A few nights later Palaestra fulfills her promise by leading Lucius at dead of night to the door of her lady’s bedroom where through a crack he can watch her proceedings. She mutters to her lamp. She strips. She rubs her naked body with ointment from a little box. Gradually she is transformed into an owl and flies away to her lover. Lucius then prevails upon Palaestra to let him attempt the same transformation. By ill luck the maid brings him the wrong box of ointment so that he is changed not into a bird, but into an ass. Palaestra soothingly assures him that the antidote is simple, just a meal of roses, and if her dearest will pass the night quietly in the stable, in the morning she will gather the flowers and recover her Lucius. But this simple plan gangs a-gley, for in the night robbers raid the house, secure much booty and to carry it steal also the horse and the real ass of Hipparchus and Lucius. So the man-ass, heavily burdened, is driven to the robbers’ home. One old woman is their care-taker. Several days later the robbers return from one of their forays bringing in as booty a young woman whom they have kidnapped. Later on in the absence of the brigands the girl tries to escape riding on the ass, but both are captured by the robbers. On their return, they find that the old woman in terror has hanged herself. The robbers plan a dreadful punishment for the culprits: to kill the ass, disembowel him and sew the girl up alive in his paunch to die by slow torture. But before they achieve this horror, a company of soldiers arrives, captures the whole band and carries them off to a magistrate. They had been conducted to the robbers’ den by the fiancé of the girl. He now escorts her home on the honored ass Lucius. After the wedding of the happy pair, the bride persuades her father to reward the ass her benefactor so he is to be turned out into pasture with the she-asses. But the servant to whom the care of the ass is intrusted wickedly takes him home and makes him labor first in a mill, then carrying fagots on a steep mountain, where a cruel driver mistreats him. In the midst of his sufferings, news comes that the bride and groom have been drowned on the seashore. So since their new masters are dead, the servants all flee, taking the ass with them. They sell him in a city of Macedonia to a eunuch priest of a Syrian goddess. In his life with the priests, Lucius is so horrified by their impure practices that he brays loudly in protest. The noise brings up some passing peasants who go off to tell the village the obscenities they have witnessed. The priests have to flee for their lives, but first they nearly kill the ass by beating him for his braying.