Apuleius's Metamorphoses, better known by its popular title The Golden Ass, is the only Latin novel to survive in complete form, and it follows its narrator Lucius, transformed into a donkey by a magical ointment gone wrong, through a picaresque sequence of misadventures, including the embedded tale of Cupid and Psyche, before his eventual restoration to human form. That restoration, in the novel's eleventh and final book, comes through the direct intervention of the goddess Isis, and Lucius is subsequently initiated into her mysteries, in a passage widely read as the fullest surviving literary description of what a mystery initiation in the Roman world may have actually felt like from the inside, whether or not it reflects Apuleius's own religious experience directly.
Apuleius was also a serious philosophical writer in his own right: De Deo Socratis examined the daemons, intermediate spirits bridging gods and mortals that Socrates claimed to consult, and he produced a Latin adaptation of the Greek mathematician Nicomachus of Gerasa's Introduction to Arithmetic, now lost but referenced by later writers, carrying Neopythagorean number theory into the Latin tradition. Read across his surviving work, philosophy, rhetoric, a picaresque novel and a courtroom defense against a charge of sorcery, Apuleius stands as one of the fullest single witnesses to how magic, mystery religion and Platonist philosophy sat beside one another, sometimes uneasily, in the educated culture of the Roman world.