Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass)

The only Latin novel to survive complete, eleven books following Lucius, whose obsessive curiosity about magic gets him accidentally transformed into a donkey, in which comic, often bawdy form he suffers through degrading owners and adventures, including the embedded tale of Cupid and Psyche, before being restored to human form through the intervention of the goddess Isis, to whom the final book presents his devotion in an earnest religious register that shifts abruptly from the novel's earlier comedy. Apuleius, a North African rhetorician writing in ornate Latin, layers the novel with self-referential game-playing about storytelling. Carthage, where Apuleius later practiced as an orator, is the conventional guess for where he composed it, though Rome remains a genuinely contested alternative that no surviving source settles. The Cupid and Psyche episode became one of the most retold myths in later Western art independent of its frame narrative.