Myth of Christendom Destroying Greco-Roman Classics

Sometime in the 11th century AD, in the monastery of Monte Cassino, 80 miles southeast of Rome, a monk carefully and diligently copied from an unknown original a manuscript of a Roman novel about a man who suffers from an excess of curiosity about the world of magic, thereby accidentally transforming himself into a donkey. This novel, originally titled Metamorphoses but better known as The Golden Ass by Apuleius, dates to the late second century AD and is the only Roman novel in Latin to survive in its entirety. Its most famous episode, the myth of Cupid and Psyche, has inspired countless retellings, including C.S. Lewis’s own novel Till We Have Faces. References to Apuleius’s novel exist in antiquity, as in a letter of Augustine, who clearly had read it and thought it an autobiographical account of its author’s travails. The novel’s charm proved irresistible for such Renaissance writers as Boccaccio and has continued to enthrall such more recent readers as the French novelist Gustave Flaubert.