Apuleius

Lucius Apuleius was born around AD 124 at Madauros, a Roman colonial town in North Africa, and studied at Carthage, Athens and Rome. He became a celebrated rhetorician and a Platonist philosopher, lecturing and writing in both Latin and Greek.

Around AD 158–159 he was tried at Sabratha on a charge of gaining a rich widow's hand by magic; his surviving Apologia is his own speech in defence.

His best-known work is the Metamorphoses, called by St Augustine the Golden Ass, the only Latin novel to survive complete. It tells how Lucius is turned into an ass, and it contains the tale of Cupid and Psyche. William Adlington's English version of 1566 was among the first to bring it to English readers.