOR INTENDE, LAETABERIS.

    R.G.

    Deyá,

    Majorca, 1947

    1

    The Story of Aristomenes

    Business once took me to Thessaly, where my mother’s family originated; I have, by the way, the distinction of being descended through her from the famous Plutarch. One morning after I had ridden over a high range of hills, down a slippery track into the valley beyond, across dewy pastures and soggy ploughland, my horse, a white Thessalian thoroughbred, began to puff and slacken his pace. Feeling tired myself from sitting so long cramped in the saddle, I jumped off, carefully wiped his sweating forehead with a handful of leaves, stroked his ears, threw the reins over his neck, and walked slowly beside him, letting him relax and recover his wind at leisure. While he breakfasted, snatching a mouthful of grass from this side or that of the track which wound through the meadows, I saw two men trudging along together a short distance ahead of me, deep in conversation. I walked a little faster, curious to know what they were talking about, and just as I drew abreast one of them burst into a loud laugh and said to the other: ‘Stop, stop! Not another word! I can’t bear to hear any more of your absurd and monstrous lies.’

    This was promising. I said to the story-teller: ‘Please don’t think me impertinent or inquisitive, sir, but I’m always anxious to improve my education, and few subjects fail to interest me. If you would kindly go back to the beginning of your story and tell me the whole of it I should be most grateful. It sounds as if it would help me pleasantly up this next steep hill.’

    The man who had laughed went on: ‘I want no more of that nonsense, do you hear? You might as well say that magic can make rivers run backwards, freeze the ocean, and paralyze the winds. Or that the sun can be stopped by magic in mid-course, the moon made to drop a poisonous dew, and the stars charmed from their proper spheres. Why, you might as well say that day can be magically annihilated and replaced by perpetual night.’

    But I persisted: ‘No, sir, don’t be put off. Finish your story, please finish it; unless this is asking too much of you.’ Then, turning to the other, I said: ‘As for you, sir, are you sure that it isn’t either natural dullness or cultivated obstinacy that prevents you from recognizing the truth of what your friend has been trying to tell you? Stupid people always dismiss as untrue anything that happens only very seldom, or anything that their minds cannot readily grasp; yet when these things are carefully inquired into they are often found not only possible but probable. Tell me, for instance, what you make of this. Last night at supper I was challenged to an eating race by some people at my table and tried to swallow too large a mouthful of polenta cheese. It was so doughy and soft that it stuck half-way down my throat, blocking my windpipe, and I nearly choked to death. Yet only a few days before, at the Painted Porch in Athens, I had watched a juggler actually swallow a sharp cavalry sabre, point downwards too; after which, he collected a few coins from us bystanders and swallowed a hunting spear in the same astonishing way. We watched him tilt his head backwards with the handle sticking out from his throat into the air; and presently, believe it or not, a beautiful boy began to wriggle up that handle with such slippery movements that you might have mistaken him for the royal serpent coiled on the roughly-trimmed olive club carried by the God of Medicine; he seemed to have neither bone nor sinew in his whole body.’ Then I turned once more to the other man: ‘Come, sir, out with your story! I undertake not only to believe it, even though your friend will not, but to show my gratitude for your kindness by

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1