This book examines the comic and philosophical aspects of Apuleius' Metamorphoses, the ancient Roman novel also known as The Golden Ass. The tales that comprise the novel, long known for their bawdiness and wit, describe the adventures of Lucius, a man who is transformed into an ass. Carl Schlam argues that the work cannot be seen as purely comic or wholly serious; he says that the entertainment offered by the novel includes a vision of the possibilities...

"Ovid was hardly the first Greco-Roman writer to treat the theme of metamorphic myth, but his poem of transformation was itself transformative in the literary landscape of Augustus' Rome. Breathtakingly original in the scale of its intellectual and creative ambition, in many ways it changed the course of Latin literary history through the influence it exerted on successive generations of poets at Rome. From Late Antiquity onwards, through the Middle...