The only complete Latin novel to survive from antiquity -- a picaresque tale of a man transformed into a donkey, containing the earliest known telling of Cupid and Psyche.
The Golden Ass (formally Metamorphoses) is the only Latin novel that survives complete from the ancient world -- a strange, funny, sometimes disturbing picaresque about a man named Lucius who is accidentally transformed into a donkey and must survive a series of misadventures before regaining human form. Embedded within it is the earliest known full telling of Cupid and Psyche, a story that would go on to influence fairy tales for the next 1,800 years. Apuleius wrote in the 2nd century CE in North Africa, and his prose is famously ornate and playful, unlike almost anything else that survives from Roman literature.