mithec's video: The Metamorphoses or Golden Ass are medieval

The Metamorphoses or Golden Ass is touted as the only surviving work of literature from the ancient Greco-Roman world. It relates the ludicrous adventures of one Lucius, who experiments in magic and is accidentally turned into an ass. Numerous amusing stories, many of which seem to be based on actual folk tales, with their ordinary themes of simple-minded husbands, adulterous wives, and clever lovers, as well as the magical transformations that characterize the entire novel, are included within the main narrative. The longest of these inclusions is the tale of Cupid and Psyche: The goddess Aphrodite (in Roman mythology, Venus), jealous of the beauty of a mortal woman named Psyche, asked her son Eros (in Roman mythology, Cupid) to use his golden arrows to cause Psyche to fall in love with the ugliest man on earth. Eros agreed but then fell in love with Psyche on his own, or by accidentally pricking himself with a golden arrow. Driven by curiosity Psyche frightens away her godly lover. Adventures follow one another but love triumphs in the end as Zeus endows Psyche with immortality and marries her to Eros. The Golden Ass text is a precursor to the imaginative, irreverent, and amusing literary genre of the picaresque novel in which Rabelais, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Voltaire. Defoe and many others have succeeded. The 'Classical ass story' surfaced only in Renaissance. The main plots of it had been developed 200 years earlier by the troubadours. The Golden Ass is a logical conclusion of a mediaeval cycle.