Lucius or, The Ass by Lucian (c125-180)

Another strange burst of oddness from long ago. A young Greek goes journeying with a letter of recommendation to a professor of rhetoric in Thessaly. When he arrives, the story is set up such that we think he is probably going to find out that the woman who seems to be the maid is actually the professor's wife. The wife is known for her 'black magic' skills, and it turns out that the maid is not unadept either! Push comes to shove, and the maid turns him into a donkey. Here we leave behind what I'm guessing was the original plan of a tale of deceptive identity, and swirl off into a picaresque story of a young man's ego being challenged by all he undergoes as a beast of burden. Robbers steal him and treat him dreadfully. He is rescued by a wealthy young girl, but her father hands him over to a groom who has an evil streak, and they trade blows. He narrowly escapes castration because his owners drown in a tidal wave, and the groom ends up appropriating him and selling him to a gay cult who worship the ancient Syrian goddess Atargatis. As Lucian was apparently Syrian, this seems a nod to his origins. The cult wander from village to village with the statue of the goddess tied up onto his back, and demand alms via dancing wildly, cutting themselves in nerved-up excitation to prove their devotion. But when they are discovered mid-pleasure with a new convert they are thrown into prison, and The Ass is sold to a baker who runs him to skin and bone servicing his mill. A market-gardener who buys him at this low ebb has a fight with a military officer and hides away with him in the house of a friend. The Ass gives them away by sticking his head out of the window of their hideout, Lucian claiming that this is the origin of the phrase 'don't stick your neck out!'. He then provides great amusement in the family of the chef that purchases him next, by eating all sorts of things that donkeys wouldn't normally like, drinking wine, and being trained to perform tricks, which of course he is only able to do because he is human inside and can understand all that's being said to him. His fame grows as a peculiar phenomenon. A foreign girl comes to see him and falls in love with him - and they are both quite happy to make love together, which is.....an interesting plot development! They are spied on by his owners, who decide THIS will be a good money-earner! Set up in a public spectacle to repeat these pleasures with a female slave for all to see, he sees an attendant walk by with yellow roses, which he has been told by the maid in the beginning are his key to transformation back into a human. He grabs them, munching them up, and duly returns to his original form. The young woman who introduced him to odd pleasures is cautious about him, but decides to give him a try as a human lover when he seeks her out, having grown 'attached' to her. But she is wildly disappointed in his little monkeyishness after his no doubt splendid asinine proportions of yore! So, he returns home thankful to the gods for surviving his strange adventure. What I haven't yet mentioned is the cruelty in this piece. Other animals' legs are hacked off and they are dumped over cliffs, he is beaten to a pulp by several of his owners, and so on. The perverse mixture of sexuality and savagery gives this short piece a sting alongside the humour. A clear window into how much has changed since the second century. Though there was novelty and a species of freedom in aberrance in this, I'm on the whole glad we don't live anymore in a world of this kind of ravening. Just have to cure ourselves of those of our times.

The True History by Lucian (c125-180)

Lucian was apparently a Syrian (in the ancient sense) and probably wrote in Syriac, but all of our records of his work are from Ancient Greek translations. This is a simple, splendid and short satire of the tall tales recorded as truth by ancient writers. He mentions a good many of the writers he has in his sights as the narrative progresses. Wow, what a narrative. Thinking about all the things that might have appeared fascinating and liberating to a mind of those times, Lucian seems to attempt a good proportion of them. Visiting the moon, sailing through air rather than water, all manner of strange creatures, all sorts of exigencies coming out of things being composed of elements they shouldn't - fire-waves, grapes full of milk, dreams being corporeal (and then again not). The satire is fairly straightforward, almost like saying "look, we can all make things up!"; it doesn't appear to me to have lots of layers, but the results are great mind-freeing fun. This 1958 adaptation-translation by Paul Turner appeared while John Cowper Powys was still alive. I wonder if he read it, and it helped to fuel the beautiful crazed short fantasies that he had already begun writing and that constituted his late-life wonder. But I guess, given his predilections, he was probably already all-too-familiar with this book. This is a spirited and airy flowering of nonsense-imagination, stacked full of the gods, heroes, and literary figures like Homer and the ancient historians - lovely releasing stuff.