Nikéla Reed

they/she

Education: Majoring in Theatre

McNair Project: Pinning a Tail on the Donkey? Identity and Irony in Apuleius’ Golden Ass (2023)

Mentor: Benjamin McCloskey, Ph.D.

In the Mediterranean of the second century AD, the Roman empire was in the middle of massive changes: it was the Second Sophistic, a time of great cultural conversations that both focused on the Greek past and also grappled with negotiating the relationship between Roman imperial power, Greek cultural identity, and African cultural identity. The stronger the power of the Roman state, the more important it was for regional, colonized minorities to successfully balance preserving their indigenous identity with assimilating to Roman power.

It is in this context that the author Apuleius becomes important: he is an Roman-African-Greek author who both resists Roman power by writing literature that centers African and Greek perspectives in literature that, however, also conforms to the conventions of Roman literature. He is, professionally, also a Roman civil servant and priest who mediates between his local African society and the imperial Roman government. Apuleius is an author who is complicated, with many moving parts, and who actively, intellectually engages on both ‘sides’ of the colonizer/colonized fence.

One of his works of literature is the Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass, in which the well-to-do, aristocratic Roman citizen protagonist, an African-Greek-Roman named Lucius, through his curiosity, lack of social awareness, and an unfortunate encounter with a witch, is turned into a donkey and goes through a series of adventures meeting a wide range of financially, legally, and ethnically marginalized mostly non-citizens of the Roman empire. What first fascinated me about this text was that Lucius, the protagonist, was so deeply fixated on magic that he does anything–lies, boasts, manipulates, seduces, shirks blame, and refuses to learn from his own mistakes–to get what he wants. He is both charming and incredibly frustrating, not least because his identity keeps shifting within the novel: he is at times a man and a donkey; he is an unemployed aristocrat, a priest, a lawyer, and a student. He talks about himself as a Greek and then as an African.

I examine scenes from Book 2 in Apuleuis’ Golden Ass, arguing that Apuleius wants the reader to understand both the nature of patriarchal power and how women can reclaim power. Apuleius uses this argument to strategically share the experience of navigating identity as an African-Roman-Greek Roman citizen of the second century AD without being explicit. I also examine a scene depicting a statue in the atrium of Byrrhena, Lucius’ aristocratic aunt. I argue that Apuleius writes this scene in a way that invites two parallel readings: first, Lucius’ exploitative, patriarchal perspective is highlighted; second, Byrrhena’s hostility towards patriarchal exploitation is expressed via the statue. I do this by examining Byrrhena’s identity as depicted in the novel, by examining the statue, its apparent purpose, the ways in which this version of the myth of Diana and Actaeon diverges from the canonical version of the myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I conclude that Apuleius wants the reader to not make the same mistakes that Lucius made–and will make, later in the novel.