The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius
Requirements: MP3 Player, 33 MB
Overview: translated by Robert Graves
adapted by Jeremy Clyde and Jonathan Myerson
with Jeremy Clyde, Nathaniel Parker and Jenny Funnel’
directed for BBC World Service by Gordon House
probably broadcast between 1998 and 2003
The metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, which according to St. Augustine was referred to as The Golden Ass (Asinus aureus) by Apuleius, is the only Latin novel to survive in its entirety.
The text is a precursor to the literary genre of the episodic picaresque novel, in which Quevedo, Rabelais, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Voltaire, Defoe and many others have followed. It is an imaginative, irreverent, and amusing work that relates the ludicrous adventures of one Lucius, a virile young man who is obsessed with magic. Finding himself in Thessaly, the "birthplace of magic," Lucius eagerly seeks an opportunity to see magic being used. His overenthusiasm leads to his accidental transformation into an ass. In this guise, Lucius, a member of the Roman country aristocracy, is forced to witness and share the miseries of slaves and destitute freemen who are reduced, like Lucius, to being little more than beasts of burden by their exploitation at the hands of wealthy landowners.
The Golden Ass is the only surviving work of literature from the ancient Greco-Roman world to examine, from a first-hand perspective, the abhorrent condition of the lower classes. Yet despite its serious subject matter, the novel remains imaginative, witty, and often sexually explicit. Numerous amusing stories, many of which seem to be based on actual folk tales, with their ordinary themes of simple-minded husbands, adulterous wives, and clever lovers, as well as the magical transformations that characterize the entire novel, are included within the main narrative. The longest of these inclusions is the tale of Cupid and Psyche, encountered here for the first but not the last time in Western literature.
80/44/mono; 33.1 MB; sound quality very good
Upped by repcrac at thebox.bz
Source: BBC Radio 4 Digital Radio via analogue cable > tape
Download Instructions::
http://ul.to/lg6t93/Apuleius_-_The_Golden_Ass_(BBC_WS).mp3
Mirrors MU:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=XOB4DQ9L
Part of Sherlockx’s collection. – G & a
