42 - Apuleius

Summary

Apuleius (no praenomen is attested) was born at Madauros (Mdaurusch in Algeria) in the middle 120s A.D., the son of a wealthy duumvir. His Apology sketches the main lines of his earlier career. Having studied locally at Carthage under the grammaticus and rhetor and having developed philosophical interests there, he continued his researches for some years at Athens and spent a period in Rome. By the time of his chance arrival at Oea (Tripoli) in 155–6, he was a literary celebrity. His marriage there to Pudentilla, a wealthy widow, led to indictment on a charge of magic. After acquittal he resided in Carthage, his life as sophist and leading dignitary being documented in his Florida. Nothing is known of any activities after about A.D. 170.

In the history of Latin literature Apuleius has two main claims to attention. As a philosopher without original genius he is important for his transmission of the ideas of Middle Platonism, and as a writer of fiction he is the author of the Metamorphoses (‘Transformations’), the one Latin romance to have survived complete from the classical period. These contributions have traditionally been studied in isolation from each other, to the impoverishment of criticism of the Metamorphoses. The student of the novel cannot adequately assess its nature and purpose without prior investigation of its author's leading attitudes and preoccupations.

Everything that the man touches reflects the curiosity of the scientist or the enthusiasm of the philosophical littérateur. Practical treatises on trees, agriculture, medicines; a long compilation in Greek on natural history (Quaestiones naturales); educational works on astronomy, music, arithmetic, as well as a disquisition on proverbs; light verses after the manner of Catullus of both a risqué and a satirical kind; symposium-literature in the manner of Gellius or Athenaeus; in the sphere of fiction, in addition to the Metamorphoses a second romance Hermagoras, an anthology of love-anecdotes, not to mention a mysterious Epitome historiarum – no one seriously regrets the loss of much of this, but the catalogue indicates the author's phenomenal intellectual energy.