Those byways to unknown gods were much affected by Apuleius himself.  The world was at the slack, waiting, as it were, for the next tide to flow, and seldom has religion been so powerless or religions so many.  Of one abandoned woman it is told as the climax of her other wickednesses that she blasphemously proclaimed her belief in one god only.  Apuleius seems to have been initiated into every cult of religious mystery, and in his story he exultingly shows us the dog-faced gods of Egypt triumphing on the soil that Apollo and Athene had blessed.  Here was Anubis, their messenger, and unconquered Osiris, supreme father of gods, and another whose emblem no mortal tongue might expound.  So it came that at the great procession of Isis through a Greek city the ass was at last able, after unutterable sufferings, to devour the chaplet of roses destined to restore him to human shape; and thereupon he took the vows of chastity and abstinence (so difficult for him to observe) until at length he was worthy to be initiated into the mysteries of the goddess, and, in his own words, “drew nigh to the confines of death, trod the threshold of Proserpine, was borne through all the elements, and returned to earth again, saw the sun gleaming with bright splendour at dead of night, approached the gods above and the gods below, and worshipped them face to face.”

It was this redemption by roses, and the initiation into virtue’s path, that caused Adlington in his introduction to call the book “a figure of man’s life, egging mortal men forward from their asinal form to their human and perfect shape, that so they might take a pattern to regenerate their lives from brutish and beastly custom,” And, indeed, the book is, in a wider sense, the figure of man’s life, for almost alone among the writings of antiquity it reveals to us every phase of that dim underworld which persists, as we have supposed, almost unnoticed and unchanged from one generation of man to another, and takes little account either of government, the arts, or the other interests of intellectual classes.  It is a world of incessant toil and primitive passion, yet laughter has place in it, and Apuleius shows us how two slave cooks could laugh as they peered through a chink at their ass carefully selecting the choicest dainties from the table; and how the whole populace of a country town roared with delight at the trial of a man who thought he had killed three thieves, but had really pierced three wine skins; and how the ass in his distress appealed unto Caesar for the rights of a Roman citizen, but could get no further with his best Greek than “O!” It is a world of violence and obscenity and laughter, but, above all, a world of pity.  Virgil, too, was touched with the pity of mortal things, but towards the poor and the labouring man he rather affected a pastoral envy.  Apuleius had looked poverty nearer in the eyes, and he knew the piteous terror on its face.  To him we must turn if we would know how the poor lived in the happiest and most prosperous age that mankind has enjoyed.  In the course of his adventures, the ass was sold to a mill—­a great flour factory employing numerous hands—­and, with his usual curiosity, he there observed, as he says, the way in which that loathsome workshop was conducted: