Niklas Holzberg

The Golden Ass (title in the manuscripts: Metamorphoses) by Apuleius (2nd century AD) is the only completely preserved prose novel of Roman literature and one of the greats of world literature. The events presented by a first-person narrator resemble those of a picaresque novel and have inspired modern novelists time and again. The sometimes extremely piquant novellas, especially the 'Tale of Cupid and Psyche' in Boccaccio's Decamerone, have also had a broad impact. The description of the cult of Isis in the last of the eleven books has always aroused great interest.

A new Tusculum edition &ndash, the old one dates from 1958 &ndash, is a desideratum, because the text has only been interpreted on the basis of modern literary studies since the 1980s (most recently by an internationally renowned research group in Groningen) and the results of this research should definitely be taken into account when editing, translating and making the work accessible. The German rendering is based on the target language, but unlike that of its predecessors, it is as literal as possible and thus meets the requirements of a modern bilingual text.