Golden Ass The romance of Apuleius, written in the second century, and called the golden because of
its excellency. It contains the adventures of Lucian, a young man who, being accidentally metamorphosed
into an ass while sojourning in Thessaly, fell into the hands of robbers, eunuchs, magistrates, and so on,
by whom he was ill-treated; but ultimately he recovered his human form. Boccaccio has borrowed largely
from this admirable romance; and the incidents of the robbers' cave in Gil Blas are taken from it.
