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:

"What stunted little men met my eye, their skin all striped
with livid scars, their backs a mass of sores, with tattered
patchwork clothing that gave them shade rather than covering!
... Letters were branded on their foreheads, their heads were
half shaven, iron rings were welded about their ankles, they
were hideously pale, and the smoky darkness of that steaming,
gloomy den had ulcerated their eyelids: their sight was impaired,
and their bodies smeared and filthy white with the
powdered meal, making them look like boxers who sprinkle
themselves with dust before they fight."

Even to animals the same pity for their sufferings is extended--a pity
unusual among the ancients, and still hardly known around the
Mediterranean. Yet Apuleius counted the sorrows of the ill-used ass,
and, speaking of the same flour mill, he describes the old mules and
pack-horses labouring there, with drooping heads, their necks swollen
with gangrenes and putrid sores, their nostrils panting with the harsh
cough that continually racked them, their chests ulcerated by the
ceaseless rubbing of their hempen harness, their hoofs swollen to an
enormous size as the result of their long journeys round the mill, their
ribs laid bare even to the bone by their endless floggings, and all
their hides rough with the scab of neglect and decay.

The first writer of the modern novel--first of romanticists--Apuleius
has been called. Romance! If we must keep those rather futile
distinctions, it is as the first of realists that we would remember him.
For, as in a dream, he has shown us the actual life that mankind led in
the temple, the