SOURCE: "Toxaris and Philopseudes," "The Onos: The Greek Frame-Story" in Studies in Lucian's Comic Fiction, E. J. Brill, 1976, pp. 12-49.

[In the first section of the following excerpt, Anderson discusses the sources and structure of Lucian 's True History and Toxaris. In the second section, he discusses the themes, techniques, and authorship of Lucius, or The Ass.]

… Among Lucian's narratives the Toxaris has been almost wholly neglected. It is too late to offer much information for the history of the Greek novella; and scholars have been deterred from looking too far afield for sources,² when Lucian himself claims that the tales of friendship are examples from recent history (10). This in itself does not make them authentic, and there have been two tentative lines of approach. Bompaire³ characteristically assumes that handbooks supplied most of Lucian's needs, and collections… were certainly available,⁴ while Rostovtseff⁵ explained the convincing background to Lucian's Scythian tales from lost Greek novels set in Scythia. The latter view is all the more tempting when we know that the elusive Antonius Diogenes opened his novel in the Caspian area.⁶

Lucian would have had his usual incentive, however, to contribute something on his own account. Like VH [Verae Historiae], Toxaris is another opportunity for pseudos: the Scythian storyteller demands an oath from his Greek rival, on the grounds that this sort of thing is not difficult to make up (11). But his own oath (38) is so ludicrous that the reader must be prepared for plenty of fiction. And although he condemns Mnesippus' story-telling as the sort of thing that Greeks are always contriving for effect (42), he himself tells the tallest story of all, with two further lying tales woven into it (44-55)! …

As we have seen in VH, the arrangement of material may itself offer some hint about how Lucian uses his sources. This is equally important here. The Greek Mnesippus and his Scythian rival had agreed to tell a series of five tales each (11). But how are the groups arranged? Amid laborious and oversubtle discussion of the relative length of tales, Schissel³⁹ contends that they are not intended to correspond tale by tale, but that Lucian has given both speakers a free hand to elaborate suitable topoi about friendship as the opportunity arises. Bompaire too found no arrangement within the tales (465), but his evidence rests on the fact that Mnesippus tells us so: the stories are to be the first that spring to mind (35). But Lucian is scarcely to be trusted, when both speakers in Tox. make extraordinary promises which they cannot keep: Mnesippus swears that he will tell his stories without any theatricals on his part (12), but dramatises to a considerable degree in 20 and 34; Toxaris himself promises to avoid embellishment, since that is not the Scythian way (35)—yet his preamble still lasts till 38! And Mnesippus disbelieves Toxaris and his fantastic oath to tell the truth (36) after his incredible third tale. In Nigrinus also, Lycinus promises that he can only give a random account of his meeting with the master (8), but this is only a concession to PI. Phaedr. 228D which he does not strictly observe.⁴⁰ We need not expect Lucian to be any more trustworthy here.

To make an effective syncrisis between Greek and barbarian he has to make the tales as different as possible. But this does not mean that they should not have the same points of departure: in both groups he develops the same basic formulae in the same order, first under Greek then under Scythian conditions.…

Lucian has decorated these formulae with the 'correct' rhetorical trappings proper to Greeks and Scythians: the Greek tales involve domestic intrigue and a murder charge, sailing, honouring a will, pleading in court, and being wrongfully accused of theft: the fantastic situations are still both civilised and 'tame'. Faced with the same dilemmas in the same order, the Scythians all have grotesque adventures: taking out eyes, fighting wild beasts, raising armies, facing gladiators, and sacrificing an only child. The contrast between the third tales of each group is especially marked: the two Greek friends execute the preposterous will inside a few lines; the corresponding Scythian story takes up eleven paragraphs, in which the two friends have to murder a king and fetch a virgin bride to oblige their Scythian blood-brother in the same way. When Lucian has so obviously developed the contrasting tales for their own sakes, he could scarcely have expected his audience to notice the pairs; he has merely used the device as a rough guideline when composing or arranging his material. Another such guideline can be seen if we examine the parallel details within each group: in the Greek tales the first and last (12 ff., 27 ff.) are long stories dealing with friends who choose to share a prison sentence; in the Scythian tales the second and fourth (43, 57 ff.) deal with single combat on a friend's behalf. Such symmetrical arrangements are also found in Philopseudes (I, V on magicians; II, IV on statues/revenants), where they serve a genuine purpose: the conversation is made to turn full circle. There is no such point here, and any other arrangement would have served: it is tempting to suppose that Lucian was content to repeat an arbitrary procedure which had served him well in the past.

I have already suggested that Lucian had the resources to invent his own tales.⁴¹ The use he makes of parallel arrangement here suggests that he had a further incentive. It is again difficult to believe that any material available to him from handbooks fell so neatly into these schemes; and it is still more likely that he was forced to invent, adjust or contaminate at least some of the stories to fit a gap in his scheme.…

At first sight the content of [Onos] seems far removed from that of VH, Philopseudes or Toxaris: the adventures of a man-turned-ass through the Thessalian countryside do not seem the obvious companion-piece to any of them. Language and ethos are different as well. Yet these three works have the greatest part to play in solving the many questions raised by the Onos. Did Lucian write this work as a complement to his other excursions into fiction—or indeed did he write it at all? Even the authorship is only part of a much wider problem.⁴² It has long been established that the Onos and Apuleius' Metamorphoses both derive separately from a lost [Metamorphoses] ascribed by Photius to an otherwise unknown Lucius of Patras. We have not only to decide whether the Onos itself was by Lucian, but why such an epitome came to be written; what the original might reasonably have been like; and above all, how to reconcile any answers with Photius' enigmatic statement on the subject.⁴³

Scholars have so far favoured two main possibilities:

1. Lucius of Patras, otherwise unknown, wrote the [Loukiou metamorphoseon] and Lucian abridged it: this allows Photius' judgement to stand.
2. Lucian himself wrote the original Greek Metamorphoses, and the extant Onos is a mere epitome by an unknown writer (the view developed by B. E. Perry). On this interpretation, Photius has to make three mistakes: he gives Lucian's work to 'Lucius', the hero of the piece, because he has misconstrued [Loukiou metamorphoseon] in the title; he then feels obliged to find room for Lucian somewhere, and gives him an anonymous epitome instead; and he sees Lucian's real work—inevitably comic—as serious and superstitious.

The only common ground between these interpretations is that Lucian writes one work but not the other, and both have unsatisfactory implications: either Lucian merely copied or Photius was wildly mistaken. Recently there have been two radical attempts to break the deadlock, both demonstrably unsound.⁴⁴ No-one has seriously considered a third view: that Lucian was the. writer of both works, and so produced an epitome of his own work.⁴⁵ I intend to show that this view is at least as tenable as the two generally accepted alternatives; and that it combines the advantages of both the others with the disadvantages of neither: it does justice both to Lucian's practice and Photius' statement.

After the appearance of Perry's dissertation in 1920, no very serious objections to Lucian's authorship of the original were advanced (other than Photius' testimony itself). But in 1971, Helmut van Thiel brought forward a new pseudo-Lucian to take the place of Lucius of Patras,⁴⁶ and some new criteria emerge from his investigation. He notes that the author shows close attention to the topography of Thessaly. Since 'Lucius' identifies two of his relatives (55), van Thiel relates their names to the prosopography of the area: this gives him two tentative candidates for authorship, Flavius Phoenix and Flavius Phylax of Hypata, a pair of local sophists mentioned by Philostratus (VS 604 f.); they may, he argues, have been parodying the Metamorphoses of Adrian of Tyre.⁴⁷ Lucian is edged out of the Onos triangle altogether. He does not know the locality, and his work reflects a totally different approach.⁴⁸ This kind of argument is easily unhinged. If Lucian had set out to write a magic tale, where would he have set it, native of Samosata as he was? The answer is of course still Thessaly: we can infer that sophists from Gaul to Egypt could produce an ecphrasis of Thessaly at a moment's notice, for the same reasons as they could supply one of Scythia or Libya: Herodotus provides the textbook description readymade (VII. 128 ff.). And Lucian has already proved that it does not take a Scythian sophist to write the Toxaris! Here all he needs to know is that Hypata is the chief town of Thessaly, and that the name of one other is Larissa. Moreover Lucian had been in both Macedonia and Thrace (Herod. 7, Fugit. 25); since he has evidently performed in Philippopolis, he must surely know of the existence of Thessalonica and Beroia as well!

Van Thiel also objects to Lucian because Perry chose him for sheer availability; but apart from Photius' explicit connexion of Lucian with the ass-romance, we at least know something about his capabilities and inclinations. We do not have that assurance about Flavius Phoenix of Hypata—and exactly the same objection applies to him. Apart from Lucian we are still clutching at straws: we should at least examine whether there is any common ground between his repertoire and the Onos.

A. Lucianic Themes

A number of van Thiel's remarks on the texture of the work suit Lucian very well. He divides the various strands into proverbs, fable material, witchcraft, adventure, parody romance, and love.⁴⁹ The Onos is thus shown to be an effective combination of those very sophistic diversions in which Lucian himself was well practised, with an element of religious satire thrown in. But it also offers scope for several of Lucian's specialities: the narrator is a sophisticated animal,⁵⁰ or finds himself in a humiliating situation—in the hands of a magician⁵¹ or an enemy,⁵² or ill at ease at a dinner.⁵³ Lucius' general run of adventures belongs to the same milieu as those of Lucians Toxaris—loss at sea,⁵⁴ imprisonment on a charge of templerobbery,⁵⁵ a virgin's abduction,⁵⁶ and a gladiatorial show.⁵⁷ These cases may be little more than the usual themes of the novel,⁵⁸ but in the course of collecting linguistic parallels, Perry also noticed a few motifs common to the rest of Lucian and the Onos.⁵⁹ This list can be greatly expanded.

Most of the 'magic' motifs are found elsewhere in Lucian. Lucius arrives in Thessaly because he is curious to see marvellous sights—the reason Lucian gives for his own travels in Verae Historiae.⁶⁰ Lucius suggests two magic phenomena he might expect to see—a man in flight or turned to stone. Both are ubiquitous in Lucian, who can petrify one of his characters even in the middle of a philosophic argument!⁶¹ Lucius finds that his host is married to a witch, who turns into a raven to pursue her lover; one of Lucian's magicians uses a winged Cupid to fetch his client's beloved.⁶² So far conventional magic props. But the witch's maid Palaestra uses the wrong spell and is unable to undo it immediately. This is a variant of the sorcerer's apprentice, a motif whose first known appearance is in none other than Lucian's Philopseudes.⁶³

The fable material has also strong connexions with Lucian. The ass is suspected of making approaches to the mares: Lucian uses the proverb [ton tas hippous anabainonton onon]⁶⁴ and I have shown that he frequently allows proverbial material to pass into tales and vice versa.⁶⁵ He knows a series of proverbs about asses, and although he does not use [ex onou parakupseos] (Onos 45) it would certainly be in keeping with his interests. The Ass in due course receives a luxurious costume when it becomes an exhibit in the house of Menecles: Lucian several times dresses up incongruous animals in pretentious disguise—monkeys in fine clothes, camels in magnificent trappings, and of course the ass in lion's skin.⁶⁶ This soon becomes an essential motif in the plot, when Lucius finds himself in the arena and changes back into a man by eating roses. Now Lucian twice tells the story of the performing monkey who discards its human clothes during a public performance and resumes its own nature by eating nuts.⁶⁷ Lucius is made to act out this proverbial story in reverse: he starts off in animal guise and resumes his human form when the right food comes his way.

Sexual themes loom large in the Onos, and all of them were in Lucian's repertoire. The ass has to service a rich foreign woman, like Lucian's Alexander.⁶⁸ And she receives the ass's organ so that it cannot withdraw: in VH two of Lucian's men have a similar experience after their grotesque intercourse with the vinewomen.⁶⁹ Lucius, a man-turned-ass, exposes a secret homosexual debauch; in Lucian's Gallus we find Pythagoras, turned into a cock, exposing exactly the same crime.⁷⁰ Again, Menecles' servants spy on the ass's acts of bestiality through a chink in the door—a variant on one of Lucian's most persistent topoi.⁷¹ At the end of the Onos Lucius is to be forced to demonstrate his prowess in public with a bawd. Lucian looks forward at the end of the Eunuchus to a situation where a philosopher will have to demonstrate his sexual powers in front of an assessor,⁷² and actually compares the victim to an ass on this occasion. Once Lucius has lost his ass's skin, he is thrown out naked; Lucian's adulterer Cantharus is stripped of his lion's skin and exposed in the snow.

There are also a number of other features in the Onos which recur often enough in Lucian to be called 'characteristic'. Lucius gatecrashes a meal.…⁷³ The ass is put up for auction and remains unsold, like some of the philosophers in Vit. Auct. Or Lucius' sexual initiation is presented in terms of a wrestling-match; Lucian describes wrestling holds in some detail in Anacharsis,⁷⁴ and this would be a natural opportunity to contaminate two more of his interests. One of the robbers suggests that a girl should be sewn up inside the ass and roasted in the sun. This can be seen as a trivial version of the fate of Perilaus, whom Phalaris roasted alive inside a bronze bull: Lucian devotes two whole declamations to the theme.⁷⁵ The galli who buy the ass steal a golden bowl, as do most of Lucian's villains.⁷⁶ Most noteworthy of all, however, is the revelation scene at the games, when Lucius changes back into a man. The audience is divided about what should be done—again a characteristic dilemma in Lucian, whether at celestial councils, in commitees set up to appoint professors, or for gangs about to lynch their victim.⁷⁷ Lucius finds however that the governor at the games knows his father, and he is able to reveal that he himself is a man of letters. This is yet another variation on one of Lucian's most sophisticated topoi—again we can compare Gallus, where an animal reveals that he is also a human being in disguise and is a creature of considerable education.⁷⁸ The governor is able to protect Lucius from the crowd. Once more this is a well-worn topos: a governor who likes philosophy is able to protect Peregrinus in a difficult situation.⁷⁹

There are some other features which recur less often in Lucian. The galli appear only in de Dea Syria; and on quite independent grounds I believe this work to be genuine beyond any doubt.⁸⁰ In both works the weird rites of Atargatis are carefully described.⁸¹ The galli impose their goddess on the hospitality of the next village; Lucian makes fun of the Olympians imposing themselves on the Ethiopians.⁸² And the goddess is stranded with no-one to carry her; even this little touch recurs in de Dea Syria, where Apollo's statue has to agitate for a lift!⁸³ And one of the galli makes the joke that the priest who bought the ass will give birth to foals; Lucian's Micyllus tells Pythagoras that he should have laid eggs (since he is now a cock transmigrated from Aspasia).⁸⁴

The most puzzling feature in the Onos is Lucius' identification of himself to the local governor when he regains his human shape: he reveals himself as a writer of [historion kai allon], his brother Gaius as an elegiac poet and a skilled prophet. This has been seen as a means of identifying the author—if he is the same as Lucius—or at least as satirising some rival, whom he puts into the ass.⁸⁵ Whatever the answer, there are two techniques here which are characteristic of Lucian. The author decorates the name with 'precise' autobiographical details, a procedure which Lucian is well able to use in any situation: he can provide suitable biographies for any number of unlikely historians, or for strangers inside the whale! A fictitious pedigree for his hero would be no difficulty—and all the more amusing when he has just changed from being an ass. On the other hand the end of Fugitivi is a scene where several villains are identified in much more specific terms, as three ex-slaves in Philippopolis. Whether or not the author has any victims in mind here, the surprise comic effect is similar—at a similar point in the work.⁸⁶

B. Structure

In this case the arrangement of the extant version is again important. If it is merely an epitome of a work by Lucian, then the familiar patterns which he uses ought at least to be obscured if not completely lost; and the epitomator might be particularly tempted to discard minor episodes in such a prolonged chain of adventures. But as it stands the extant Onos has a clearly-defined structure:

Introduction

1-4: Lucian arrives at Hypata, and gives the real reason for his quest. I

5-11: His affair with Palaestra II

12-14: He is changed to an ass and sets off.⁸⁷

Episodes

16-26: His adventures with the robbers:

17: eating roses Ia

23: escaping with the girl b

26: He escapes being disembowelled when the robbers are captured.

27-34: At his rescuer's house: II

28: grinding corn. a

29: with the slave-boy b

34: He escapes being castrated when his mis tress is drowned.

35-41: With the galli: III

38: betraying an orgy a

40: upsetting a banquet b

41: He escapes being murdered when the galli are imprisoned.

42-45: Two more owners: IV

42: grinding corn a

43: with the nurseryman b

45: He escapes by accidentally betraying his master.

46-54: At Menecles' house: V

46: eating human food a

50: copulating b

54: He escapes from the arena by eating roses.

54-55: He regains his human shape.

56: Another sexual encounter.

Lucius finally returns to normal life.

The writer has used a double prologue, of which the second stage is an elaborate digression. He has also introduced an element of ring composition: Lucius has a sexual encounter immediately before he becomes an ass, and immediately after he resumes his own shape. The enclosed adventures fall clearly into five separate units, each containing two distinct adventures before Lucius' owner has a mishap, or he escapes a bizarre fate. Here too there is ring composition: in I and V Lucian has a new and grotesque liaison with a woman: as the girl's proposed tomb (25), or as a bestial lover (51); and in both II and IV he is put to the mill (28, 42); while the elaborate religious satire, III, forms the centrepiece.

Not only does Lucian use precisely these techniques of grouping and spacing: he employs them in those very works which stand closest to the Onos in every other way—Toxaris and Philopseudes. In the former he devotes the second panel of the introduction to a digression (Tox. 5-7), and groups his tales in fives; but in Philops. he groups the tales as here in five pairs ABCBA, with an element of ring composition in both inner and outer frame. I have shown elsewhere that Lucian persistently 'transfers' a sequence of events or a basic layout from one work to another, whether for economy or for the sake of sheer ingenuity: this makes it all the more likely that the extant Onos was arranged by the same hand as the Philopseudes.

C. Humour

These connexions with Philops. and Tox. can also help to remove one of the two main obstacles to Lucian's authorship: is the extant Onos sufficiently 'funny'? Scholars have continually voiced their disappointment at the comparative lack of satire and malice in the extant work: Perry asks 'why, in making the epitome, he concentrated on the bare action and left out just that kind of thing which was most essential to the satirical meaning of the book as a whole'. Why indeed, when Perry denied him any satire to leave out? He latterly believed that the extant Onos represents almost the total bulk of the original;⁸⁸ on this view the hypothetical satire in the original has to be concentrated conveniently in those very pages which the epitomator has dispensed with. But was this satire ever there? Lucian could command a wide spectrum of humour; and he could relate fictitious journeys in realistic style (Navig. 7-9) with only restrained satirical comment (Navig. 10), as well as fantastic extravagances full of parody (VH). And he constantly experiments with various blends of material. The Onos would offer an ingenious conflation of several elements which he has kept separate elsewhere: a full-length, self-contained tale of magic misadventure too long for Philopseudes, but blended with substantial contributions from material similar to that of Toxaris. Even within the latter work the element of burlesque varies considerably from tale to tale, with satire subordinated to storytelling: Lucian would be capable of the same priority here.

D. Style

The remaining objection to Lucian's authorship of the Onos is the curious Greek, with its bizarre mixture of vulgarisms and poetic words. Whoever its author was, his style is an artificial blend accessible only to a highly literate person by deliberate choice. Knaut, Neukamm⁸⁹ and Perry have listed a number of contacts between the writer's idiom and Lucian's own: this evidence is sometimes less impressive than it appears, since any 'Lucianic' usage which derives ultimately from a classical author will also be accessible to other sophistic writers.⁹⁰ But even if the Lucianic element is reduced to a minimum, this does nothing to weaken Wilhelm Schmid's old argument that Lucian deliberately aimed at mimische Erzählung to produce the correct 'low' tone and mock-heroic ethos required by the subject.⁹¹ Is this consistent with Lucian's practice elsewhere? He often appears to enjoy what is best described as linguistic hypocrisy, by indulging at long length in styles which he would otherwise condemn: he sneers at the Ionic affectation of historians, but writes a lengthy excursion in it himself (DS); he ridicules Hyperattic jargon (Pseudolog. 24, Rh. Pr. 16-17), but produces a riotous display of 'anthyperatticism' in Lexiphanes; and in Podagra he has the opportunity to indulge in the pretentious tragic diction he laughs at so frequently. If Lucian enjoyed these very various literary extremes, why should he not have enjoyed literary 'slumming' and absurd linguistic mixture as well?⁹² He could give appropriate vulgarisms to the courtesans in D. Meretr., and even allows the gods a subtle syntactical variation in final clauses.⁹³ Nor would he be the only litterateur in antiquity to possess a high degree of taste and skill and yet still enjoy linguistic malpractice: Trimalchio's guests speak very differently from Eumolpus, and Petronius indulges with relish in both extremes;⁹⁴ or Seneca could turn his hand from Tragedy to the familiar colloquialism of the Apocolocyntosis.⁹⁵ It would take no more than a preliminary prolalia to apologise for the lapses in the Onos; and if Lucian were making a deliberate effort to depart from his normal idiom, this too would help to explain the relatively thin spread of satire and burlesque which scholars have been able to find in the extant work.

E. The Two Greek Versions

On the evidence so far discussed Lucian could have written the extant Onos. It contains enough distinctive cross-references; it conforms to one of his characteristic patterns of arrangement; and its curious language can still be explained in terms of his practice elsewhere. The strongest objection to this view is that it denies any originality to Lucian, who is made to borrow [autais te lexesi kai suntaxesin] from an unknown author.⁹⁶ But there is no strong objection to making Lucian the author of the original, apart from Photius' statement to the contrary. The point scholars have failed to consider is that both theories are compatible: Lucian may be the author of both original and epitome.⁹⁷ This leads us to an obvious objection: while an author can revise a work of his own, Lucian's habit is to make substantial changes when he uses material a second time. This is not the function of an epitome. But is the extant Onos an epitome at all? A subscription in [G.] says so; but Photius implies that there was a marked difference of tone between the two Greek versions …

Few scholars would accept this at its face value: Perry⁹⁸ and others assume that Photius grasped the satiric tone of the extant Onos, but was entirely wrong to pronounce that the tone of the original was serious. Now if the Ich-erzählung of an ass is of itself comic or satirical, this feature was also present in the original, which must therefore have been funny as well. Hall⁹⁹ argues however that Photius merely assumed any work attributed to Lucian to be satirical as a matter of course; on this view, the extant Onos need contain no satire either. But Lucius' attack on the priests (36-41) should be read as satire; it enjoys a conspicuous place in the centre of the work, and might easily have coloured Photius' view. On the other hand he shows a wide experience of bizarre secular literature; considering how difficult it is for modern scholars to agree on the 'tone' of the ancient novels,¹⁰⁰ we cannot afford to dismiss his verdict on a lost work out of hand.

Is there any other way that Photius could have gone wrong? It is worth noting that his description would apply tolerably well to both the extant versions based on the lost original. The conversion of Lucius in Apuleius Met. XI alters the tone of the Latin version very considerably, whatever the author intended in the previous ten books: and it would not be difficult for a casual reader to think of it as giving the whole work a serious 'intention'. Such an effect is of course entirely absent from the extant work, where there is no such conversion scene. When the two extant versions are so totally different in effect—despite the enormous bulk of identical material—we cannot afford to assume that no such difference existed between the two Greek versions. Could Lucian himself have introduced such a difference between two workings of the same theme? Some of the extant doublets in his own work suggest the answer. If Photius had read a group such as Kataplous and Nekyomanteia against D. Mort. 10, he would have been obliged to note that there is some small agreement [autais te lexesi kai suntoxesin]; with no other information available he could easily have attributed Neky. to Menippus, the main character, and assumed that Lucian had copied his 'model'; and he might also have deduced that Menippus was superstitious while Lucian was frivolous, on the basis that Menippus relates an absurd Ich-Erzählung about his journey to Hades. If Photius had read de Dea Syria beside VH he might easily have assumed—like many modern scholars—that it is the work of a credulous traveller who could not be identical with the mocking writer of VH. These are the kind of mistakes which anyone unfamiliar with Lucian's techniques is liable to make; it is perfectly possible that Lucian wrote an elaborate original version as an [eskhematismene] display,¹⁰¹ but that he later reduced the story, or rather reworked it, as the extant piece—not merely using an occasional phrase, but recasting the tone so as to produce a different kind of humour. What kind of material would he have needed to include to make the first version different in the shortest space? I suspect that he could have put the Ass through some kind of elaborate religious purification in original—in the same [eskhematismene] manner as de Dea Syria; we have no right to assume that Apuleius was the inventor of this part of the story, though of course he was able to put it to a different use. It is indeed possible that some Comic-conversion-scene suggested to him the idea of serious propaganda for Isis: ludicrous conversions and rituals are no surprise in Lucian.¹⁰²

Of course such an origin for book XI of Apuleius is beyond proof on present evidence. What is important is the fact that Lucian's authorship of both pieces fits the rest of the picture so neatly. Since this hypothesis can be reconciled both to Lucian's practice and Photius' statement, it might at least serve to lessen the dogmatism with which the extreme positions have been advanced hitherto. Until the lost work turns up the difference between the extant versions and Lucian's habits of self-imitation are our only guide.

F. The Source of The Ass-Romance?

Finally, could Lucian have created, or developed, the original Ass-tale? It is only an assumption that because material about the ass existed already, this particular tale was itself in independent circulation. There was no lack of popular material about the ass in the form of proverbs,¹⁰³ and Lucian makes use of several elsewhere.¹⁰⁴ There were also plenty of folktales concerned with animal metamorphosis, a subject again very dear to Lucian,¹⁰⁵ and some material on bestiality.¹⁰⁶ But none of the scraps in ancient literature outside Lucian and Apuleius provide a secure basis for the tale as they present it.

The ass itself had a reputation for lust,¹⁰⁷ and this would be enough to account for an allusion such as Juvenal VI.332 ff.: hic si/quaeritur et desunt homines, mora nulla per ipsam/quo minus imposito clunem summittat asello. Macleod thought that this presupposed the existence of a story (LCL VIII.51), but Juvenal may well be indulging in his own characteristic exaggeration. We are simply told that some women are lascivious enough to gratify themselves with an animal; this is comparable to his account (X.304 ff.) of a man who will not stop short of an affair with his grandmother: neither passage needs a literary tradition behind it. As to the fragment of Sisenna (10 Bücheler) which Reitz-enstein¹⁰⁸ compared with Onos 51, … there is nothing to tell us that the first of these refers to an ass: this is a [skhema sunousios] which one might reasonably expect in any lascivious story; and even if the author of the Onos alludes directly to it, there is still no real proof that an ass was involved in the original version.

Students of folklore have been able to collect ample proof of the tale's diffusion, extending from Germany to China. Both K. Weinhold and W. Anderson assumed that a pseudo-Lucian was the author of the Greek version,¹⁰⁹ and so did not consider it in the light of Lucian's own literary methods. Recently van Thiel and Scobiel¹¹⁰ advanced the view that the author himself has contaminated folklore themes in the same free way as he does in the rest of the work. Now metamorphosis was a subject in the sophists' repertoire (Ps.-Menander, Spengel III.393): and there is a useful parallel in Xenophon of Ephesus (II.8.2), where the hero Habrocomes has a dream that in his pursuit of Anthea he is a stallion in search of a mare, and regains his human form on finding her. In its context this motif is simple enough to have been the author's own improvisation rather than a distant variation on some lost Eselsurquelle.¹¹¹ Neither van Thiel nor Scobie, however, accepted Lu-cian's authorship of the original. Did he have the basic ingredients for the tale in his own repertoire?

We have already seen his capacity to 'manufacture' or at least embellish folklore.¹¹² In the Corpus there are two cross-references to the basic motifs of the ass-story: in Neky. 20 the rich transmigrate into asses for 250,000 years (an allusion to PI. R. 620C, Phaedo 81E); and in Gallus Lucian gives Pythagoras, transmigrated into a cock, the same kind of Ich-Erzählung as Lucius: he too has had his adventures—seeing a robber stealing a vessel,¹¹³ taking part in unnatural vice,¹¹⁴ and eating strange food;¹¹⁵ and there is a particularly striking cross-reference, when the ass and the cock both reveal a secret debauch to someone else.¹¹⁶ Lucian also uses an element of ass-lore in combination with other material at VH II.46 (the Asslegs). In the Onos, then, he could have set out to blend the account of animal adventures (Gall.) with the ass-transmigration (Neky.) and the sorcerer's apprentice (Philops.)—a tour-de-force of combination. This is not to imply that Lucian would not have used any popular material which came to hand: the robbers' ass carries the betrothed girl back to her lover, as in Phaedrus app. 14, where the girl rides the donkey from the rich suitor's wedding back to the poor lover.¹¹⁷ But the existence of the frame tale before Lucian has still to be proved.

The Onos emerges, then, as another Philopseudes and Toxaris, translated into animal terms in the manner of Gallus. It is a similar plasma of partly traditional, partly invented material, and maliciously novel treatment. On present evidence, it makes sense that the original at least—and not unreasonably the epitome as well—come from the same author as the other two.

Notes

…² For Schissel's attempt to connect them with Milesiaca, cf. infra c. VII.

³ 455, 675.

⁴ E. g. Val. Max. IV. 7, cf. ps.-Plut. Amatoriae Narrationes (Mor. 771E ff.); also Trenkner, The Greek Novella in the Classical Period, Cambridge 1958, 71 f. and notes.

⁵Skythien und der Bosporus I, Berlin 1931, 196-99.

⁶ Cf. E. Rohde, Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer⁵, Leipzig, 1876, 278.…

³⁹Rhetorische Forschungen II, Halle 1912, 68.

⁴⁰ For the formal aspects of Nigrinus' speech, see Bompaire 277.

⁴¹Theme and Variation 48-62, supra 12 ff.

⁴² The history of this problem is now in danger of becoming a study in itself, though Perry's view has unified a substantial consensus of opinion behind him. The variations on Perry and his opponents are conveniently enumerated by P. Vallette in his introduction to D. S. Robertson's Budé text of Apuleius (2nd edition, Paris 1956). Perry reassembled the substance of his many early contributions to the problem in The Ancient Romances, Berkeley, California 1967, 211-282. Advocates of a non-Lucianic original continue in three excellent discussions by A. Lesky (H 76, 1941, 43-74); H. van Thiel (Der Eselsroman, Zetemata 54.I-II, Mu-nich 1971); and G. Bianco (La fonte greca delle Meta-morfosi di Apuleio, Brescia, 1971), the latter pair with fundamental bibliographical apparatus throughout.

⁴³Bibl. Cod. 129 (Ed. R. Henry, Budé II p. 103 f.).

⁴⁴ Bianco, o.c. attributes the Greek Metamorphoses to an anonymous Greek author after the extant Onos; but the evidence for Apuleius' dependence on a text fuller than the present Onos still holds (e.g. Onos 17/Met. III.29; 24/Met. VI.29; 38/Met. VIII.30). Bianco's determination to press this position (close to Wieland's) seems to me to have undermined some of his preliminary discussions on Apuleius' relationship to the lost version: for Bianco's theory to work there must of course be none. Hermann (AC 41, 1972, 573-599) adopts the theory that 'Lucius of Patras' wrote both the original and the Latin Met., while Lucian is allowed the extant Onos. By this reckoning Lucian's only contribution is to change a few names and retain some of the more risque material missing from the Latin version! If this is palatable, much of Hermann's method of reaching it is not: there is much flimsy hypothesis converted into fact, especially when Hermann is interpreting cross-references within Lucian himself.

⁴⁵ Dismissed briefly by Perry, CPh 21 (1926), 234 (without argument).

⁴⁶Eselsroman, o.c. 1.38.

⁴⁷Ibid. 40 ff.

⁴⁸Ibid. 37 f.

⁴⁹Ibid. 193-204.

⁵⁰Gall. 2 ff., cf. Pan, Bis Acc. 9 ff.

⁵¹ Cf. Neky. 7-9.

⁵²Onos 24 ff./VH I. 18.

⁵³Onos 53/Gall. 10 f.

⁵⁴Onos 34/Tox. 19.

⁵⁵Onos 41/Tox. 28.

⁵⁶Onos 22/Tox. 52.

⁵⁷Onos 53/Tox. 58 f.

⁵⁸Infra, c. VI.

⁵⁹CPh 21 (1926), 226-28.

⁶⁰Onos 4/VH 1.5.

⁶¹ (Flying) Philops. 13; (turning to stone) Vit. Auct. 25, cf. Imag. 1.

⁶²Onos 12/Philops. 14.

⁶³Onos 13 f./Philops. 34 ff.

⁶⁴Onos 28/Eun. 13.

⁶⁵ See G. Anderson, Theme and Variation in the Second Sophistic, Leiden 1976, 41 n. 5, cf. 45; 123 f

⁶⁶Onos 48/Pisc. 36; Prom. es 4; Fugit. 33.

⁶⁷Pisc. 36/Apol. 5.

⁶⁸Onos 50/Alex. 6.

⁶⁹Onos 51/VH 1.8.

⁷⁰Onos 38/Gall. 32.

⁷¹Onos 52/Gall. 32, Icar. 15 f.; Theme and Variation 16 f., 106 ff.

⁷²Onos 52/Eun. 12 (cf. Perry, o.c. 228).

⁷³Onos 40/Conv. 12; D. Meretr. 15.

⁷⁴Onos 9/Anach. I ff.

⁷⁵Onos 25/Phal. I.ll.

⁷⁶Onos 41/Herm. 37 ff.; Icar. 16; Conv. 46 (Perry).

⁷⁷Onos 54/Icar. 33; Eun. 12; Pisc. 2 ff.

⁷⁸Onos 54/Gall. 4 f.

⁷⁹Onos 54/Peregr. 14; for other examples, Theme and Variation 17.

⁸⁰ See c. V infra.

⁸¹Onos 37/DS 50.

⁸²Onos 41/Sacr. 2.

⁸³Onos 38/DS 36.

⁸⁴Onos 36/Gall. 19.

⁸⁵ So van Thiel, Eselsroman 1.36-42, who searches for a precise identity for Lucius; cf. Perry, who saw satire of a superstitious Roman (Ancient Romances 222), and Rohde (Über Lucian's Schrift [Loukios e Onos], Leipzig 1869), who interpreted Lucius as a literary rival. In view of the parallel with Fugitivi, I am inclined to suspect that the latter view is right.

⁸⁶55/Fugit. 33, cf. Merc. Cond. 42; Pseudolog. 18.

⁸⁷ This outline shows only Lucius' basic changes of fortune. No account is taken, for example, of details which do not amount to self-contained episodes: he suffers numerous discomforts at the hands of the robbers, and is eventually lamed (22); but this is only a detail to account for the fact that the robbers leave him behind with the girl. Various stages in his progress through Menecles' household (46 ff.) can be explained in a similar way.

⁸⁸Ancient Romances 223.

⁸⁹ C. F. E. Knaut, De Lucianio libelli, qui inscribitur Lucius sive asinus auctore, Diss. Leipzig 1868; V. Neukamm, De Luciano asini auctore, Diss. Tübingen 1914; Perry, CPh 21 (1926), 225-34.

⁹⁰ J. Hall, Lucian's Satire, PhD thesis (unpublished), Cambridge, 1967, 289.

⁹¹N JklAlt 7 (1904), 485. Contra R. Helm PWXIII. 2, 1927, 1749.

⁹² Van Thiel's arguments (o.c. I.211-22) are insufficient to show that the author used any specific wordlist. The author of Lexiphanes was clearly capable of any linguistic tour-de-force—with or without such aid.

⁹³ J. Deferrari, Lucian's Atticism, The Morphology of the Verb, Diss. Princeton 1916, 81; B. J. Sims, Final Clauses in Lucian, CQ N.S. 2 (1952), 69-72.

⁹⁴ See the convenient characterisations in P. G. Walsh, The Roman Novel, Cambridge 1970, 45 ff., 122 ff.

⁹⁵ For the latter, A. P. Ball (Commentary) Columbia 1902, 68-73.

⁹⁶ Perry, Ancient Romances 223.

⁹⁷ Perry, CPh (1926), 234 (but he dismisses the suggestion). Rohde however argued (Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer⁵, Leipzig 1876, 429 n. 1) that Xenophon of Ephesus could have been his own epitomator, and cites examples from a number of other fields. Where Lucian's hand is involved we have even more ground for suspicion: and we might further suspect that no second version would see the light as a mere epitome.

⁹⁸Ancient Romances 217.

⁹⁹ Hall, Lucian's Satire 289.

¹⁰⁰ It is still possible to take Petronius as fundamentally serious, Apuleius as entirely frivolous, or vice versa; Perry and Walsh neatly illustrate the chiastic positions.

¹⁰¹ For this approach, see infra 73.

¹⁰²Cf. Theme and Variation 83 f. The conversion scene at the end of Nigrinus is badly joined to the main body of the work: for the problem as a whole, see J. Bompaire Lucien écrivain, Paris 1958, 509 ff.

¹⁰³ Van Thiel, o.c. 1.179 ff.

¹⁰⁴ [Peri onou skias] (Herm. 71/Pl. Phaedr. 260); … [Kume Onos] Pisc. 32, Fugit. 13; [onos luras] Adv. Ind. 4, cf. Pseudolog 6, D. Mar. 14; [ton tas hippous anaibainonton onon] Eun. 13.

¹⁰⁵ See among many others Gall. 2; VH 11.46; D. Mar. 4.

¹⁰⁶ See Trenkner, Greek Novella, o.c. 59, 87.

¹⁰⁷ See now A. Scobie, Apuleius Metamorphoses I, Meisenheim 1975, 31 and n. 18.

¹⁰⁸Das Märchen von Amor und Psyche, Leipzig 1912, 59 ff. Since then the idea has had a long history: see c. VII. n. 43.

¹⁰⁹Sitzungsberichte der Akademie der Wissenschaft zu Berlin (1893), II.475-88; Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 51 (1954), 215-36; 54 (1958), 121-25.

¹¹⁰Der Eselsroman I.184-6; Scobie, o.c. 33.

¹¹¹ Ph. Bruneau, BCH 89 (1965), 350 ff., attempted to link several representations of a woman's intercourse with an animal to the scene at Onos 51, and rightly draws attention to their early date (on lamps of Ist/early 2nd century A.D.). This leads him to believe that Lucian could not have invented the theme. But the links in his argument are extremely tenuous: if these are representations of an ass, they still prove no more than we already know: that Lucian could improvise round quite basic situations, as he does in Philopseudes. We are dealing with a simple theme of bestiality, which cannot prove that the whole framework existed; or that Lucian did not take the merest hint seen as an illustration and turn it back into literature. But the lamps might in any case represent a horse, in which case the woman might be Semiramis—a point which Bruneau suggests but does not develop.

¹¹²Supra 24 ff.

¹¹³Gall. 14/Onos 41.

¹¹⁴Gall. 19/Onos 51.

¹¹⁵Gall. 5/Onos 54.

¹¹⁶Gall. 32/Onos 38.

¹¹⁷ An important ingredient is the roses; and it has been plausibly conjectured that a local author associated the rose gardens of Midas in Macedonia with the legend of his ass's ears (A. H. Krappe, CPh 42, 1947, 288). Since this information was accessible anyway through Herod. VIII.138, we have the attractive possibility that Lucian himself was the first to make the association: certainly he has a proved capacity for contaminating Herodotus in any paradoxical way.