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  • The Paris Review

    Memoirs of an Ass

    by Anthony Madrid Feb 28, 2018 7 minutes

    1.

    Just to give you the essentials: Probably around 180 A.D. (which is to say probably during the reign of the emperor Marcus Aurelius), a novel was written in Latin. It really is a novel. Trot out any definition of novel: it’s that. Also, it’s the only one, complete, that we have from ancient Rome. Other similar books in Latin have been reduced, over the centuries, to rubble. The one I’m talking about is still whole. Corrupt, but whole.

    The author’s name was Apuleius. He was famous during his lifetime as a Platonic philosopher. There were statues of him in North Africa, where he was from. They’re all gone now. And we don’t know how many copies of the novel existed during his lifetime. We do know that every one of ’em had to be copied out by hand. The text requires about two hundred pages of modern type, I don’t know how many pages of Latin holograph.

    What’s in it. Well, a guy tells, in the first person, about traveling to the region of Greece that was most notorious for witchcraft in those days: Thessaly.

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