American Journal of Philology

1. IN WHICH THE AUTHOR MUST DECIDE WHETHER OR NOT TO WRITE A REVIEW

The Lucius of Apuleius' The Golden Ass is not delighted at his transformation into an ass, but the many juicy stories he overhears during his stay in animal form provide a silver lining—stories which, once he has returned to human form, he incorporates into a book about his experience. The resulting narrative offers countless opportunities for interpretation. In it, realistic depictions of animal suffering caused by humans jostle with the most light-hearted X-rated romps; the contents of a ribald "Milesian tale" stud the confessions of a priest; a complicated allegory about love is questioned by its framing narrative. The novel's central questions demand serious thought: why would a devotee of Isis include raunchy tales in his autobiography? Is the author/ass simply the last victim of all the religious scams he sees? Does the battered donkey stand as testimony to the suffering of ancient slaves? How does the Cupid and Psyche story reflect on Lucius' curiosity? This complexity—and the fact that The Golden Ass makes for a fabulous read—renders the experience of reading the work pretty much inenarrabile.

Enter Peter Singer, the Princeton utilitarian and bio-ethicist, who has recently published a curtailed version of the novel with a translation by classicist Ellen Finkelpearl. It's unusual for bio-ethicists to publish editions of classical texts, but the motivation here was personal. In an essay published in the online Classics journal Antigone, Singer tells of his astonishment upon encountering this work.¹ Here, from the 2nd [End Page 169] century c.e., was an account of a man transformed into an ass who suffered much in that unhappy pelt. To Singer, the point seemed clear. As he writes in an essay on "The Ethical Significance of the Golden Ass" included in his edition, "almost two millennia ago, a writer and philosopher chose to tell a story from the point of view of a donkey, seeing that animal as a sentient being with a life of his own to lead" (211). It was a message worth repeating, given that Singer hoped we would think about the implications for our own view of animals. But since the message was obscured by the presence of the titillating stories heard by the ass along the way, Singer also decided to prune away from the book anything unrelated to the donkey's direct experience.² (He notes that Finkelpearl did not approve of the cuts; her decision to go ahead with the translation reflected her desire to broaden the text's audience.)³

As the reader will know, Peter Singer has been an eloquent advocate both for philanthropic giving in The Life You Can Save (Singer 2009) and, more pertinently here, animal rights (starting with his foundational Animal Liberation (Singer 1975). Much as in Bentham's famous argument that "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"⁴ Singer has argued that using criteria such as rational capacity to create a hierarchy of animals and humans is, simply put, immoral. On his view, we should privilege instead a living being's capacity to suffer, and, since animals can most certainly suffer, we are obliged to offer them the same consideration as we do humans.⁵ The publication of this Golden Ass is in support of this cause, and Singer's essay in the volume also offers a brief history of philosophical views on animal rights and dwells on the very real horrors of factory farming.

As it happens, this reviewer is also a passionate advocate of animal rights. I believe that factory farming is indeed the great moral evil of [End Page 170] our times, and that our descendants will look back on it with the horror we feel now for slavery. Should I therefore applaud the publication of the athetized Ass? Surely not. After all, if we're letting ethics enter into consideration...