The Golden Ass (title in the manuscripts: Metamorphoses) by Apuleius (2nd century AD) is the only completely preserved prose novel in Roman literature and one of the greatest in world literature. The story told by a first-person narrator resembles a picaresque novel and has repeatedly inspired modern novelists. The inserted, sometimes extremely piquant novellas, especially the "fairy tale" of Cupid and Psyche, for example in Boccaccio's Decamerone, also had a broad impact. The description of the Isis cult in the last of the eleven books has also always aroused great interest.

A new Tusculum edition - the old one dates from 1958 - is a desideratum because the text has only been interpreted on the basis of modern literary studies since the 1980s (most recently by an internationally renowned research group in Groningen) and the results of this research should definitely be taken into account when editing, translating and cataloguing the work. The German rendering is based on the target language but, unlike that of its predecessors, is as literal as possible and thus fulfils the requirements of a modern bilingual edition.