Apuleius

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The influence of Lucius Apuleius (c. 124-170) on the development of Western prose fiction can not be overestimated. His Metamorphoses, the only surviving novel in Latin, has provided a model stylistically, thematically, and structurally, for many of the great writers of Europe and America.

Apuleius was born sometime around the year 124 in the city of Madaura (near modern Mdaourouch in Algeria) in the Roman province of Numidia, during the reign of Hadrian. He also lived during the reigns of emperors Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. His father was a duumvir (a colonial official) of Madaura, and upon his death left Apuleius and his brother small fortunes. Apuleius admitted spending nearly all of his inheritance on his twin passions: travel and study. He was fluent in Greek and Latin and well versed in literature written in both languages. His early education was most likely acquired in Madaura. Apuleius continued his studies of literature, grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy in Carthage, Athens, and Rome. (The Carthage in which Apuleius lived and studied was not the traditional adversary of Rome, which had been obliterated as a result of the Third Punic War, but a completely Romanized city rebuilt during the time of Augustus.) Besides the usual subjects for a scholar of his era, Apuleius had an almost anthropological interest in the Mediterranean religions of his time, especially the eastern Mediterranean region where he traveled. This brought him into contact with the beliefs and ceremonies surrounding the Egyptian goddess Isis, which he later made use of in the Metamorphoses. So eloquent are the passages dealing with Isis and her priesthood rites that scholars have been led to believe that Apuleius himself was a priest of Isis.

After living and teaching for a time in Rome, Apuleius's desire for travel led him to Alexandria. On the way he stopped in the town of Oea (near modern Tripoli). There he met an old student friend from Athens, Sicinius Pontianus, who convinced Apuleius to marry his widowed mother, Aemilia Pudentilla. The untimely death of Pontianus set all of Pudentilla's relatives against Apuleius. They brought suit against him, charging that he used magic to persuade Pudentilla to marry him in order to inherit her fortune. To this charge, Apuleius responded with what has become known as the Apologia, or De Magia.

The Apologia

The Apologia was delivered at Sabrata c. 156-158 when proconsul Claudius Maximus held court there. Apuleius had gone to Sabrata to defend his wife in a lawsuit, but was instead accused of murdering Pontianus and using magic to win Pudentilla. Sicinius Aemilianus, Pudentilla's brother-in-law, brought the charge of murder, was dropped within a few days. At this point, Pudentilla's younger son, Pudens, charged Apuleius with use of magic and assorted minor offenses. Because of its many digressions, some have argued that the Apologia was handed down is a reworked text. Others, notably Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, in Apuleius and His Influence, have claimed that "under the development of the sophist's art, juridical oratory may well have been considerably modified." The digressions provide insight into everyday provincial life in the period: education, manners, inheritance, the position of women, and the notion of magic.

Apuleius began the Apologia by describing the character of his accusers and explaining why he felt it necessary to answer the charges. Then he rebuts the lesser charges - writing love poems and poverty - before going on to answer the charge of magic. The final section of the Apologia is an eloquent argument that leaves no one in doubt of Apuleius's innocence while at the same time explaining his interest in magic. Since Claudius Maximus's decision has been lost, scholars are divided as to whether or not Apuleius was acquitted. However, it is known that Apuleius returned to Carthage and resumed his career.

Apuleius's considerable fame during his lifetime rested on his oratory, for which statues in his honor were erected in Carthage, Oea, and elsewhere. Outstanding selections of Apuleius's oratory are collected in Florida ("Flowers"). These are fragments of his public speeches, made in various African cities, and collected during ancient times, possibly by Apuleius himself. Their subjects cover testimonials to great cities and men (such as Alexander the Great and Socrates), historical and mythological anecdotes, fables, geography (the topography of Samos), natural history (habits of the parrot), ethnography (characteristics of the Indians), and the art of sophistry. At least three of the speeches were delivered between the years 161 and 169. The exact date of Apuleius's death is unknown, though most believe it was around 170.

Philosophical Writings

Apuleius was also a Platonic philosopher. His writings in this field include De Deo Socrates ("On the God of Socrates"), De Platone et Eius Dogmate ("On Plato and His Doctrine") and De Mundo ("On the World"). Apuleius himself termed De Deo Socrates an oratio as opposed to a philosophus, thus linking it closer to the spirit of Socrates, who never wrote but lectured in public, as well as to his own public speeches. It deals with the concept of spirits or demons that mediate between the gods and the human race. This was not a new concept. Prior to Apuleius, this doctrine had been touched on by Hesiod, Pythagoras, Plato, and Plutarch.

De Platone et Eius Dogmate is an attempt to convey Plato's teachings and a brief sketch of his life to Apuleius's contemporaries who were unable to read the Greek. It is a collection of translations and abridgments, the first section dealing with the Timaeus, and the second section the Gorgias, the Republic, and Laws. A third section, on dialectic, has been appended to the text but it is generally believed to be a later addition by someone other than Apuleius.

De Mundo is a translation of a treatise that was incorrectly thought to have been written by Aristotle. The text, which Apuleius was using as his source, has been identified as having been written during the first century. Outside of adding a few personal fragments, Apuleius remained true to the original, making De Mundo interesting only to a select number of scholars.

Metamorphoses

Apuleius's posthumous fame rests with his satirical masterpiece, Metamorphoses, or The Golden Ass, as it is known in English. Though there has been some debate as to whether it was written before or after Apuleius delivered the Apologia, there is considerable textual evidence indicating that it was written in Rome before Apuleius was married. Written entirely in prose (thus making it one of the earliest novels in existence) and set in Greece and Rome, it tells the story of Lucius, the narrator, who is magically turned into an ass. He then embarks upon various adventures until the goddess Isis restores him to his proper form. The adventures are a collection of short stories revolving around the plot of Lucius seeking to regain his humanity. Scholars have divided them into five groups: magic, crime, love (which is further subdivided into comedy, tragedy and fairy tale), adventure, and religion. Lucius's adventures as an ass move back and forth from one to another of these themes, making the structure of the work quite complex. Apuleius not only gave the hero his own name (which has served to complicate the tale's origin in the eyes of scholars), but he wrote autobiographical parts into his romantic fable.

The most well-known section of the Metamorphoses, one that has been often anthologized, is the fairy-tale love story of Cupid and Psyche. It makes up nearly one quarter of the Metamorphoses and contains, as Elizabeth Hazelton Haight noted in Apuleius and His Influence, "all the marks of a folk-lore tale …: beautiful, neglected princess, marriage to a husband whom she must not see, jealous elder sisters, disappearance of husband when this prohibition is neglected, jealousy of husband's mother who sets the bride dangerous and cruel tasks, accomplishment of tasks by supernatural aid, final re-union of bride and husband."

There is much debate over the source material for the Metamorphoses, but many scholars recognize that Apuleius was indebted to Aristides for his Milesiaca, or Milesian Tales, a collection of ancient ribald stories. A second possible source has attributed the original version of Apuleius's Metamorphoses to the ancient Greek writer Lucian, others to a lost text by one Lucius of Patrae. The argument is further complicated by the fact that Lucius of Patrae, as it has come down in the writings of others, is actually the hero of the lost Metamorphosis and that nowhere is the author named. Other scholars, critics, and translators, reject Lucian's version as the source material for Apuleius's Metamorphoses.

That the work has exerted great influence over the centuries is undeniable. The tale of Cupid and Psyche has inspired numerous imitators. Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, and Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote owe much to the Metamorphoses, stylistically and in their treatment of earthy themes. Until the latter part of the twentieth century, modern readers had tended to overlook Apuleius's great work. However, since the late 1960s scholars and translators have rediscovered the Metamorphoses, and have mined it for the literary treasure trove that it is. Composers, too, have rediscovered it. 1999 saw the premiere performance of an operatic version of The Golden Ass, composed by Randolph Peters with a libretto by Robertson Davies.

Further Reading

The Classical Roman Reader, edited by Kenneth J. Atchitry, Henry Holt and Co., 1997.

Haight, Elizabeth Hazelton. Apuleius and His Influence, Longmans, Green and Co., 1927.

The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1997.

Perry, Ben Edwin. The Ancient Romances: A Literary-Historical Account of Their Origins, University of California Press, 1967. Maclean's, April 26, 1999.

Apuleius, Lucius (125–?) Roman rhetorician and Platonic philosopher. Born in Hippo, now Annaba, Apuleius was educated at Carthage and Athens. He travelled widely in Greece and Asia Minor and practised for a while as a lawyer in Rome. When he was about 30 years old, he returned home, where he gained a distinguished reputation as a writer and lecturer. His most famous work is Metamorphoses, also known as The Golden Ass, which includes the famous fairy tale ‘Cupid and Psyche’. He also wrote The Apology, or On Magic (Apologia: Pro se de magia liber), his defence in a suit against him by his wife's relatives, who accused him of gaining her affections through magic, and three philosophical treatises, On the God of Socrates (De deo Socratis), On the Philosophy of Plato (De Platone et eius dogmate), and On the World (De munde).

The Metamorphoses concerns a young man named Lucius who sets out on a journey to Thessaly, a region in northern Greece known for its witches. While there he indulges himself in a decadent life with a servant girl named Fotis, who gives him a magic ointment that will supposedly allow him to change himself at will into a bird. When he applies the ointment on himself, he is transformed into an ass. Though he keeps his human understanding, he is mute and cannot explain his situation to anyone. Stolen by a band of robbers, he has numerous adventures and hears all sorts of stories, among them the tale of ‘Cupid and Psyche’. In this version Cupid becomes enamoured of the beautiful Psyche and saves her life. He sleeps with her at night on the condition that she never look at him. However, on the urging of her jealous sisters, she turns a light on him, and he disappears. Venus makes her complete three difficult tasks before Psyche can be reunited with her lover.

The Golden Ass was very successful during the Middle Ages, and it served as a model for Boccaccio and Cervantes. In 1566 William Adlington published the first English translation, which was very popular. The plot of ‘Cupid and Psyche’ was also well known in 17th‐century France and was transformed by La Fontaine into a long story, Amours de Psyche et de Cupidon (1669) and made into a tragédie‐ballet, Psyché (1671), by Corneille and Molière. It served as the basis for numerous fairy tales by Mme d'Aulnoy and inspired the two classical versions of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ by Mme de Villeneuve and Mme Leprince de Beaumont.

Bibliography

• Bottigheimer, Ruth B., ‘Cupid and Psyche vs. Beauty and the Beast: The Milesian and the Modern’, Merveilles et Contes, 3.1 (May 1989).
• Hood, Gwyneth, ‘Husbands and Gods as Shadowbrutes: “Beauty and the Beast” from Apuleius to C. S. Lewis’, Mythlore, 15 (winter 1988).
• Leinweber, David, ‘Witchcraft and Lamiae in ‘ “The Golden Ass” ’, Folklore, 105 (1994).
• Scobie, Alex, ‘The Influence of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses on some French Authors, 1518–1843’, Arcadia, 12 (1977).
• Winkler, John J., “‘Apuleius’”, in Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, i. Apuleius to May Sinclair (1985).

— Jack Zipes

Apuleius, Lucius (flourished c. AD 155), author of the only Latin novel that survives entire. He was born at Madaura in Africa, on the borders of Numidia and Gaetulia. On a journey to Alexandria, when a young man, he fell ill, was nursed by a rich widow named Aemilia Pudentilla, and married her. Her relatives brought an action against him on the charge of having won her by the use of magic. His Apologia or speech for the defence survives. From this we learn that he had inherited a considerable fortune but had wasted it, that he was deeply interested in natural science, and that the accusation of magic was founded on trivial grounds. That Apuleius was in fact much interested in magic appears from many passages of his novel, the Metamorphoses (see below). He was acquitted and subsequently settled at Carthage, from where he travelled among the African towns, lecturing in Latin on philosophy. We possess a collection, perhaps made by a later admirer, of excerpts from these lectures, under the name Florida (‘anthology’). Two popularizations of Platonic philosophy are attributed to him, De dogmate Platonis (‘On the beliefs of Plato’) and De deo Socratis (‘On the god of Socrates’), as well as a free translation (De mundo, ‘On the world’) of the Peri kosmou attributed falsely to Aristotle.

The work for which he is famous is his Metamorphoses or Golden Ass, a Latin romance in eleven books. A version of the same story also exists in Greek, Loukios e onos, ‘Lucius or the Ass’, doubtfully attributed to Lucian; both works probably derive from the Metamorphoses of an unknown Lucius. This original was remodelled by Apuleius and enlarged by many incidental tales.

The romance takes the form of a narrative recounted in the first person by a young man named Lucius, a Greek, whose adventures begin with a visit to Thessaly, the reputed home of sorceries and enchantments. There, while being too curious about the black art, he is accidentally turned into an ass, falls into the hands of robbers, and becomes an unwilling and much-beaten partaker in their exploits. Some of the robber stories are excellent, but the most beautiful and famous of the stories embedded in the novel is the exquisite tale of Cupid and Psychē. After many vicissitudes, in the course of which he serves one of the strange bands of wandering priests of Cybelē, and becomes a famous performing ass, Lucius is transformed back into human shape by the favour of the goddess Isis, and appears to become Apuleius the author himself. The last portion of the work refers to his initiation into the mysteries of Isis and Osiris and bears witness to the interest shown in his day to oriental religions. The many realistic details that he gives vividly illuminate the popular life of his time. The style of the novel resembles the exuberantly Asianic style of oratory (see ORATORY 1), with vocabulary drawn from a variety of registers, archaic, poetic, Greek, and colloquial.

(c. ad 125-80) The Latin writer, born in Madaura in Africa, had some claim to being a Middle Platonist. He is principally remembered for the Metamorphoses or the Golden Ass, a narrative punctuated with many digressions that formed an important source of allegories and myths during the Renaissance.

Apuleius, Lucius (ă'pyʊlē'əs), c.124-c.170, Latin writer, satirist, rhetorician, b. Hippo (now Bône, Algeria). His narrative romance The Golden Ass or Metamorphoses is the only Latin work of fiction to survive in entirety. It tells the story of Lucius of Corinth, who is transformed into an ass by a Thessalian woman and undergoes a series of strange and exciting adventures before he is restored to human form. The Golden Ass has been tremendously popular, influencing strongly the history of the novel, e.g., the works of Boccaccio, Cervantes, Fielding, and Smollett. Other works by Apuleius include The Apology or On Magic, his defense in a suit brought by his wife's family for gaining her affections by magic; Florida, an anthology of his works; and On the God of Socrates, On the Philosophy of Plato, and On the World, philosophical treatises.

Bibliography

See J. Tatum, Apuleius and the Golden Ass (1979).

See words rhyming with "Apuleius."

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