no Juvenal kidding: Milesian tales, Asinarius & Brothers Grimm

With the exasperated exclamation “if only this were nonsense {nos utinam vani},” the first-century Roman author Juvenal in Satire 6 brushed aside criticism that he was letting satire put on the high boots of tragedy. Apuleius, writing about a century later, prefaced a story of a step-mother falsely accusing her step-son of rape and poisoning by declaring that he wasn’t telling a “tale {fabula},” but was moving from the soft shoe of comedy to the high boots of tragedy.[1] Juvenal and Apuleius’s indications of tragedy extend to historical understanding of the sexuality of donkeys and men. From ancient Milesian tales to the medieval Latin Ass Tale {Fabula Asinarius} to the Brothers Grimm, masculine sexuality has been historically devalued.

asinarius updated

Ancient authorities wrote of women seeking to have sex with male donkeys. Juvenal explained that, without willing men, a sexually excited woman will turn to a male donkey for sexual pleasure.[2] A recently discovered fragment of third-century papyrus, probably from a Milesian tale, narrates a women’s sexual encounter with a donkey:

“Why are you poking me like that?” Kissing the donkey who was in anguish as soon as she had lay down with him, she says beseechingly: “Ooh, it’s fat and big as a roof-beam. Wait a little. Don’t put it all the way in at once. What, but this is it? Why then, that’s all?”

{ τί ποτέ με νύσ<σ>εις; τὸ[ν
ὄνον φιλοῦσα ἀλ-
γ[ο]ῦντα, ὥς ποτε συν-
[κατέ]πεσ᾿ αὐτῷ. καὶ
αἰ[το]υμένη λέγει
“οὐώ, παχε<ῖ>α καὶ μεγά-
λη ‘στιν, ὡς δοκός. μέ-
νε, κατὰ μεικρόν. μὴ
— ὅλην ἔσω βάλῃς. τί ποτ(ε);
οὔκ ἐστι τοῦτο ἀλλὰ
τί; οὐδὲ πᾶν τοῦτο. }[3]

A notable aspect of this text is the woman’s appreciation for the wondrous physical dimensions of the donkey’s erect penis. The fragmentary text ends with a sense that the woman wasn’t satisfied. She came to realize that she wanted it all.

In Apuleius’s Metamorphose, a woman had it all. A wealthy, married woman fell passionately in love with a donkey. She purchased from his keeper a tryst. In a luxuriously arranged bedroom to which the donkey was led, the woman got naked. She then anointed herself and the donkey with perfume. While neither party continually and affirmatively consented to sex, the woman encouraged the donkey sexually:

She kissed me ardently, yet gently, not such kisses as are usually given in a brothel, the prostitutes’ kisses-at-a-price or their customers’ kisses-with-a-hand-on-the-purse — no, she bestowed pure, sincere kisses and the most flattering words on me: “I am in love with you,” and “I want you,” and “I love you alone,” and “I can no longer live without you,” and the other phrases that women use both to lead others on and also to express their own desires.

{ Tunc exosculata pressule, non qualia in lupanari solent basiola iactari vel meretricum poscinummia vel adventorum negantinummia, sed pura atque sincera, instruit et blandissimos affatus: “Amo” et “Cupio” et “Te solum diligo” et “Sine te iam vivere nequeo,” et cetera quis mulieres et alios inducunt et suas testantur affectationes. }[4]

The male donkey, as men commonly do, showed concern for the woman and fear of punishment predominately directed at men:

But I felt quite anxious, reflecting with great fear about how, with so many and such huge legs, I would be able to mount the delicate lady, or embrace her body of milk and honey, so translucent and so tender, with my hard hooves, and kiss her dainty lips, gleaming red and ambrosia-bedewed, with such a large mouth, so enormous and misshaped because of its rock-like teeth; and finally, how the woman, even if she was titillated from top to toe, could receive such a formidable penis. Woe is me, when I have broken this well-born woman apart, I will be thrown to the beasts to serve as part of my master’s gladiatorial show.

{ Sed angebar plane non exili metu reputans quem ad modum tantis tamque magnis cruribus possem delicatam matronam inscendere, vel tam lucida tamque tenera et lacte ac melle confecta membra duris ungulis complecti, labiasque modicas ambroseo rore purpurantes tam amplo ore tamque enormi et saxeis dentibus deformi saviari, novissime quo pacto, quamquam ex unguiculis perpruriscens, mulier tam vastum genitale susciperet. Heu me, qui dirrupta nobili femina bestiis obiectus munus instructurus sim mei domini! }[5]

The woman, however, comforted the male donkey suffering from male bodily anxiety and fear of unjust punishment:

She redoubled her tender words and continuous kisses and gentle cries with gazes that touched me to the quick — in short, she said: “I have you, I have you, my fond dove, my sparrow,” and as she spoke she demonstrated that my worries had been unfounded and my fear foolish. For she clung to me very tightly and received me entirely, but fully and entirely.

{ Molles interdum voculas et assidua savia et dulces gannitus commorsicantibus oculis iterabat illa, et in summa “Teneo te,” inquit “teneo, meum palumbulum, meum passerem.” Et cum dicto vanas fuisse cogitationes meas ineptumque monstrat metum. Artissime namque complexa totum me prorsus, sed totum recepit. }[6]

The woman left the donkey, exhausted from hours of male sexual work, just before the light of dawn. Before she left, she arranged to pay the donkey’s keeper again for another night of similar pleasure.

Subsequent stories of women and donkeys depreciate the physicality of masculine genitals and the pleasure that male sexuality offers. The medieval Latin Donkey Tale {Asinarius}, written about 1200, provides key insights into that transformation over the long duration. Asinarius probably drew upon a Sanskrit donkey tale that traveling musicians helped to transmit orally from India to western Europe.[7] Asinarius also contains literary associations with ancient Greco-Roman epic texts concerning the Trojan War.[8] But the oral and literary streams that flowed into Asinarius are even richer. In that work, when a king asks a little donkey, “Do you like our daughter?” the donkey, apparently indignant with the suppression of male sexuality, responds:

Amazing! Why do you ask? O king, why do you labor to know?
Why ought I not to like her?

{ Pape, quid inquiris? O rex, quid nosse laboras?
Cur non deberet ista placere michi? }[9]

Like the donkey in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, the donkey in Asinarius appreciates the physical beauty of women:

“I like her, I like her, I like her very much,” he said.
“Certainly the man who does not like her at all is made of iron.
Her white face, suffused with rosiness, brings delight,
as if I should contemplate lilies mixed with roses,
and I like her hair. Her ivory-white neck brings delight,
and I confess that I like her whole body.

{ “Immo placet, placet illa michi, multum placet,” inquit
“Ferreus est certe cui placet illa nichil.
Candida delectat facies permixta rubore,
Ac si contemplor lilia mixta rosis
Caesariesque placet, delectat eburnea cervix
Et corpus fateor omne placere michi.” }[10]

The donkey and the daughter get married. When night comes and the couple goes to their marital bedroom, the bridegroom inexplicably “puts off his donkey garb {asinium ponit amictum}.” To all who have read the Metamorphoses or its Greek source Lucius or the Ass {Λούκιος ἢ ὄνος}, the bride’s reaction represents a complete reversal:

The maiden, seeing the noble body of a handsome man
whose appearance previously had been repulsive,
soon having marveled at her spouse’s unbelievable charm,
rushed headlong into the bond of lovemaking.

{ Virgo videns hominis formosi nobile corpus,
Cuius tunc asini turpis iinago fuit,
Mox incredibilem sponsi mirata decorem
In laquenm Veneris praecipitata ruit. }[11]

The maiden’s reaction represents the accumulation of more than a millennium of disparaging men’s penises. As male animals, a man and a donkey have similar genitals, but a donkey’s penis is typically much larger. In the sexual context of Asinarius, the man is now characterized as noble, handsome, and charming, and the male donkey, repulsive. The fundamental biological form of the male reproductive organ was celebrated in ancient sculpture, public parades, and literature. By the European Middle Ages, the penis had been devalued relative to cultural constructions of nobility, appearance, and charm. A leading scholar of Asinarius has described it as emphatically misogynistic.[12] It is also deeply misandristic.

By the nineteenth century with the Brothers Grimm, the situation had become much more grim. The Brothers Grimm created a fairy tale from the medieval Latin text Asinarius. While Asinarius drew upon the ancient idea that a woman and donkey mating makes for an interesting spectacle, the Brothers Grimm sent a servant to watch secretly the donkey-man having sex with the princess. The royal concern: “the king wanted to know whether the donkey would behave himself really nicely with courtesy and good manners {wollte der König wissen, ob sich das Eselein auch fein artig und manierlich betrüge}.”[13] As Apuleius’s Metamorphoses makes clear, males are worthy of trust in their mating with females. In addition to casting off the form of a male hung like a donkey, the Brothers Grimm added as sexual foreplay the little man seeking the woman’s approval of his being:

He then cast off his donkey skin all at once and stood there as a handsome, royal youth. He said, “You see who I am and that I have been worthy of you.”

{ da warf er auf einmal seine Eselshaut ab und stand da als ein schöner, königlicher Jüngling. “Nun siehst du,” sprach er, “wer ich bin, und siehst auch, daß ich deiner nicht unwert war.” }

That sort of male approval-seeking typically doesn’t give women sexual tingles. The new fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm continues without any sexual vigor. The bride relates to her new husband, that fairy-tale descendant of Apuleius’s fully pleasing ass, just like she would relate to her dear mother:

The bride was overjoyed, kissed him, and loved him with all her heart.

{ Da ward die Braut froh, küßte ihn und hatte ihn von Herzen lieb. }[14]

Fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and their cultural followers have prompted many women today to relish Fifty Shades of Grey. More importantly, fairy tales have prompted initiatives to suppress men’s sexuality in harshly unjust, trust-smashing, pleasure-destroying ways. Now more than ever, Western culture desperately needs more appreciation for classical and medieval literature.[15]

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Notes:

[1] On the generic positioning, Juvenal referred to “letting satire put on the high boots of tragedy {altum satura sumente coturnum}.” Juvenal, Satires 6.434, Latin text and English translation from Braund (2004). Apuleius declared, “you aren’t reading an amusing story, but are rising to a higher level, exchanging the low slipper of comedy for the high boot of tragedy {non fabulam legere, et a socco ad coturnum ascendere}.” Apuleius, Metamorphoses 10.2.14, Latin text and English trans. from  Zimmerman (2000) p. 68. Apuleius’s narrator offers the story thus: “in order that you too may read it, I will put it on the record {ut uos etiam legatis, ad librum profero}.” Metamorphoses 10.2.1, sourced as previously. The unusual phrase ad librum profero (“put it on the record”) suggests both book and legal/theatrical performance.

[2] Juvenal, Satires 6.327-34. Anthologia Latina 360 (R365) describes a father named Burdo (mule) who monstrously fathered a daughter. Latin, with English translation in Rosenblum (1961) pp. 158-9 (poem 79). Cf. Job 11:12. Hildegard of Bingen, on the other hand, expressed concern that sexually desperate men were fornicating with cattle. See appreciation for men’s sexuality in Hildegard’s Causae et curae, particularly note [8]. Anthologia Latina 137 (R148) describes a man (a lawyer) fornicating with a mare. Latin, with English translation in Kay (2006) pp. 52, 248.

[3] Papyrus Oxyrhynchus LXX.4762, ancient Greek text from May (2010) p. 63, English trans. adapted from that of id. and Barron (2005).

Aristophanes’ comic plays from fifth-century Athens indicate, using metaphorical references, the appeal of large penises to women. Aristophanes, Peace (Pax) vv. 1349-1350 (last choral song), Roche (2005) p. 331: “His fig is big and strong”; Acharnians (Archarnenes), vv. 785-7, Roche (2005) p. 42: “ruddy great thick ‘un”; Lysistrata, vv. 23-24, Roche (2005) p. 420: “God, it’s huge, and God, it’s weighty.” Alternate translations of Aristophanes are freely available from Perseus. The penis references, as well as additional ones, are given in Papademetriou (2009) p. 55, ft. 22.

In non-erotic scenes on Athenian vases, elite men’s penises are typically small. In erotic scenes, these men are depicted with large penises. A modern scholar has interpreted this contrast in accordance with contemporary academia’s prevasive contempt for vigorous masculine sexuality:

Comparing the ideal flaccid, small penises of men in normal situations with their erect, large ones as seen in erotic encounters shows that these ideal men in Greek art had the best of both worlds — tastefully “dainty” penises in public, rakishly protuberant phalluses in private.

McNiven (1995) p. 10. In contemporary academic discourse, a dainty penis is “tasteful,” while a large, erect penis is the oppressive “phallus.” That reflects Grimmly Puritanical ideology projected back onto classical Athens.

In Greek myth, Pasiphae, the immortal daughter of Helios, longed for sexual intercourse with a bull. Her longing was fulfilled. She thus conceived and delivered the hybrid bull-child Minotauros.

[4] Apuleius, Metamorphoses / Golden Ass {Asinus aureus} 10.21, Latin text and English trans. (modified slightly) from Zimmerman (2000) p. 275. All subsequent quotes from Apuleius’s Metamorphoses are similarly sourced, unless otherwise noted.

In the misnamed spurcum additamentum to the Metamorphoses 10.21, the woman cleans the donkey’s penis before sex:

And, by Hercules, she cleaned my round scrotum, my balls, with perfumed wine and rosewater of Chios. And then with her fingers, thumb, forefinger, middle finger, ring finder and little finger, she withdrew the foreskin, and cleared the shaft of my penis of the plentiful whitish dirt.

{ orcium pigam perteretem Hyaci fragrantis et Chie rosacee lotionibus expiauit. Ac dein digitis, hypate licanos mese paramese et nete, hastam mihi inguinis niuei spurci<ti>ei pluscule excoria<n>s emundauit. }

Id p. 434. The donkey enjoyed this action:

And when the beautiful woman arrived very soon at the top of my penis from my testicles, braying and lifting my teeth toward the sky, I got, through the regular friction, an erection of the penis, and while it moved up and down I often touched her belly with it.

{ Et cum ad inguinis cephalum formosa mulier concitim ueniebat ab orcibus, ganniens ego et dentes ad Iouem eleuans Priapo<n> frequenti frictura porrixabam ipsoque pando et repando uentrem sepiuscule tactabam. }

Id. The spurcum additamentum is generally thought to be not original and to date perhaps from the twelfth century. On its source, Hunink (2006).

[5] Apuleius, Metamorphoses 10.22. Lucius or the Ass {Λούκιος ἢ ὄνος} / Onos { ὄνος}, a Greek source for the Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, similarly shows the donkey’s concern for the woman. After stating that he had never before had sex with a woman, the donkey remarks:

this fact aroused in me an excessive fear that the lady could not accommodate me and she would be torn apart and I would have a harsh penalty to pay as her slayer.

{ καὶ μὴν καὶ τοῦτό μ᾿ εἰς δέος οὐχὶ μέτριον ἦγε, μὴ οὐ χωρήσασα ἡ γυνὴ
δισπασθείη, κἀγὼ ὥσπερ ἀνδροφόνος καλὴν δώσω δίκην. }

Λούκιος ἢ ὄνος 51, from Greek trans. May (2010) p. 68, adapted slightly. In Metamorphoses 7.21, a slave boy falsely accuses the donkey of rape and attempted rape. The slave boy claims that the donkey would have split a woman in two:

And if the clamor of her womanly wailing and weeping hadn’t brought at a run the assistance of fellow-travelers, if she hadn’t been snatched from between that ass’s hooves and set free, that poor, pitiable woman would have been rammed and split in two; the disaster would have been crucifixion for her to bear, and it would have meant the dealth penalty for us.

{ Quod nisi ploratu questuque femineo conclamatum viatorum praesidium accurrisset ac de mediis ungulis ipsius esset erepta liberataque, misera illa compavita atque dirupta ipsa quidem cruciabilem cladem sustinuisset, nobis vero poenale reliquisset exitium. }

Trans. Relihan (2007) p. 149. The mendacious slave boy evidently lacked appreciation for women’s sexual capacities. Relihan mis-inflates his translation of the donkey’s concern in Metamorphoses 10.22:

how in the world will this woman, even if she has the itch all the way to her fingertips, receive an organ as Brobdingnagian as mine? Curses!

{ novissime quo pacto, quamquam ex unguiculis perpruriscens, mulier tam vastum genitale susciperet. Heu me }

Id. p. 222. Regarding the donkey’s vastum genitale, Zimmerman (2000), p. 284, notes, “the narrator uses a polite word {genitale} for his large penis.” Genitale is a biological term without any connotations of boasting.

[6] Zimmerman (2000), p. 284, has the woman’s words as: “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, my little dove, my sparrow {teneo, meum palumbulum, meum passerem}.” The corresponding text above is from the translation of May (2010) p. 69. The latter seems to me a better translation.

Modern demonization of men’s sexuality has made men less able to distinguish between what persons say about penises and what they actually mean. For example, an anthropologist studying a Greek nomadic shepherding community (Sarakatsani) reported of the women:

There is a great deal of bawdy reference to the male sex organs, and women constantly speak of their dislike of sexual intercourse and the absence of physical pleasure they find in it. A bride, during the last days before her wedding, is kept company by those unmarried kinswomen who live close at hand. … The girls sympathize with the bride, but say that they will never leave their homes to submit themselves to a strange man. The bridge applauds their decision, and says that she will secrete a knife upon her person and that when the bridegroom comes to her she will castrate him.

Campbell (1964 ) pp. 275-6. The women’s words no more indicate castration culture than they do women’s dislike of men’s penises. These non-literary women are engaging in ironic banter that highly educated, modern persons fail to perceive.

Martial provides related banter among men. Addressing another man, the speaker describes his own girlfriend lamenting the loss of her twelve-year-old lover “whose cock was not yet eighteen inches long {mentula cui nondum sesquipedalis erat}.” Martial, Epigrams 7.14.10. Perhaps this twelve-year old had a penis whose length was slightly less than eighteen inches long. The primary point isn’t that the poet’s girlfriend prefers the length of the boy’s penis; it’s the speaker’s implied boast that his cock is that length.

[7] Ziolkowski (2007) pp. 219-25. Id. relates Asinarius to The Story of Vikramaditya’s Birth. The latter is attested no earlier than in a thirteenth/fourteenth-century manuscript, but plausibly dates from much earlier.

[8] Praet (2013).

[9] Asinarius vv. 193-4, Latin text Rizzardi (1983), English translation (modified) from Latin trans. Ziolkowski (2007) pp. 345-6. Subsequent quotes from Asinarius are sourced similarly. For a freely available Latin text of Asinarius, Bolte & Polívka (1918) pp. 154-65.

Asinarius is dated about 1200. It survives in fourteenth manuscripts and apparently was known across France, Germany, and Italy. Carver (2020) p. 7.

[10] Asinarius vv. 195-200. In Asinarius, the donkey’s description of the king’s daughter is a “classical descriptio puellae (‘description of a girl’) so typical of the lyric and poetry of the courtly fin’amors.” Praet (2014) p. 209. Apuleius’s Metamorphoses similarly includes a descriptio puellae. See above. Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, unlike Ovid’s Metamorphoses, isn’t well attested in Europe about the time Asinarius was written (c. 1200). But it may have been known. Carver (2007) p. 78.

[11] Asinarius vv. 311-4. The Latin describes the donkey as becoming a “new man {novus homo}”: “Presently the groom laid down his asinine cloak. / His old skin shed, he became a new man {Extimplo sponsus asinium ponit amictum; / Exposita veteri pelle novus fit homo}.” Asinarius, vv. 309-310, trans. Praet (2014) p. 210). Cf. Ephesians 4:24. In Christian understanding, the new man is the spiritual man succeeding the carnal man in the renewal of creation. Discussing the Biblical references in Asinarius, Praet concludes:

Incongruently enough to bring a smile to the reader’s lips, noble man’s quest for God through Wisdom is thus humorously juxtaposed with the basest of animals finding his way into an eager princess’ bed. In the end, no spiritual conversion or unfolding takes place; the Prince is not created a new man in Christ, he merely drops his trousers.

Praet (2014) p. 219. But what that act reveals lacks the massive significance it had in earlier Latin literature.

The revered troubadour love poetry of the Middle Ages showed appreciation for a male donkey’s penis. The thirteenth-century troubadour Montan (the Mounter) sang:

And I come towards you, Lady, with my trousers lowered,
with a larger cock than any randy donkey,
and will fuck you with such an outburst
that you’ll have to wring your bed-sheets the day after
—and say thereafter that they need to be washed;
Neither I, nor my huge nuts will leave
unless I fuck you until you pass out.

{ Et eu vas vos, dompn’, ab braga bassada,
ab maior viet de nuill az’en despan,
e fotrai vos de tal arandonada
que los linzols storzerez l’endeman
— e pos diretz c’ops i es la bugada;
ni mais no·m leu ni mais mei coillon gran
se tan no·us fot que vos zaires pasmada. }

“I come to you, Sir, with my skirt lifted {Eu veing vas vos, Seingner, fauda levada},” stanza 2, Old Occitan text and English translation from Trobar. Consistent with modern narrow-mindedness about medieval Europe, this troubadour song is rather under-appreciated within the whole trobairitz / troubadour poetic corpus.

[12] Ziolkowski (2007) p. 208.

[13] Brothers Grimm, Children’s and Household Tales {Kinder- und Hausmärchen} 144, The Donkey {Das Eselein}, German text from Grimm & Grimm (1857) vol. 2, p. 266, English trans. from Ziolkowski (2007) p. 354. The subsequent two quotes are similarly sourced.

[14] In Lucius or the Ass from the second century GC, after the donkey becomes the man Lucius again, he arranged another tryst with the married woman, his former donkey-lover. It was a debacle:

When the night was advanced and it was time to go to bed, I got up. With the idea of conferring on her a great favor, I took off all my clothes and displayed myself in the nude. I fondly imagined that compared with a donkey I should be quite irresistible. But she was so disappointed to find that I was in every respect a normal human being that she actually spat in my face. “Get the hell out of my house!” she screamed. “Go and sleep somewhere else!” “Why, what heinous offense have I committed?” I asked. “O, for God’s sake, don’t you understand?” she exclaimed, “I didn’t love you, but the donkey in you. He was the one I slept with, not you. And I did so hope that at least there’d be that mighty emblem of the donkey dangling between your legs to remind me of that splendid, useful animal. But just look at how you’ve been transformed — you’re nothing but a wretched little monkey!”

{ ἐπεὶ δὲ ἦν βαθεῖα νὺξ ἤδη καὶ καθεύδειν ἔδει, κἀγὼ δ᾿ ἐπανίσταμαι καὶ ὡσπερεὶ μέγα τι ἀγαθὸν ποιῶν ἀποδύομαι καὶ ἵσταμαι γυμνὸς ὡς δῆθεν ἔτι μᾶλλον ἀρέσων ἐκ τῆς πρὸς τὸν ὄνον συγκρίσεως. ἡ δὲ ἐπειδὴ εἶδέ με πάντα ἀνθρώπινα ἔχοντα, προσπτύσασά μοι, Οὐ φθερῇ ἀπ᾿ ἐμοῦ, ἔφη, καὶ τῆς ἐμῆς οἰκίας καὶ μακράν ποι ἀπελθὼν κοιμήσῃ; ἐμοῦ δ᾿ ἐρομένου, Τί γὰρ καὶ ἡμάρτηταί μοι τοσοῦτο; Ἐγώ, ἔφη, μὰ Δί᾿ οὐχὶ σοῦ, ἀλλὰ τοῦ ὄνου τοῦ σοῦ ἐρῶσα τότε ἐκείνῳ καὶ οὐχὶ σοὶ συνεκάθευδον, καὶ ᾤμην σε καὶ νῦν κἂν ἐκεῖνό γε μόνον τὸ μέγα τοῦ ὄνου σύμβολον διασῴζειν καὶ σύρειν· σὺ δέ μοι ἐλήλυθας ἐξ ἐκείνου τοῦ καλοῦ καὶ χρησίμου ζῴου ἐς πίθηκον μεταμορφωθείς. }

Lucius or the Ass {Λουκιοσ η Ονοσ} 56 (excerpt), ancient Greek text from MacLeod (1967), English translatiion by Paul Turner (modified) in Hansen (1998) p. 104. For reading the ancient Greek, Hayes & Nimis (2012). Lucius or the Ass stridently affirms the raw physicality of the masculine member. That’s inconceivable in today’s culture.

Praet traces the donkey-tale transformations to recent decades. His insightful analysis indicates that Erich Ackermann’s “Das Eselchen,” in Märchen des Mittelalters (2007), and M. Jean Craig’s The Donkey Prince (1977) further diminish masculine sexuality even relative to the Grimm’s tale. At the donkey’s transformation into a dandy in a private screening of the film La Belle et la Bête (directed by Jean Cocteau, 1946), Greta Garbo reported yelled out, “Give me back my beast!” Praet (2014) pp. 357-376.

[15] Literary learning involves being able to interpret stories other than as literal instructions for action. For those lacking in literary learning, here’s a plain message: having sex with a donkey can be deadly. For further instruction, consult the famous thirteenth-century Persian Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Muhammad Balkhi, commonly known among English-speakers as Rumi. Rumi’s masterpiece Masnavi describes, in verse, two women who had sex with a donkey. One woman cleverly placed a gourd with a hole in it over the donkey’s penis to lessen risk of damage to her body. The other woman, ardently seeking pleasure with the donkey, didn’t have the donkey use the gourd. The donkey’s penis tore into her intestines. She died. See Rumi, Masnavi, Bk 5, ll. 1333-1364, trans. Nicholson (1930). Nicholson switched from English to Latin in translating the verses on sex between the women and the donkey.

Concerned readers should also know that having a larger penis does not necessarily provide more sexual pleasure. The leading early-modern German surgeon Guilhelmius Fabricius Hildanus (1560-1634) confronted the case of a woman suffering serious pain and wounds from her husband’s too-large penis. Hildanus developed an ingenious device for shortening the operational length of the penis. The device worked much like the gourd for the donkey in Rumi’s Masnavi. It allowed the woman and her husband to enjoy, without adverse effects, sexual intercourse of reproductive type. See Kompanje (2006).

[image] Illustration from Crane & Evans (1874) p. 6.

References:

Bolte, Johannes, and Jirí Polívka. 1918. Anmerkungen zu den Kinder-U. Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm. Bd 3. Leipzig: Dietrich’sche Verlagsbuchhdlg.

Barron, Lucas. 2005. “On the Recovery of Ancient Literature.” Nassau Weekly. Online, Dec. 14, 2005.

Braund, Susanna Morton, ed. and trans. 2004. Juvenal, Persius. Juvenal and Persius. Loeb Classical Library 91. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Campbell, John. 1964. Honour, family, and patronage: a study of institutions and moral values in a Greek mountain community. Oxford: Clarendon Press

Carver, Robert H. F. 2007. The Protean Ass: the Metamorphoses of Apuleius from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Carver, Robert H. F. 2020. “The Medieval Ass: Re-Evaluating the Reception of Apuleius in the High Middle Ages.” Pp. 1-26 in Florence Bistagne, Carole Boidin, and Raphaële Mouren, eds. 2020. The Afterlife of Apuleius. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. Supplement, 140. London: Institute of Classical Studies.

Crane, Walter, and Edmund Evans. 1874. Beauty and the Beast. London & New York: George Routledge and Sons.

Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. 1857. Kinder und hausmärchen gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm. 2 volumes: vol. 1, vol. 2. Göttingen: Dieterich.

Hansen, William F., ed. 1998. Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hayes, Evan and Stephen Nimis, eds. 2012. Lucian’s The Ass: An Intermediate Greek Reader. Greek text with running vocabulary and commentary. Oxford, OH: Faenum Publishing.

Hunink, Vincent. 2006. “The ‘Spurcum Additamentum’ (Apul. Met. 10,21) Once Again.” Pp. 266-279 in Wytse Hette Keulen, Ruurd R. Nauta, and Stelios Panayotakis, eds. Lectiones scrupulosae: essays on the text and interpretation of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses in honour of Maaike Zimmerman. Ancient Narrative, Supplementum 6. Groningen: Barkhuis Publishing.

Kay, N. M. 2006. Epigrams from the Anthologia Latina: text, translation and commentary. London: Duckworth.

Kompanje, Erwin. 2006. “Painful Sexual Intercourse Caused by a Disproportionately Long Penis: An Historical Note on a Remarkable Treatment Devised by Guilhelmius Fabricius Hildanus (1560-1634).” Archives of Sexual Behavior. 35 (5): 603-605.

May, Regine. 2010. “An Ass from Oxyrhynchus: P. Oxy. LXX.4762, Loukios of Patrae and the Milesian Tales.” Ancient Narrative. 9: 59-83.

MacLeod, M. D., ed. and trans. 1967. Soloecista. Lucius or The Ass. Amores. Halcyon. Demosthenes. Podagra. Ocypus. Cyniscus. Philopatris. Charidemus. Nero. Loeb Classical Library 432. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

McNiven, Timothy J. 1995. “The Unheroic Penis: Otherness Exposed.” Special Issue: Representations of the “Other” in Athenian Art. Source: Notes in the History of Art. 15 (1): 10-16.

Nicholson, Reynold Alleyne. 1930. The Mathnawí of Jaláluʼddín Rúmí: edited from the oldest manuscripts available with critical notes, translations and commentary. London: Luzac.

Papademetriou, John-Theophanes A. 2009. “Romance without eros.” Pp. 49-80 (Ch. 4) in Karla, Grammatiki A., ed. Fiction on the fringe novelistic writing in the post-classical age. Leiden: Brill.

Praet, Stijn. 2013. “The Trojan Ass: Asinarius as Mock Epic.” Viator. 44 (3): 157-173.

Praet, Stijn. 2014. Fairy Tales and the Latin Tradition: A Literary-Contextualising Approach. Ph.D. Dissertation. D. Litt. Faculty of Arts and Philosophy. Universiteit Gent.

Relihan, Joel C. 2007. Apuleius. The Golden Ass, or, A Book of Changes. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.

Rizzardi, Simona. 1983. “Asinarius.” Pp. 137-251 in Commedie latine del XII e XIII Secolo. Vol. 4. Genova: Istituto di Filologia Classica e Medievale.

Roche, Paul, trans. 2005. Aristophanes. The complete plays. New York, N.Y.: New American Library.

Rosenblum, Morris. 1961. Luxorius: a Latin poet among the Vandals; together with a text of the poems and an English translation. New York: Columbia University Press.

Zimmerman, Maaike, ed. and trans. 2000. Apuleius. Metamorphoses {The Golden Ass}, Book X: Text, Introduction and Commentary. Groningen: E. Forsten.

Ziolkowski, Jan M. 2007. Fairy Tales from before Fairy Tales: the medieval Latin past of wonderful lies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Mirror of Simple Souls, rationalization, and the Virgin Mary

The late-thirteenth-century Mirror of Simple Souls is an extraordinary document of rationalization. Humans alone among animals have the capability and propensity to rationalize their actions. Losing yourself in the love of God isn’t enough. You want to explain and justify your nothingness. That’s what the Mirror of Simple Souls does. Nothing to humans becomes much better when others understand how good it is.

The Mirror of Simple Souls features long arguments with personified reason. That’s much different from acting apart from reason or with indifference to reason. In the Mirror, the soul kills reason with an argument about the impossibility of limits on love.[1] Putting reason to death with argument is the ultimate in rationalization.

Virgin Mary enthroned

Taking seriously concern for reason in the Mirror of Simple Souls provides insight into its complicated manuscript history. In a chapter considering the Virgin Mary, the Mirror states:

I considered this lady {the Virgin Mary} at the Cross, present at the death of her child {Jesus}, there where the Jews were crucifying him all naked before her face. … Lady, truly, if there had been need, at that very hour you would have given your life, if they might have had forgiveness from God for this misdeed, but there was no necessity, for Jesus Christ was reconciling them so fully and with such anguish that he sufficed for everything. [2]

The Virgin Mary here appears willing to lay down her life to save the Jews. The scribe of the Chantilly manuscript, written about 1500, added in the margin, “Alas, note well, you proud ones.” The scribe’s point seems to be that vindictiveness is associated with the sin of pride. At the same time, the Mirror of Simple Souls emphasizes transcending the virtues. Within the primary message of the Mirror, the Virgin Mary would lay down her life to save the Jews because her worldly life was nothing, and she was one with Jesus.

Within the Mirror’s chapter on the Virgin Mary is another hypothetical, one concerning Mary’s virginity. The Mirror states:

I considered her {the Virgin Mary} in respect of her virginity; but I believe of her that if the whole world could have been saved by her means, if she renounced her state of virginity, she would have never thought for one instant of consenting, since Jesus Christ, in his goodness, by means of his death could do that.

That’s mystifying in comparison to the Virgin Mary’s willingness, in the Mirror, to die to save the Jews. The scribe of the Chantilly manuscript added in the margin, “Note well, good virgins.”

The original text of the Mirror of Simple Souls probably had the Virgin Mary willing to sacrifice her virginity. In comparison with the text concerning the Virgin Mary and saving the Jews, the most plausible text for the Mirror’s author would be:

I believe of her that if the whole world could have been saved by her means, if she renounced her state of virginity, she would have in an instant consented, but that was never necessary, since Jesus Christ, in his goodness, by means of his death could do that.

The Chantilly manuscript has been recognized to include changes that make it more doctrinally orthodox.[3] One Latin manuscript and the Italian manuscripts of the Mirror omit the clause “since Jesus Christ, in his goodness, by means of his death could do that.”[4] The Mirror, on the whole, gives no reason for attaching importance to the virginity of Mary. In the context of cherished beliefs about the Virgin Mary, scribes plausibly found reason to change the text of the Mirror.[5]

The interplay of love lyrics and simple theological ideas drives the Mirror of Simple Souls. Its last chapter declares:

Sometimes indeed it does happen that in the whole of a kingdom one could not find two creatures who were of one spirit, but when by chance it happens that two such creatures find one other, they declare themselves one to the other, unable to disguise themselves, for even if they wished to they could not, such is their state of spirit, their constitution, their way of life to which they are called, if they have not attained the peak or perfection of freedom. [6]

The sentiment “we were meant for each other” is not seriously theological. It’s a common love rationalization. It’s like imagining an excuse to lose your virginity. The Mirror of Simple Souls can be understood better if it’s read with less scholarly piety.

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Notes:

[1] Mirror of Simple Souls, Ch. 87, from Old French trans. Colledge, Marler & Grant (1999) p. 112.

[2] Id. Ch. 126, titled “The fourth consideration is of the Virgin Mary,” p. 160-1. The subsequent quote is from id. p. 159. The scribe’s notes are given in footnotes in id.

[3] Lerner (2010) pp. 101-3.

[4] Colledge, Marler & Grant (1999) p. 159, n. 3.

[5] Kocher (2011) provides a case study of a particular crux in the manuscripts. Lerner (2010) and Kocher (2011) judge that the Middle English text is closest to the original. Id. p. 13 notes that the Middle English manuscript contains “patent misinterpretations of the French.” Doctrinal corrections in details are plausible in the Middle English manuscript, as in the other manuscripts.

[6] Mirror, Ch. 139, trans. Colledge, Marler & Grant (1999) p. 175.

[image] Madonna with child, enthroned. Giotto, c. 1310. Uffizi Gallery, Italy. Thanks to Wikipedia.

References:

Colledge, Edmund, J. C. Marler and Judith Grant, ed. and trans. 1999. Margaret Porette {Marguerite Porete}. The mirror of simple souls. Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press.

Kocher, Zan. 2011. “The Virgin Mary and the perfect meulequin: Translating a textile analogy in Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls.” Philological Quarterly. 90 (1): 1-19.

Lerner, Robert E. 2010. “New light on The Mirror of Simple Souls.” Speculum. 85 (1): 91-116.

The Mirror: actively promoted, long book on doing nothing

Porete painted into corner

The Mirror of Simple Souls, a book probably written about 1300 in France, exalts noble Souls. These Souls have taken leave of reason and works of virtue. They have relinquished completely their will. Annihilated, they seek nothing. This book’s author, now commonly regarded as Marguerite Porete, seems to have understood herself to be a noble Soul.[1] She thus struggled to explain why she wrote (and actively promoted) a long book on the noble way of doing nothing.

Porete declared that her work as an author was base. In an exculpatory chapter entitled, “How the Soul who caused this book to be written excuses herself for having made this so long-winded, this book which seems so small and short to the Souls who dwell in nothingness…,” Porete wrote:

I excuse myself, says this Soul {“who caused this book to be written”}, before all you who dwell in nothingness … for I have made very big with my many words this book, which yet will seem very small to you, if I know you rightly. [2]

To those who dwell in the greatness of nothingness, Porete’s book is “very small” because it’s a worldly work. Addressing noble Souls, Porete made conventional excuses and declared her book to be base:

Now by your gracious leave excuse me, for necessity knows no law. I did not know to whom to make my intention known. But now I know, to set you at peace and to tell the truth, that it is base. It was Cowardice who guided it, and who surrendered this intention to Reason through Love’s replies to Reason’s questions [3]

She pleaded that she had to write the book. She pleaded that she was too cowardly not to write the book. She elaborately explained that she didn’t cause the book to be written:

Love caused it to be written by human knowledge, and by the will of the transformation of my understanding, with which I was burdened down, as it appears in this book; for Love has made it by unburdening my spirit through these three gifts of which we have spoken. And so I say that it is base and very little, however great it seemed to me when I began to make this state of being known.

After declaring her book to be “base and very little,” Porete turned to lyrical poetry. Her poetry affectively argues that her writing isn’t base.

Porete actively promoted her book. Sometime after she wrote the first version of her book, she added to the prologue blurb-like endorsements. In one, the Cisterian monk Dom Frank fully endorsed it: “it is all truth that this book says.”[4] The theological scholar Master Godfrey of Fontaines lavishly praised it:

the soul never comes to divine usages until she has this usage, for all other human usages are beneath these usages. This is divine usage and none other but this. [5]

The Friar Minor John of Querayn affirmed its divine inspiration: “this book is made by the Holy Ghost.” Porete, making clear that The Mirror of Simple Souls should not be understood as her personal expression, explained: “through me, the creator has created out of himself this book.”[6] The puffery that Porete collected and incorporated into her book is as actively and willfully promotional as blurbs associated with aggressive book marketing in modern, highly competitive scholarly book markets. That’s something.

Porete actively promoted her book even in circumstances that strongly favored doing nothing. Sometime before 1306, Guido of Colmieu, Bishop of Cambrai, condemned Porete for “a certain pestiferous book containing heresy and error.” Guido ordered Porete to watch her book be publicly burned.[7] Porete was additionally admonished:

You were expressly prohibited by this bishop, under pain of excommunication, from composing or having again such a book, or using it or one like it. The same bishop added and expressly stated in a certain letter sealed with his seal that if you should again use the aforesaid book, or if you should attempt again by word or in writing those things that were contained in it, he was condemning you as heretical and relinquishing you to be judged by secular justice.

Porete, however, refused to do nothing. Two years later, a new Bishop of Cambrai accused her of distributing her book and teaching her views.[8] The official inquiry addressing her activity recounted:

After all these things, against the said prohibition, you several times had and several times used the said book, as is evident in your acknowledgements, made not only in the presence of the inquisitor of Lorraine, but also in the presence of the reverend father and lord, Lord Philip then bishop of Cambrai and now archbishop of Sens. After the aforesaid condemnation and burning, you even communicated the said book, as though good and licit, to the reverend father Lord John, bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne, and to certain other persons [9]

For almost a year and half, Porete refused to testify under oath to the official inquiry into her activity. She refused opportunities for absolution and reconciliation. Perhaps Porete was eagerly seeking the self-annihilation that she celebrated in her book. In any case, she was burned as a heretic in 1310.[10]

The scholastic officials of her time had Porete burned for actively promoting her path of doing nothing. In our enlightened age, we should better recognize that leaving behind reason and virtue and embracing nothingness are bad ideas.

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Notes:

[1] Lydia Wegener and Elizabeth A.R. Brown, who are highly knowledgeable, truth-seeking scholars, have recently questioned whether Marguerite Porete authored The Mirror of Simple Souls and whether the text condemned in Paris in 1310 was that text. Wegener (2010) and Brown (2012) pp. 27-9. In this article, I assume both those claims to be true. In any case, the difficulties with the authorial position within The Mirror of Simple Souls don’t depend on who authored it and whether it was officially condemned.

Within the now standard view of Mirror authorship, Lerner (2010), pp. 92-3, points out that Porete was probably a nickname rather than a cognomen. He states:

I would also add my subjective judgment that referring to this remarkable woman as “Marguerite,” rather than “Porete,” places her fittingly in the company of Hadewijch, Mechthild, and Eckhart.

On the other hand, Porete has become the standard surname. It is more distinguished among names than is simply Marguerite. In any case, careful evaluation of the historical evidence of authorship is surely more interesting than pondering conventions of reference.

[2] Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls brought to nothingness and who live only in the will and desire for love, Ch. 119, from Old French trans. Colledge, Marler & Grant (1999) p. 146. All subsequent quotes from Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls, unless otherwise noted, are from id.  Field briefly observed:

Marguerite’s story contains its share of contradictions. She was a theologian of nonaction and nothingness, yet consistently active in seeking approval for these ideas. … These contradictions and complexities only add to the extraordinary nature of her life and death.

Field (2012) p. 164. Rationalization and hypocrisy, like court poets delivering eulogies for the reigning lords, isn’t extraordinary. It’s commonplace. In highly developed cultures, it can take striking meta-forms, e.g. entrenched authorities praising mythic marginal-transgressive heroes and shunning real, contemporary transgressive work.

[3] Id., also for subsequent quote. The excuse “necessity has no law” (necessitas legem non habet) was well-established in late-thirteenth-century France. It’s found in the ninth-century Pseudo-Isidore and the twelfth-century Decretum Gratiani (C.1 q.1 dictum post capitulum 39). Professor Ken Pennington’s site provides a citational history for the phrase. Colledge, Marler & Grant (1999) p. 146, n. 2, states, “The proverb is older than Christianity.” I haven’t found evidence supporting that statement.

[4] This and the subsequent two endorsement blurb quotes are from M.N.’s Middle English translation of the Mirror, literally trans. into modern English in Field (2012) pp. 51-2. The Middle English source text, which Lerner (2010) regards as the best witness to the original, is available in Doiron, Colledge & Guarnieri (1968). The dating of when Porete sought the endorsement blurbs is a matter of scholarly controversy.  Field (2012) pp. 277-8, n. 31.

[5] Mirror, Middle English translation, literally trans. into modern English in Field (2012) p. 52. An alternate modern English translation taking into account the Latin manuscript evidence is:

the soul will never attain to divine practices until she has acquired this practice, for all other practices, inferior to this, that teacher said, are human practices. This practice is divine, and no other except it.

Colledge, Marler & Grant (1999), Appendix 1, p. 181. This text doesn’t occur in the late fifteenth-century French Chantilly manuscript of The Mirror of Simple Souls. Field (2009) provides detailed analysis of evidence concerning the intellectual and practical relationship between Porete and Godfrey of Fontaines. Id. doesn’t consider the broader question of whether Porete was actually the author of The Mirror of Simple Souls. Cf. Wegener (2010) and Brown (2012) pp. pp. 27-9. Field (2009) also doesn’t evaluate the possibility that the author of The Mirror fabricated the endorsement blurbs, perhaps after Godfrey of Fontaines death. Such action would help to explain the inconsistency between Godfrey being a leading theologian and the weak theological content of The Mirror. Dom Frank and Friar Minor John of Querayn, quite unlike Godfrey of Fontaines, are completely unknown other than in The Mirror.

[6] Colledge, Marler & Grant (1999), Appendix 1, p. 180, modern English translation based on M.N’s Middle-English translation. The Mirror‘s Prologue declares that “a most mighty king … gave me this book.” Id. p. 11. Following Dronke, Field states:

Marguerite did not claim that God spoke through her or that what she knew came from a mystical access to the divine that others lacked. In fact, she did not deign to explain how she knew what she knew at all.

Field (2012) pp. 7-8. See also Dronke (1984) p. 203. Claiming that God spoke through her was necessary for Marguerite to rationalize her action as author of The Mirror. Claiming divine authorship was also an important aspect of marketing and promoting The Mirror.

[7] Evidence suggests that the burning of her book occurred in Valenciennes, which was probably about where Porete lived. Porete appeared before the Dominican Inquisitor in Paris, William Humbert, also known as William of Paris.The quotes in the above paragraph are from French National Archives Box AN J.428, document no. 15b, dated 31 May 1310, William of Paris’ sentencing of Marguerite Porete and Guiard of Cressonessart, from French trans. Field (2012) p. 228. Id., Appendix A, provides a thorough description and painstakingly accurate English translation of all the relevant trial documents. Appendix A is based on fresh transcriptions of the original records. Prior printed versions of the trial documents, both the original texts and translations, are not fully reliable and have created factual mistakes in historical accounts. Id. pp. 3-6. Id., Appendix B, provides English translations of other contemporary sources as given in printed editions. Richard Burton has provided online English translations of some trial documents and contemporary sources based on printed editions. That’s very helpful for general public understanding. Field’s book, however, should now be regarded as the authoritative source for detailed scholarly work with the trial documents.

[8] Field (2012) p. 59. The new Bishop of Cambrai was Philip of Marigny. Id., pp. 54-61, provides a plausible summary chronology prior to William of Paris taking up the case in the autumn of 1308.

[9] The canon lawyers’ summary, dated 9 May 1301, AN J428 no. 19bis, states that Porete communicated the book not only to Lord John, Bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne, but also “to many other simple people — begardis and others — as a good book.” Trans. Field (2012) p. 225. The inquisitor from Lorraine was almost surely Brother Ralph of Ligny. Id. p. 58.

[10] William of Paris publicly read Porete’s sentence on May 31, 1310, at the Place de Grève in Paris. She was burned on the next day, probably also at the Place de Grève. Id. p. 159.

[image] Corner Piece. Lynda Benglis (1969). Latex. Item 05.30, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC. Douglas Galbi’s photograph at Hirschhorn Museum.

References:

Brown, Elizabeth A. R. 2012. “Moral imperatives and conundrums of conscience: reflections on Philip the Fair of France.” Speculum. 87: 1-36.

Colledge, Edmund, J. C. Marler and Judith Grant, ed. and trans. 1999. Margaret Porette {Marguerite Porete}. The mirror of simple souls. Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press.

Doiron, Marilyn, Edmund Colledge, and Romana Guarnieri, eds. 1968. Marguerite Porete. The Mirror of Simple Souls. Archivio Italiano Per La Storia Della Pietà (Testo Stampato). Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura.

Dronke, Peter. 1984. Women writers of the Middle Ages: a critical study of texts from Perpetua († 203) to Marguerite Porete († 1310). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Field, Sean L. 2009. “The Master and Marguerite: Godfrey of Fontaines’ praise of The Mirror of Simple Souls.” Journal of Medieval History. 35 (2): 136-149.

Field, Sean L. 2012. The beguine, the angel, and the inquisitor: the trials of Marguerite Porete and Guiard of Cressonessart. Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press.

Lerner, Robert E. 2010. “New light on The Mirror of Simple Souls.” Speculum. 85 (1): 91-116.

Wegener, Lydia. 2010. “Freiheitsdiskurs und Beginenverfolgung um 1308 – der Fall der Marguerite Porete.” Pp. 199-236 in Speer, Andreas, and David Wirmer. 1308: eine Topographie historischer Gleichzeitigkeit. Berlin: De Gruyter.

rape & poisoning on a college campus: an ass’s tale of justice

I wasn’t always an ass. My hide was thick, it had to be, with the vicious politics at my small, liberal arts college in a lush valley in the middle of far utopia. With a grave, dignified appearance like that of Aesop, and with all his wisdom, I was a classic of classics, you know the type, a classics professor. We get all our books via a fly-over air-drop from Amazon. The packages of books float down under colorful parachutes filling the cloudy empyrean like manna — hosanna in the highest! — from Jupiter.

Fortune struck me with a wife, a chemist, a polyamorist. She became the college president. Most of her time she spent soliciting philandropy from women and men wide and long all across the country. I kept my nose in books and out of the mind-bending groping of administrative group work. That was the cause of my downfall and metamorphosis.

My wife, acting in the high clogs of today’s college leaders, performed with a chorus of deans. One, a young woman, supple, slim, and soft, had sparkling black hair, parted in the middle and joined in the back, like fertile black earth beckoning for vernal seed. She bore the form for satisfying ADA-compliance for my Virgil seminar. She ignored me standing by the door of the now empty seminar room; the lengthening shadows from burning Helios’s decline creeped across the ground. You, emissary of the gods, why so forlorn of face? Share the burden of your woe with me! Why are you such an ass, she said, with a hint of flirtatiousness. You’re the classics teacher. Teach me. Here’s the sensational and salacious story I told her.

I had a sister dear, my playmate from birth, inseparable from me in mirth of childhood innocence. The nursery rhymes we were taught urged us to study science. Emma Penelope was smarter than me, or at least, less distracted in high school. She became a professor of computer science at a large state university.

Her partner Proserpina, a professor of molecular biology, had a girl. Neither she nor Emma could further conceive. So they adopted a boy, a cute little boy, who liked to play with his toy.

So long as Cupid was an infant, nursed only by his first nutriments, Emma could stand up against his still-feeble force, easily suppressing in silence the subtly suffused blush of her cheek. But when his mad fires had fully engaged her heart and Love blazed up in an orgy of excess, then she succumbed to the sadistic god; she masks the wound in her heart by the illness of her body, feigning fainting and feebleness. She was lovesick as sure as science.

That can happen to anybody, you who would judge the sister as sick, you know nothing of life as it was and is and ever shall be. The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. The haters who never, ever feel bater’s remorse are like plums dried up by the sun, good for nothing but helping the constipated.

To return to the story, Emma, exhausted, forlorn, on the brink of death, as if somebody had tweeted something mean to her, pondered the right words to speak to the boy who loved her like a mother. He lovingly tended her in her exhaustion and weakness. She cries torrents of tears, lifts up her dress to cover her face, and speaks to her son thus:

The entire cause, the fons et origo, of my present anguish; also my cure; also my sole hope of salvation: you yourself are all these things to me. … Have pity on a woman who is dying because of you! And don’t let your reverence for your other mother stand in your way — no, not at all. It is because I see her features in your face that I love you — it’s only right. You have the security that comes from your mother’s long hours at the lab; you have the leisure that can accommodate the deed that must be done. You see, what no one knows about — it’s practically as if it never happened at all!

The boy was shocked by the suddenness of this sinfulness, and although he recoiled in horror from the horror proposed, he knew that delay and diffuse promises are the glue that hold the academic family together. So he makes a long-winded, convoluted declaration of contingency, uncertainty, complexity, and the social construction of reality. He spoke of the hope that his other mother would travel to an academic conference to provide secure time for the free rein of their passion. He planned a galloping getaway from having, unintentionally but culpably in the criminal court of public opinion, seduced his foster-mother.

Emma, a full professor of computer science at a large state university, was no fool. She knew that the boy’s excuses and postponements, calls for further discussion and further consideration of various issues, meant that he had no intention of doing the deed of passion. She summoned to her office a post-doc student, a loathsome lackey, a serf in mind and a slave to her in his professional future. She, mother and spurned foster lover, instructed the post-doc to prepare posthaste a poison for the death and destruction of her foster-son.

The poison was compounded with kombucha and placed in Emma’s office refrigerator to keep it fresh. While Emma was out at a departmental meeting, Proserpina and their daughter Daphne dropped by the office. Proserpina perused co-authors listed on the papers on Emma’s desk. Daphne, bored, pouted. She pleaded for a fizzy drink. Proserpina opened the refrigerator, espied the killer kombucha, and unknowingly gave the death-dealing brew to Daphne to drink. Three sips as if pouring a sacrifice to the gods, and she dropped dead. Campus police sounded the campus emergency alert when they heard Proserpina’s piercing, keening cry and saw her beating her breast and tearing out her already short hair.

My sister dear, my playmate from birth, inseparable from me in mirth, had become an unparalleled paragon of monstrous motherly maliciousness. The gruesome, twisted sister plotted even worse. She sent the slavish post-doc to fabricate a report that her son, Hippolytus himself, poisoned Daphne in revolting revenge for her refusing to allow him to rape her on the mattress in her office. She further claimed that Hippolytus was terrorizing and harassing her on campus so as to destroy her promising career in science. The campus police, cold and heartless, told her to pick up her mattress and walk away. She has been carrying that mattress around campus to this day.

Proserpina, Daphne’s loving mother and Emma’s fiercely loyal partner, spoke out courageously against the inadequate university response to attempted rape and poisoning. Pulling out all the stops, she played for a death sentence for her son Hippolytus. She led vigils, marches, occupations, and dramatic theater of long, lyric speeches pouring forth full hearts in profuse strains of unpremeditated art. In her sorrow and lament she set on fire not only the local senate but the people as well; such was her appeal to their pity, such was her righteous anger, that they all cry out that this public menace should be publicly punished, stoned to death under a hail of stones, or at least lynched. Away with the tedium of due process! Away with the proofs of the prosecution, clear as day anyway! Away with the premeditated prevarications of the defense!

The college president, blood boiling with a vow of vengence, called an urgent meeting of the mightiest deans and biggest heads. “We must unite and move vigorously, passion against passion, and vindicate the right,” she said. “We will press forward, again and again, until we produce a press release. The earth will move under Hippolytus, the sea will roar, and he will be destroyed in the crush of our words.” The army of intellectual leaders all cheered, “Alala, alala.” In the fever of flashing eyes, the gleam of sharp-tipped fountain pens, and nodding heads, nobody noticed that the classics head was missing amidst their ranks.

My foster-nephew Hippolytus is now dead. Inspired warriors tore him to shreds in the ecstasy following the president’s press release. Emma Penelope, my sister dear, my playmate from birth, inseparable from me in mirth, now lives only in mourning for the children she loved and lost. She has not produced a single computer science peer-reviewed publication since. I, once joined with her in mirth, now join with her in mourning.

This beautiful woman’s burden of mourning crushed me like end-of-semester exam-paper grading. The sorrow in her eyes, the fall of her glistening black hair, the suffering of the poor dear, shook me to my marrow. I am only a classics professor, no scientist, not even a sociologist. Of what use is my sword in the battle against rape and poisoning on campus? To rise to be like a firm, thick column in the gleaming temple of righteousness, must I join the mind-bending groping of administrative group work with the college president, my own wife?

I wandered, dazed, out to the lake on the edge of campus and fell down into the white sand imported to make a small beach for the students. The warmth of the sand embraced my body, the music from the dormitories faded, and night enveloped me in sweet sleep. About an hour after the last couple had left the beach, in the deserted silence of the 3am sand, I am startled from my sleep with a hard bolt in the night. I see the disk of the moon, at its full, blindingly bright, just now rising out of the waves of the lake. I had gained the silence-shrouded secrets of the shadowed, sheltered night. Now I was certain that the supreme goddess does hold sway in surpassing majesty; that absolutely all the affairs of mortals are governed by her Providence; that not just animals — be they domestic or wild — but even inanimate objects are quickened at her divine nod, her light, her might; that physical bodies as well — be they on earth or in the sea or in the heavens — now wax and grow in harmony with her, now wane and fade in deference to her.

I rose quickly, enthusiastically to my feet and ran to the earth beyond the edge of the beach. I rolled in the dirt, gushed tears down my face, and prayed to the all-powerful goddess. She came forward toward me with her body naked and exposed, except that she shrouded from the heat her majestic mons pubis with a gossamer gown of silk. A fresh and curious breeze would playfully, erotically, now puff out the hem of this gown, push it aside, to reveal the flower of her blooming youth; would now sensuously blow against it, to outline in fine detail the delights of her limbs by clinging with a soft insistence. She reached out her exquisite fingers and offered me straw, saying take this, my beast, and eat. The straw stuck in my teeth as I chewed. It scratched my throat in my swallowing.

At once my thick skin hardens into a hide. At the very calloused ends of the palms of my hands all my fingers come together, no longer discrete, and coalesce into hooves, one by one. From the base of my spine a fully developed tail comes out of hiding and flops in my spreading crack. Now my face grows hideously long-drawn, my mouth gapes much larger, my nostrils flare outward, my lips hang downward; not only that, but my ears are covered in upstanding bristles of an unpluckable mass. And I could see no consolation for this pitiful metamorphosis except for this:  I had become quite superhumanly hung.

As ass can understand, the way a man can’t, the rape crisis on campus and the poison hidden from the uninitiated child putting his hand into the adder’s den. The bear, the wolf, the lion, and the leopard are there to kill, and kill they will without strong iron bars creating safe spaces in zoos. I now plead with all the eloquence of my learning to my wife and her chorus: refashion campus to make safe spaces for all, including asses, silenced no longer and seeking salvation in your justice.

*  *  *  *  *

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Notes:

The video above, from the Associated Press, reported the news that five men gang-raped a Hofstra student on September 13, 2009. The five men were held in jail for nearly four days. Then a video emerged that completely contradicted the alleged rape victim’s story. She recanted. The men were freed from jail after intense personal trauma and damage to their reputations. The sensational, unquestioning news reporting of the rape allegations greatly contributed to harm to the innocent men.

Another recent, sensational college rape story is the Rolling Stone story, “A Rape on Campus” (published in December, 2014 issue). Subsequent critical analysis of the story found it lacking in fundamental aspects of good journalism. Among many other issues, the alleged rape victim apparently fabricated the character Haven Monahan and used that character to forward letters containing text copied from scripts of the TV series Dawson’s Creek and Scrubs. There’s now good reason to believe that the gang rape described in the Rolling Stone story didn’t actually occur.

Emma Sulkowicz, who regards herself as a victim of rape by another Columbia student, has created for her senior thesis in visual arts a public spectacle of her carrying a mattress around the Columbia University campus. A university inquiry found that Sulkowicz’s allegation was not sufficiently credible to entail punishing the accused student. However, according to the Washington Post:

{Sulkowicz} has committed herself to toting around a mattress until the school expels the fellow student she says raped her, or he leaves on his own. She’s been carrying it around since August. In doing so, she’s generated a lot of buzz, namely because it’s really difficult to ignore a woman toting a mattress with her wherever she goes on campus.

According to Wikipedia:

New York Times art critic Roberta Smith described the {Sulkowicz’s mattress performance} piece as “strict and lean, yet inclusive and open ended, symbolically laden yet drastically physical”, writing that comparisons to the Stations of the Cross and Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter are apparent. Nato Thompson, chief curator of Creative Time, said that he “[couldn’t] think of another instance where a work of art has triggered a movement in this way.” Art critic Jerry Saltz called it “clear, to the point, insistent, adamant … pure radical vulnerability”, and included it in his list of the best 19 art shows of 2014. … Sulkowicz received the National Organization for Women’s Susan B. Anthony Award and the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Ms. Wonder Award for the piece. She was invited to the 2015 State of the Union Address as a guest of Senator Kristen Gillibrand.

Further analysis of Sulkowicz’s claims strongly supports the university’s judgment that they aren’t sufficiently credible to entail punishing the accused student. Her claims, however, have attracted an enormous amount of public attention and have been highly damaging to the accused student. On April 22, 2015, the accused student filed a suit against Columbia University for a variety of wrongs it allegedly committed against him. Here’s the court filing (US District Court, Southern District of New York, 15 CV 03216, before Judge Woods).

Both rape of women and wrongful accusations of rape have been major public concerns throughout recorded history, except perhaps for today. Serious discussion of wrongful accusations of rape today is marginalized and demonized in elite public discourse.

Sections of the main text above I adapted from Apuleius, The Golden Ass / Metamorphoses, 10.2-3,6 (perfidious stepmother), 11.1, 10.31, 3.24, from Latin trans Relihan (2007) pp. 208, 209, 211, 233, 239, 62-3. Relihan labels the relevant story from The Golden Ass as “the lustful stepmother.” That’s a mis-characterization. What’s most important isn’t that the stepmother is lustful, but that she’s perfidious. She attempted to murder her stepson, falsely accused him of raping her, and falsely accused him of attempting to murder his step-brother.

Reference:

Relihan, Joel C. 2007. Apuleius. The golden ass, or, A book of changes. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub.