 Our guest today is Dr. Joel C. Rellehan, and Dr. Rellehan is professor in the Department of Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, or GLAM, at Whedon College in Northern Massachusetts. His research interests include late, classical, and early Christian literature, such as Apolaus, Lucian, Romance literature, Augustine, and Boethius, medieval Latin literature, and Minipian satire. He is the author of Ancient Minipian satire, and has produced many wonderful translations of, among other figures, Lucian, Boethius, and Apolaus. So Dr. Rellehan, welcome to the show. Glad to be here. It's a pleasure. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a very long time. I was actually just reading your translation of Cupid and Psyche. I like to read translations together, so I'm reading Sarah Rudin's translation and your translation back to back because I retain better that way. I took some Latin in college, but I'm not like native in it. And my Greek is all, it's been a long time since I worked on my Greek. So we're going to be tackling one of a group of texts that you've worked on extensively, the work of Apolaus's Golden Ass and a Greek novel sometimes attributed to Lucian of Samosita called Onos. However, before we jump into that, I feel it's important to provide the viewer a basic outline of the story. That being said, can you provide a brief rundown of the story and the genre of the Golden Ass and Onos? Your question, you know, story, genre, style, those are a lot of words all at once. And I thought it might be useful to tease these apart just a little bit. It's easy to call all these things novels these days. And I always want to push back against that. You know, novel is very modern. If you wanted a term that kind of include Apolaus's Metamorphoses or Golden Ass and the Greek Ass story, the Onos, you might say picaresque, you know, look ahead to golden age Spanish literature, you know, Lazurio de Tormes. It's more like that. But if you're going to talk about genre or style, those terms are only going to be meaningful if you can think of expectations that a reader might have that could be met or frustrated. If they don't have expectations, then there is no genre. So there are a number of things that I'll get around to that people would have in their heads when they would read these stories. And maybe they're genres and maybe they're not. I will talk about style, but I really like your your term brief rundown of the story, because that's about as generic a term as you can get. It avoids the minefields of technical knowledge. Oh, yeah, I can give you a brief rundown. The story is a young man, gables in man, loses its shape, regains it after a year of wandering and suffering. Now, if I were to ask you, Jason, why that wasn't enough, what would you say was missing? Certainly for something like Onos, it would be sufficient. But for Apolaus and what he does in the Golden Ass, he doesn't just focus on the main character. He focuses on a lot of other stories like Telefron. He focuses on the story of Socrates. He focuses on Cupid and Psyche, of course, right? That that wonderful story in books four through six. He also tells the story of the robbers, those insane kind of facts, but he's using these all for a higher purpose, right? That gets culminates in book 11, right? So I'm very fascinated by the fact that you mentioned the inset stories that I didn't mention in that one sentence, but you didn't say you didn't mention he turned into an ass. You know, so it's interesting that I would have thought that the ass was the first thing that that was missing. I say he loses his shape and regains it. It is important that he's turned into an ass. I could try another synopsis of the story. I could say a young man spends a year as an ass before regaining his human shape after a magic spell that imprisoned him was broken. Now it's a story about an ass. It's a story about magic. It's a story about time, but that's still kind of unsatisfactory. So we might try this. You have a young man who goes to Thessaly, proverbial land of witchcraft in order to see magic. And he gets more than he bargained for when the woman he seduces, the servant of a powerful witch, pretends to be a witch herself, applies the wrong potion, turns her lover into an ass. The search for the antidote, which turns out to be roses, of course, is frustrated as the ass is stolen by robbers, forced into service, beaten unmercifully, passed from owner to owner. His experience as an ass and his opportunity to see the gritty Roman world of thieves and slaves, soldiers, wretched poverty, wretched excess is maybe educational when he learns his lesson. He's redeemed. Now, that's a better accounting of the story, though it doesn't say anything about any individual inset story, because how can you summarize the story and say, oh, and then there's a story of telephoto, which in its details has nothing to do with the rest of it. You can say after many experiences he's transformed. The problem is there are so many stories in Apollaeus does summarizing the book involve summarizing the other stories? The answer has to be no. I never thought of it that way. I was thinking more in terms of like how Apollaeus starts out the book. There's always the problem of like the genre of like the Greek novels or the romances, like people didn't think of these things in the genre sense back then. I think I was more just thinking in the terms of like Apollaeus starts out the book and saying he's doing a story in the Malaysian style, the Malaysian tale. I'm thinking like a Malaysian tale, like has those short kind of titillating scenes in them. I think it's just because I was drawn to the different stories in Apollaeus, you know, they're almost like campfire stories in a way. In book one, there's a fantastic story about witches. This is a story of Socrates and its beautiful details about the witches and his and the man's partner and how he watched the witches slit the guy's throat, pull his heart out, put a sponge in, sew it up. And the story is told by these travelers that our narrator has fallen in with. And it sets the tone. This is a story about magic and witches. And it sets the tone because one of the travelers says, that story is ridiculous. And our narrator, Lucius says, oh, I think anything is possible. And it establishes our guy as a dupe. You know, our narrator thinks the stories could be true. And what people don't pay attention to, I think, or it's not enough, is that these people are guiding him to the town he wants to go to, which is Haipata in Thessaly, where he wants to find witches. And by the time he gets there, it turns out they're celebrating the Festival of Laughter. Lucius is their sacrifice for the Festival of Laughter. The whole three first books are how he's been pranked by these people. I figure that those two people he meets on the road are setting him up. Or as you say, they're just winding him up to get ready. And they goes in and they got this witch and the servant girl, Fotis, and he's invited to a banquet. That's where the story of Telefran telling the story about how he was the corpse watcher. And he said, stay awake all night. But of course, he fell asleep and the witches bite off his nose. They bite off his ears. And he tells the story of the next day. They fell off. He says, and of course, they were humiliated. So I grow my hair long and I wear a cloth over my face. Did he lose his nose? Or is he telling a story to a guy who's getting drunker and drunker, which is totally unverifiable in the first place. And I would say an obvious lie. Again, winding this guy up. Then there's the event, the robbers, which is you ask me, the best part of the whole Mademorphosies is the festival of laughter sequence, where the whole story gets told three different times. It's like Rashomon have to figure out what's the real version of the story. And finally, there's this big revelation in the amphitheater. And they pull off the cloth and there are these three bodies, which are just stuffed goat skins. Yeah, he's been pranked, right? The whole thing must have been intended from the beginning. You get there and you reread in your mind, Book One, this is how they set him up. And then he goes back to Fotis says, oh, I'm sorry. It was a mistake. I didn't mean to do it. What do you mean she didn't mean to do it? She tells a story about the Be-Ocean boy and the and the hair that she gathered at the barbers and how she accidentally animated the goat skins because she was forced to leave the hair behind. But if that was accidental, then he couldn't have been pranked. So she's obviously lying to him. And I figure she's lying to him also when she puts the wrong potion on her. She's continuing the joke and intends to be transformed into a donkey to have one last laugh at this idiot. And then the whole story is turned upside down when the robbers come. And then all of Apalaeus's ability to tell a complex, interrelated story, those first few books, is chucked out. So he's going to tell a series of episodes. And the episodes in terms of plotting are not nearly as interesting as the pranking of books one to three. Now, he'll insert stories that are very interesting on their own and he'll make some stories that comment on the whole story. And Cupid and Psyche comments on the whole of Metamorphosis because it's a story of curiosity, punishment, wandering, near-death experiences, transformation, divinity, ascension to an upper world. But the story of the three sons who were killed by the nasty neighbor. If it weren't their music, some stories are better than others. But there's a price that Apalaeus pays when he shifts from being a really good, I'm almost a novelist, to a teller of episodes. And much as I like the Apalaeus, take a look at the latter half and I say, this isn't as good as the beginning. But would you say that's a consequence of him having to work with the common lost Greek source that he has in front of him that onus obviously follows that chronology pretty well? Apalaeus knows he has to tell a certain story and maybe he can't find places to insert. But yeah, you're right, like book three, you even see like with Lucius himself. When he tells the story, he's kind of like embellishing it. When he originally tells stories like I couldn't see anything. I was like scared out of my wits. And then he tells this like elaborate story about the robbers and how one of them was bigger than the other. He was going to bash my head in with a stone and I had to defend myself. I think they're all unreliable narrators. And that's what I love about the Greek romances and the romances and the novels in general, because you always have these unreliable narrators. One of my favorites is Lucapean Clydefon. Clydefon is a complete blockhead. He's like the main character of the story, but all his slaves and everybody else are doing things for him. And he's just bumbling along. And that's kind of the same thing here. Lucius is like this. I was well learned and versed in his paideia and his training at great orator. But like he's just constantly getting into these, you know, and he's like played the fool. Like you said, the first three books are just everybody playing a trick on him. And that's really interesting. You brought up about how all of these people that he encounters are kind of playing him for a dupe. You know, there he's a mark. You know, they're they're pushing him along. And I kind of thought that I didn't think about photos in that way until like the ointment. And then I'm kind of like, she's like, well, just wait here and I'll bring in the roses in the morning. I'm like, well, why couldn't she just bring them the roses now? You know, it would take you like maybe five minutes. So easy for people to say it was a mistake. And I'm convinced in my own mind that it was just the next humiliation. And Appalaius doesn't know how to end the story very well. For his inset stories, he builds up to a conclusion. Then the conclusion is very quick and he runs on. The ends of individual books are rarely well constructed. Now, Cuban psyche, you know, that's that's that's pretty well done. But his trouble ending well, he starts well. But, you know, the naive character romance is a stock character. The young man has to grow up. The young man can't start out as some kind of suave James Bond character. You know, he has to move up and into his place in the world. And he's going to be helped by slaves and strangers. The way people are helped by animals in young Ian folk tales. He has to be assisted because he can't do it on his own. That's reasonable. But you said that, you know, is Appalaius constrained by the boundaries of the Greek metamorphosis that he inherits? Well, there are a lot of things that are in the same order. You know, there is the the magical mistake. There are the robbers. There's going to the robbers layer. There's a maiden who is abducted on her wedding day. There are the robbers are captured. The donkey is sold. You get the Syrian priests. The Syrian priest episode has a real life of its own in Appalaius, I presume, because the frauds that are the Syrian priests are contrasted to ISIS. You have the mill. You have the farmer, the soldier. Then the two brothers who are the cooks who feed him, learning how to eat and drink in the banquet. The matron who wants to sleep with him. The restoration of his shape and the end of the story. So there is that sequence, the evil stepmother who poisons everybody. I presume he put that in there on his own. Why? I say, if it were gone, would you miss it? Did the book need to be as long as it is? Appalaius, he likes to write, but there is an episodic nature to the golden ass, which you can decide you've had enough of. And certainly the author of the onus has no patience for inset stories. We know that there were stories in there that he decided to cut. And the key one is the story about the couple that Appalaius calls Karate and the Clopolomus, the woman who was abducted, the one to whom Cupid is psyche is told. There's just this confused sentence in which somebody brings the news that they were walking along the seashore and they were swallowed by a wave. And that was it. So there was a story. And I think that on us just decided this is a donkey magic story. There's really no room for the pretentious insertion of these other stories. We're going to narrow it down. So you can kind of like the onus for that. But here are another couple of ways to summarize the whole story. You could say, maybe it's a morality tale. It's about a male who is reduced purely to his sexual nature. How does he learn to be more than an ass? How does he learn to be fully human? His tail is increasingly that of a sexual object, who is desired purely for his prowess, for this lustful matron. Can he reject that and look for a definition of humanity beyond it? You know, as I say, in the celibate arms of Isis, or does he embrace it returning to his matron when his shapers are stored only to be rejected because he was better as an ass? It should be a story of how a young man, a naive man, that the man of the romance is educated and grows up and takes his place in society. But that's not what you get in the onus, which just refuses to have any kind of edifying ending. Now, there's a medieval story about a young man who's born as an ass and loves a woman who's the daughter of a king. And eventually, because of love of her, he loses the ass's skin, inherits the kingdom from the father-in-law, becomes a fully functioning adult male. And it's a story of growing up from a young boy's embarrassment as sexual nature to his taking a proper place in the world. And inspired by that folktale, which exists independent of these stories, says, ah, I'll write Cupid and Psyche, which is the woman's side of that. Woman growing up, a woman confronting her sexual nature, a woman finally being married and taking her place in the social order. So the story of how do you grow up? The main thing I took away from Cupid and Psyche is I would really hate to have Venus as a mother-in-law. But the main thing is like there's a lot of ambiguity in there for me when I read Cupid and Psyche. When she's first being courted, so to speak, by Cupid. Psyche is terrified. Psyche is it's in the dead of night. She is terrified for her virginity. She, Anapoleus puts this in, he said, by force of habit, it became easier for her. So it's terrifying at first. Is this happening at first by consent? Or is it just like, you know, by force of habit? You know, that's kind of my response to it. Well, well, it's a perfectly reasonable response because it is rape. I mean, she's she's taken into this place. She's all alone. It's a bedroom. He rapes her. And one might say if you if there's a need to excuse the story or to contextualize it in a world of arranged marriages, what does marriage look like, you know, if the woman has no choice if she's being, you know, pawned off by her father for financial reasons, you know, all marriage must look like rape. And the fact that there might be such a thing as happiness on the other end of it. Well, I guess that's what we'd hope for. But it's a brutal reality turned into a folk tale. One thing that you have to say about this is that Cupid is in his own way devoted to her. And the story makes it, I just don't want my mom to figure it out. Yeah, you know, ultimately, he's Cupid is just like this impetulent teenager. As in a romance, he's the naive young man who eventually has to learn to stand up to his mom. A mom who looks exactly like the girl he's fallen in love with. Remember, everybody says that she looks just like Venus. So this is bad, bad news. I would not advise any young woman to go for a guy who thinks that she looks like his mother. He's a guy who's got to stand in his own two feet, tell a lover. And he grows up in the context of sex. Sex implies social order and the marriage at the end of Cupid and Psyche is a restoration. They grow up together and then they live on Olympus. But it's all a story about sex leads to stability and society. And you are elevated by accepting your sexual nature as opposed to the ISIS book, which you're elevated by rejecting your sexual nature. And I think that Cupid and Psyche and the ISIS book are mirror opposites. Similarly, the Olympian heaven is comic and the Isiac Egyptian heaven is ineffable. You know, mysteries that cannot be spoken. All the initiations, our narrator accepts that he has been transformed by the acceptance of a service of a goddess who requires salivacy. And he knows that after he dies, he will have a better afterlife than anybody else. And I take that ending totally seriously. The beauty and the faults of Appalachus is that like any good, second, sophistic orator and learned young man, he knows all this stuff and he'll take any opportunity. No matter how focused the story should stay, he'll he'll do all these asides and tell you about mystery cults. He'll tell you about these little stories, even in Cupid and Psyche. You know, you don't have the basic point like you were saying. But you know, a boy meets girl and boy has to stand up to his mom to be accepted and say, this is this is your daughter in law, whether you like it or not, ultimately. But he just can't keep from doing all those little mystery cult like initiations that Venus sends Psyche on, you know, and, you know, and that's what I really, you know, honestly, just between you and me, like as a reader, I actually prefer Onos because Onos for me, the author or the redactor, he really emphasizes that this is the brutal reality of somebody being dehumanized, literally as an as an ass. And, you know, think of it as like maybe like a person in slavery. You know, like all the Greek novels, all the all the romances emphasize this role reversal of people in elite status being sold into and having to endorse the trials of slavery. And Onos, more than any of the others, I think, really emphasizes that dehumanization, that fear and the violence, everyday occurrence of somebody going through this situation. He is like you say in your introduction to the text, right? The first, whoever wrote Onos, whoever took this story that both he and Apollaeus had at the same time, roughly 150 to 180 common error. And he looks at it and he goes, this is ridiculous that they're putting this carnal story of, you know, low lives in this, you know, this Malaysian tale and then they have this supposed lofty ambition at the end. No, so he excises all that. There's no redemption. It's kind of like when you read Satirakon, we don't know how Satirakon ended, I guess, but it's all about low lives, right? It's a view of life from under his back. Ultimately, the author of Onos is stripping away all of these lofty ideals. And he's like, this is the reality. And I think that it really comes home at the end. Just how Apollaeus' version of this story doesn't fit because he adds this really lofty middle platonic Isis and Osiris narrative at the end. The person who wrote Onos is like, this is ground zero. He's lapped out of the building and then he goes home and that's it. It's a point made and I found this persuasive in Stefan Tilg's book on Apollaeus, he figured that the Greek original did have transformation in Egypt. The Apollaeus did not make up the idea that there would be divine transformation at the end. He did it with a level of detail and you might even say commitment that would have not been in that original. And Onos is cutting out a religious end. But I might push back against the notion that it's about dehumanization. If the ending is also so throw away. If our narrator doesn't learn anything from being dehumanized. If all he wanted to do was go back and sleep with that maiden again and is disappointed to discover that he was better as an ass, structurally, the problem with the Onos is that it builds up to that bedroom farce of an ending. And it's funny enough, but it's too much build up, you know, by cutting it down to one Mylesian tale, 45 pages long. It is as we used to say when I was a kid, a long run for a short slide. You know, it could have been a better constructed story that built up to that disappointing, unedifying ending. But if your theme is the dehumanization of slavery, what is the point of your ending? Ah, she threw me out. I ran naked down to the dockyard and I got a boat home. Is it that that is human nature? You know, that we are still on an animal level, you know, don't talk to me about transcendence. We're all just beasts here. It's good for a laugh, maybe. I mentioned in the introduction to my translation of Onos that there's this new abbreviated translation of the golden ass by Ellen Finkelpurl and Peter Singer, the animal rights activist, among other things. And he thought not enough people read the golden ass. It's because it's too boring. There are too many extra stories. You cut out the stories. What you get is a story about compassion for animals. It's an animal story. So how animals are mistreated and how bad that is. And the rewrite of the story seeks to improve our modern consciousness to give us greater sympathy for the wretchedness that animals are forced to endure. And people are on record as saying that, you know, Apollos is not about sympathy for animals and the Onos is not about sympathy for animals. But when they trimmed away all the stories that they thought got in the way of the real storyline, they said it's a story about animals. And people would like it more if it were a story about animals. And the remarkable thing to me was that they then wrote a new conclusion. They just wrote it as a joke. You know, they're not serious about it. But when they imagine the new conclusion that would be appropriate for the trimmed down ass story to be an animal story, they imagined ultimately that Lucius and Fotis would get together, marry as equals and then start a farm, which was a rescue place for animals. But what that underlines is that Lucius in all of the stories has to decide at some point what he's going to do because he's been the recipient of a miracle. Whatever you may think about, whether these things are comic or ironic or, you know, we're supposed to laugh at Lucius, what really happens in the story is that a man is really turned into an ass and then really turned back again. And he's got to decide what to do about. Now, in Apolaus, in the full book, the guy says, I've been redeemed by ISIS, I should do something in the world to show my thanks. And he doesn't just say I've got my salvation for myself. He goes into the world to be an example to people. And he is there, as I say, he encourages people to look up. He's got a social function because he has to be true to the reality of his miracle. In Onos, the roses are not given by a priest. The roses just happen to be in that amphitheater where he's supposed to go through with the donkey show. He eats them and he's turned into a human being and everybody thinks he's a magician, kill him. He has nobody to thank. He never has to confront the question of whom do I owe my thanks to? And so he is unregenerate because he cannot be thankful because no one gave him a gift. The fickle pearl singer fantasy ending. He decides that his obligations to ISIS are too onerous. He turns his back on ISIS. He is making a conscious decision not to accept his miracle for himself, but to read a vote himself left below. He encourages people to look down, to look downtrodden, to look to the animals. And that's where I take the end of Apollaeus. Seriously, these are the beliefs that he has because he really was transformed and it really was by ISIS. How could you doubt it? Having read the book, having read the mechanism by which he gets the roses, how would you doubt it? Why should he doubt it? Why shouldn't he be transformed? I think my reaction to the ending of that new translation was just in his relationship with photos as a whole is not too realistic for me at the end because he wasn't really, he was more in lust with photos than he was in love. He really used her as more of like a means to an end. And thinking about it just in our conversation, Fotis really was leading him on a lot just in terms of making him look foolish or making him do foolish things. So it doesn't seem realistic that they would get together and start a farm to save animals. But I know it was a joke, but they don't want to be held held to it. But I just found it illuminating. Now, to go back to Fotis, imagine at the festival of laughter, imagine the amphitheater, imagine all the people sitting around waiting for the unveiling of the corpses, waiting for Lucius to see what had happened, to go from horror to bewilderment and then just imagine the whole amphitheater of people bursting in the laughter. Imagine how powerful that would be. And then in the stands, you know, if you were filming this, the camera would zoom in on Telefran, taking off his wig and his mask and being totally normal. You would zoom in on Fotis and she gets to be pointing and laughing. We take a look at the magistrates slapping their knees and he just look around everybody and his host, the witch, everybody, the people he walked into town with in book one, they'd all be around in a circle, just laughing at him and his humiliation. And Fotis would have been part of that. Absolutely. And just after this conversation, I'm convinced she was absolutely leading him on. I think it's more her character in Onos than in the golden ass, though. I think she has actually more of a stronger character in Onos. Yeah, is that how you say it? In both texts, they're, you know, very self-assured. I like how, even though she's a domestic slave, when Apollaeus flirts with her as like this young, amorous, oratory loverboy, she she gives as good as she gets and she gives probably even better. She gives that wonderful speech about, like, you know, you really don't want to touch within this pot. Wonderful line. I dialed it up in front of me. What are you laughing at? You see before you a butcher of man flesh, pure and simple. It's not only these trivial little tasties I prepare, but even now this big thing here, this beautiful thing, this man thing. This is what I know how to slaughter in skin and cut up fine. But what I love most of all, I get my hands on the guts in the heart, you know. So yeah, she's great. I mean, she's kind of diminutive and golden ass. But in Onos, she's giving him wrestling instructions. So she's really taking the lead. And I love that about the character. Now that I think about it, too, just in our conversation, like, if she's assisting her mistress with all these. Magical rights, right? And she she's being shown the the the the vials to use to give the witch the pharmacos to change back. She's not going to make that mistake. She's done it probably lots of times. So it's like, oh, I can't believe it. I am sorry. I I got the wrong one. So yeah, she's just she's a great character. She's a great who that I am. But yeah, she she's much more aggressive, you know, on us. Lucius is kind of like a I mean, he's he's kind of an ass, so to speak, in both texts, but like and in golden ass, you know, he's exposing himself. And he's saying I'm ready for battle. And in an Onos, he's a little bit more demure in bed, I guess. But it's still police are taking the lead in that text. And I love that she's the one really in charge of the situation. Even touch it burned with that fiery brand. You'd be bound to my service and no one, not even a God, would be enough to heal you. I don't want to burn you. I had another thought on on how you surprise the experience of the books, our trio of texts, so you could be kind of meta about it. What is the book about? Well, an author confronted with a popular text about a donkey man and his adventures is inspired to try his own hand at it. Should he treat the text as porous, infinitely elastic, allow the dog has an unobserved observer to see an anthology of only loosely related stories. It'd be Apollaeus's approach. Or if he concentrated on the donkey's experience only, show the misery of the animal as a degraded human being. This is the approach of the Onos. The former sees a redemption narrative and stresses how it's only through the goddess Isis that the narrator can find peace. The latter sees a bedroom farce. But we could say that the book is about how books get written, how authors make choices, how they deal with their source text. And as I say, the Onos reads the Greek metamorphosis as something to reject. And it's not just trimming it down or cutting it or bridging it. It certainly isn't trying to clean it up. But it's trying to remove its pretensions and make it a different book. And when you make it a different book, you have a different ending. And that's what the Singer version taught me. A different book requires a different ending. Our Onos author just decides that the medium is not appropriate for the message. And this is where genre becomes an interesting question. There may be something that you were expecting, a Mylesian tale. But Apolaus is the one who's frustrating your expectation of genre. It's just way too big. That's no Mylesian tale. Even, you know, their collection of by Cicena, first century BCE of Mylesian tales, we're not exactly sure about it, but it's probably just a collection of separate stories. Weaving them together to make a narrative in which our narrator's life is illuminated by the stories he runs into. You can say that's pretty sophisticated. You can also say it's just too much. At least that's what I think the Onos author does. He rejects that bid for complexity. And note how he changes the title because metamorphosis, Latin or Greek, is plural. And it's abstract. Narrator's not named. It's tales, changes of shape. The Onos author says donkey. You know, just think about that, you know. Oh, you think it's called tales or shape? Of shape, chef? Shape shifting? I'd say donkey to that. And he gives donkey story. You know, it's aggressive. It's an aggressive insulting, relabeling of the whole thing. Because he does not accept it as... He does not accept the genre as a medium appropriate for the conclusion that either the Greek metamorphosis met or... Of course, the Greek author of Onos never read Apollaeus. I'm not going to say that. But he's just not going to believe that a Malaysian medium can bear this kind of weight. It's pretentious. And it's minimum. The ending of Onos is death to pretension. There is no meaning here. Onos is very on the ground. It's very, this happened, this happened, this happened. That's it. You know, it's very bam, bam, bam. Apollaeus wants to be flowery and middle platonic and oratory. I really loved researching these texts. Thank you so much for these amazing, wonderful translations. If you have anything you feel you want to add to this that we didn't go over, feel free to do that. All of these stories are written in an environment in which there are other stories that are told. We know that there was an independent story about a woman having sex with an ass. I mentioned this in the notes to Onos. It's very explicit and supposed to be funny. You know, I forbear to quote it here. But there were other donkey stories, not necessarily the same as the Greek metamorphosis. The Greek author of metamorphosis also had a group of texts to build on. We know that there was a story about a donkey man. And that story goes underground and turns into that medieval story, the Asenarius that I was referring to. We also know as far as Cupid and Psyche is concerned, that there are lots of stories told about Cupid and Psyche, about Eros and Psyche, about Eros is sort of more of a philosophical principle. How is it that the soul returns to heaven? It is at the guidance of love. Plotinus refers to the many versions we see of Eros taking Psyche to heaven. But we also know popularly there's lots of art in which there's a little papyrus drawing. You have a man with bird wings, evidently in bed. Behind him is a woman with butterfly wings, because Psyche is supposed to mean butterfly. And there are stories about the relationship between these two winged creatures, Psyche the butterfly and Cupid the bird. We know that there are stories told about women getting their revenge on Cupid. There's a wonderful late classical poem called Cupido Cucchiatur, in which down in the underworld all of the great lovers, the women in mythology, who have been driven to suicide or something because of love, they finally get a hold of it and beat it. So there are stories that were being told about Cupid and Psyche in a philosophical context, Cupid and Psyche in an erotic context, so that a reader of Apolaus brings to the golden ass a knowledge of Plato and a knowledge of stories about people turned into donkeys and a knowledge of stories about Cupid and Psyche. There's sort of a rich stew of popular tales, folk tales, popular philosophical stories, a well from which all these authors drew. If you really want to handle all these stories, what you want to do is read Cupid and Psyche and the onus side by side, each of them is a response to the Greek metamorphosis. For Apolaus, Cupid and Psyche fills in a gap, tells a woman's story, tells a different kind of transcendence, talks about love and the restoration of society. Onus takes a look at the Greek metamorphosis and rejects a lot of it, tells a more animal-based story, a story about lack of transformation. And if you view each of these as stories produced by the way that the original irritated their authors, irritant in the sense of that which creates a pearl inside of an oyster. Metamorphosis is an irritant to Apolaus and leads to Cupid and Psyche. The Greek metamorphosis is an irritant to the author of Onus and leads to Onus. Put those two side by side and I think you'll really come to a good understanding of the value of Onus and ultimately of that original Greek story which, as Tilg says, is possibly the most successful piece of fiction in the ancient world. We really wish we had it because it drew forth very intelligent if widely different responses from people who managed to tell good stories out of it. Dr. Rellahan, this has been an absolute blast for me. I love talking these stories with you. Thanks for inviting me. I have to say I didn't know what to expect, but now that it's over, I'm very happy to have been here. Thank you very very nice narrator of your own. You tell a good story and I wish you luck as you tell more stories to more people.