How The Golden Ass drew on Metamorphoses
A documented line of influence: Apuleius demonstrably engaged Ovid’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Metamorphoses
Ovid · 8
Ancient RomeThe influenced
The Golden Ass
Apuleius · c. 170
Ancient RomeRelevance
6/10
On The Golden Ass’s page
- Apuleius's novel was itself titled Metamorphoses — a deliberate nod to Ovid's poem of changing shapes
- The donkey-plot came from elsewhere, but the governing idea, transformation as the thread that strings a story together, is Ovid's, lifted out of verse and into the first great Latin novel
On Metamorphoses’s page
- Apuleius paid Ovid the highest compliment a writer can — he stole the title, calling his own novel Metamorphoses
- The plot, the narrator, the man-turned-donkey came from a lost Greek tale, but the frame around it — transformation as the engine of a whole story — is Ovid's idea carried into Latin prose fiction