Thread by @FlintDibble

The fact @PeterSinger thinks the takeaway point of The Golden Ass by Apuleius is about "animal rights" is more proof that he's a eugenicist

Lets take a journey back to 2nd c CE Roman Greece in this brief thread about one of the earliest novels ever written (now w/ alt-text)
/1

The Golden Ass is a fun read filled with sex, drugs, magic, violence, and lots of (often sexist) comedy

Lucius is a young man interested in women and magic

He falls for a woman enslaved to a witch. They eat magic herbs, make love, and he is accidentally turned into a donkey
/2

They thought the spell would turn him into a bird. Too bad, Lucius, you're an ass! Like the braying kind...

The only cure is to eat some fresh roses

So, Photis, his lover puts him in the stable for the night. The plan is for her to go find some roses the next morning
/3

But... there's a plot twist

yes, even really early novels had crazy plot twists

That night, the house is robbed. The robbers grab all kinds of loot and load it up on Lucius the donkey to make their get-away
/4

The adventure now begins

Lucius gets to experience life as a donkey

He's abused, insulted, and othered. Sometimes in comic fashion other times in appalling fashion
/5

At first glance, maybe its a message about animal rights

Lucius is beaten like an ass. Repeatedly

He moves from job to job, bearing one load after another on his equine back, pulling a millstone round and round to grind grain in a Roman mill (like this one from Pompeii)
/6

But the fact is that Lucius' humanity is front & center

Like his centaur cousins, he also partakes in (usually sexual) hijinks that are oh-so human

After all, there's a human in that equine form. People started to recognize it and his fame grew
/7

PS: spoiler/bestiality ahead

By the final climax of the novel he is the donkey performing sex shows. A noblewoman pays an extravagant sum to sleep with him

His humanity emerges and he runs away to fall asleep on the beach
/8

He sleeps and wakes

His visions show him the Egyptian goddess, Isis. Her procession arrives and the priest gives him his crown of roses to eat

Lucius is now a man again, initiated into an important religion of the time

The story is one of religious salvation
/9

And, this is the problem with applying our anachronistic idea of "animal rights" to this story

The story is overtly one of humanity

As a donkey, he's ignored, and so he sees humans acting like they do when nobody's watching
/10

Lucius observes lovers cheating on one another (it's a running gag)

He witnesses the unrepentant greed of so many thieves and con artists

He sees so much violent abuse, some leveled on him, some leveled on his enslaved human companions
/11

But the whole point is he's human!

In the end, he learns from his adventure. He has a religious experience and is saved

It's not a story about animal rights, it's a metaphor about humans (I know, it's shocking, early novels had metaphors, just like our modern ones)
/12

The fact that
@PeterSinger
published in
@AntigoneJournal
that The Golden Ass is about animal rights is a problem

Peter Singer has argued that it should be ethical and legal to kill disabled children with serious illnesses, after birth
/13
aeon.co/ideas/what-i-l…

The philosophical argument to kill children is one that is based in dehumanization

According to this argument, a serious disability can make someone less than human so that normal human ethics don't apply
/14

Confusing Apuleius' Golden Ass as a story about animals instead of humans betrays a similar, biased logic

Singer admits in his piece, he'd never even heard of this novel a few years ago. And, then, bam he reads it as a story about animal rights and not human salvation...
/15

As a scholar who studies ancient animals, I can tell you that not too many donkeys had torrid affairs with noblewomen

Enslaved humans were abused and dragged millstones round and round in ancient Rome. Nothing in this novel should be read as about animals, but humans
/16

How we read and explain a story matters

Disabled people are and were people

Who @AntigoneJournal chooses to publish matters

They claim to make Classics accessible for all. But this article is inaccurate and excludes disabled people
/end

Plus, it just seems ironic to be so vociferous for animal rights and so casual about eliminating human rights from real people. After all, killing someone is certainly eliminating their human rights

This whole situation upsets and confuses me

BREAKING NEWS

George Orwell's Animal Farm is actually about animal rights!

C'mon @AntigoneJournal, this article is basically making the same argument!

Thanks to the reminder of @debscavator, I've now re-written the thread to include alt-text

which is only fitting since one of the themes of the thread is disability, and I want my threads to be accessible to all

Another good point by @CBPolt

Lucius is shunned by fellow animals. His mistreatment is a metaphor for the mistreatment of people

Exactly what Singer's philosophy misses. He argues to treat animals well but to kill people