I consider myself fortunate to have had a classical education at an excellent school. It is sad that so few English young people today have the option of learning Latin and Greek as I did. One story in particular that sticks in my mind is from the second century satirical writer Lucius Apuleius. In his rather naughty, but entertaining book The Golden Ass (which here, I must hasten to add, does not bear its crude American meaning, but simply means donkey), he relates how as a young man he had the misfortune of being turned into an ass and having to work for various masters and mistresses (none of whom knew he was really a man in a donkeys body). Chapter XIII contains a cp story, now nearly 2000 years old, which is perhaps one of the main reasons, apart from being a spankophile, that I got into writing cp stories myself. I reproduce it here from Robert Graves translation and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did when I first read it as a teenager.
But first, a few introductory words. Lucius tells how, after being turned into a donkey, he was sold to a baker, who put him to work grinding a mill. The baker is married to a wicked woman, a real bitch, who regularly cheats on him. One evening, while he is out visiting his laundryman friend, an old crone she is friendly with arranges for a teenage boy to come and have _s_e_x_ with her. The old crone goes off to fetch the boy and thats where our story begins....
The bakers wife prepared a supper grand enough for a priests banquet, carefully decanting vintage wine, cooking up a delicious ragout of tender meat and thick gravy and waiting for her lovers arrival as if for the advent of some god; luckily her husband had been invited to supper at the laundrymans, next door. When evening came, I was unharnessed from the mill and allowed to go to my manger at the other end of the big room where the supper party was to take place. It was splendid to be released from drudgery and have my blinkers removed; now I had free use of my eyes and could watch all that the wicked woman was doing.
Darkness gathered; the sun sank behind the ocean to give its light to the other side of the earth and presently the old woman brought the lover in. He was only a boy, with no hair on his cheeks, but healthy-looking and very handsome. The bakers wife kissed him passionately again and again and sat him down to table. But he had hardly put his lips to the first glass that she handed him as an appetizer when the baker was heard returning, hours before he was expected. "God _d_a_m_n_ the man!" cried the devoted wife. "I hope he trips over the doorstep and breaks a leg."
The boy sat there, pale with fright, but the bin into which she used to bolt the flour was not far off, between my manger and the door, and she shoved him under it. As the baker came in she said with perfect composure: "My dear, how nice to see you! But why have you come back so soon? Surely your old friend the laundryman....?"
"I could bear it no longer," he broke in with a deep sigh. "That dreadful wife of his! Heavens, I could never have believed it. She seemed so respectable, so well-behaved. Upon my word, it was a revelation; I swear to you, by the image of the Corn-goddess over there, I could hardly believe the evidence of my own eyes."
"Tell me what happened."
"No, no, Id be ashamed."
"O, please do. You must tell me what happened. I shall never be satisfied until I hear all about it."
He yielded in the end and began telling her the story of the disgraceful goings-on at his neighbours house; quite unaware that there was anything wrong at his own.
"Well," he said, "you know that the laundryman is one of my oldest friends, and his wife has always seemed a thoroughly honest woman, looked up to by the neighbourhood, and has managed her husbands affairs decently enough. But not long ago she fell in love with a man, and they began to have secret meetings, and tonight when the laundryman and I came back to supper from the baths, it seems we interrupted them in the middle of their fun. Startled and confused by our sudden arrival, she could find no better hiding-place for her lover than a high wicker cage, with cloths hung over it to bleach in the fumes of the sulphur fire inside. It seemed a safe enough place, so she came and sat down to supper with us. But the lover was forced to breathe in the suffocating sulphur fumes, and you know how it is with sulphur: the smell is so acrid and penetrating that it makes one sneeze and sneeze. The laundryman, who was on his couch at the other side of the table from his wife, heard the first sneeze from immediately behind her. "Bless you, my dear!" he said, and "bless you, bless you!" at the second and third sneeze. But the noise went on and on, and at last he began to take notice and suspect that something was wrong. He pushed the table aside, got up, turned the cage over, and there he found his rival panting for breath, nearly at his last gasp.
"My kind host went mad with rage and shouted for a slave to fetch him his cutlass. He was on the point of cutting the poor wretchs throat, when I managed to restrain him, though with great difficulty. I pointed out that if left to himself, his rival would soon die from sulphur poisoning, but if he were found with his throat cut everyone would get into trouble, myself included.
"My appeals to our old friendship carried little weight with him because he was boiling with rage; however, he saw the force of my argument and dragged the unconscious man out into the lane to die. Then I managed to persuade his wife to leave home at once and take refuge with friends until he had time to cool down slightly. I was pretty sure by the look of him that if she stayed hed do something desperate: hed probably kill her and himself, too. Well, all this was quite enough entertainment for one night, so I came home, and here I am."
The story was punctuated by virtuous exclamations of horror and indignant curses from the bakers wife, who brazened out her own guilt pretty well. She called her neighbour a snake in the grass, a shameless whore, a disgrace to her whole _s_e_x_, a woman without a rag of decency left or any sense of what she owed her husband. "Imagine her turning his house into a brothel!" she cried. "A respectable married woman, too, behaving like the lowest sort of tart. Such women deserve to be burned alive." Still, she was not altogether at her ease. She wanted to free her lover from his unhappy confinement as soon as she could, and tried to make the baker go to bed early.
"No, wife," said the baker. "I missed my supper at the laundrymans and Im hungry. Lets eat."
She quickly and very crossly served him up his supper that she had intended for the boy under the bin. Meanwhile my feelings were so outraged by her behaviour that I felt quite a pain in my stomach: first those lecherous kisses and now this impudent pretence at virtue. I was anxious to find some way of helping my master by exposing her wickedness: for example, by kicking the bin over and revealing her lover squatting underneath it like a tortoise in its shell.
"How scandalously she treats the poor man," I thought. At this moment Providence came to my aid. It was our watering time and the lame old man who was in charge of us came to drive us to the nearby pond. This gave me the very chance I needed for getting my own back on the bakers wife. I noticed as I passed the bin that the boys fingers were sticking out from underneath. I planted the edge of my hoof on them and squashed them flat. The pain was excruciating. He could not help crying aloud and pushing the bin over as he jumped up. There he stood for everyone to see, and the bakers wife was unmasked.
The baker did not seem so shocked by his discovery as I had expected. He began mildly and gently to reassure the trembling boy, who had the fear of death in his eyes, begging him not to be afraid. "Dont take me for a barbarian or a savage," he said. "I dont intend to suffocate you with sulphur fumes and youre too pretty a boy, too pretty by far, to take to court. It would be a shame if the death penalty exacted by the Adultery Law were passed on you. And I dont intend to bring a divorce case against my wife or sue for a division of property: this business can be settled out of court by a simple deed of partnership and we can all three snuggle down happily in the same bed. My wife and I have never quarrelled about anything: we have been sensible enough to live together on such good terms that what pleases one of us has always pleased the other. But its only justice that the wife should not have more authority than her husband."
He went on joking quietly as he made the unwilling boy come along to the bedroom with him. Not to outrage his wifes modesty he locked her in another room, then climbed into bed with the boy and enjoyed a wonderful revenge for the wrong she had done him. The next morning at the first sign of dawn he called the two toughest of his mill-hands, who hoisted the boy up for him to thrash on the bare backside with a stick. After giving him a dozen or two of the best, he said: "Such a nice little boy, too! You ought to be ashamed of turning down lovers of your own age and trying to break up respectable homes. Youll be getting yourself a bad name, my son, and adultery is a very, very serious crime, dont you forget that!"
He gave him another half-dozen for good luck and chased him out of the house. So this most enterprising adulterer got away with his life, which was better luck than he had hoped for, but with sobs and cries for his pretty white backside, which was aching terribly after all that it had been through....
I hope you enjoyed that ancient story – the very first cp story ever written unless you know of one older! I may invent some further episodes of my own in imitation of Apuleius if I get some positive feedback.