page_title: The Golden Ass
section_title: Tale of the Wife's Tub
hierarchical_section_title: The Golden Ass / Inset stories / Tale of the Wife's Tub
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustration from The Golden Ass.
context_page_description: The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, which Augustine of Hippo referred to as The Golden Ass, is the only ancient Roman novel in Latin to survive in its entirety.
  The protagonist of the novel is called Lucius. At the end of the novel, he is revealed to be from Madaurus, the hometown of Apuleius himself. The plot revolves around the protagonist's curiosity and insatiable desire to see and practice magic. While trying to perform a spell to transform into a bird, he is accidentally transformed into an ass. This leads to a long journey, literal and metaphorical, filled with inset tales. He finally finds salvation through the intervention of the goddess Isis, whose cult he joins.
context_section_description: In the course of a visit to an inn in Book Nine, a smith recounts an anecdote concerning his wife's deceit:
  During the day, her husband absent at his labors, the smith's wife is engaged in an adulterous affair. One day, however, the smith, work finished well ahead of schedule, returns home prematurely—obviously to his wife's great consternation. Panicked, the faithless woman hides her lover in an old tub. After absorbing his spouse's efforts at distraction, which take the form of bitter reproaches that his coming back so early betokens a laziness that can only worsen their poverty, the smith announces that he has sold the tub for six drachmae; to this his wife responds by saying that she has in fact already sold it for seven, and has sent the buyer into the tub to inspect it. Emerging, the lover complains that his supposed purchase is in need of a proper scrubbing if he is to close the deal, so the cuckolded smith gets a candle and flips the tub to clean it from underneath. The canny adulteress then lies atop of the tub and, her lover pleasuring her the while, instructs her hapless husband as to where he should apply his energies. To add insult to injury, the ill-used man eventually has to deliver the tub to the lover's house himself.
caption: The Wife and her lover near the Tub. Illustration by Jean de Bosschère
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