1. This paper was delivered in a much shorter form at the USC/UGLA Seminar in Roman Studies in Spring 2007 and was scrutinised at a 2009 Scripps College Faculty Research Seminar. I wish to thank the participants of both of these seminars, and in particular Richard Fletcher who offered many useful suggestions, and Ben Lee who also presented his work on African Latin in the Scripps seminar.

2. Summers, R., ‘Roman Justice and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses’, TAPA 101 (1970), 511–31Google Scholar. See now the refutations in Graverini, L., Le metamorfosi di Apuleio: letteratura e identità (Pisa 2007), 218–23Google Scholar.

3. Dowden, K., ‘The Roman Audience of the Golden Ass’, in J. Tatum (ed.), The Search for the Ancient Novel (Baltimore 1994), 419–34Google Scholar.

4. Esp. Harrison, S., Apuleius: A Latin Sophist (Oxford 2000Google Scholar).

5. See Lancel, S., ‘Y a-t-il une Africitas?’, REL 63 (1987), 161–82Google Scholar, who, however, suggests that particular African schools of rhetoric could have promoted certain styles that may have differed from the stylistic modes popular at Rome.

6. Finkelpearl, E., Metamorphosis of Language in Apuleius: A Study of Allusion in the Novel (Ann Arbor 1998), 131–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wilhite’s interpretation of Tertullian’s presentation of Dido (at a later period) is similar to mine: according to Wilhite, Tertullian uses Dido, as well as the wife of Hasdrubal, as ‘two of the greatest examples of anti-Romanism available to his audience’: Wilhite, D., Tertullian the African: An Anthropological Reading of Tertullian’s Context and Identities (Berlin & New York 2007), 66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Both women ‘resisted Rome even unto death’, and served as exempla both for Christians and for Tertullian’s African audience ‘many of whom would retain an anti-Roman sentiment to varying degrees’ (ibid. 66f.).

7. Bradley, K., ‘Romanitas and the Roman Family’, Canadian Journal of History 35 (2000), 215–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Law, Magic and Culture in the Apologia of Apuleius’, Phoenix 51 (1997), 203–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Apuleius and Carthage’, AncNarr 4 (2004), 1–29Google Scholar.

8. Graverini (n.2 above), 206–17 and passim. Graverini points out, for example, that the spatial markers used by Dowden to support a claim of Roman readership are recognisable much more widely; that Rome was not the only centre of literary production (Martial wrote from Spain, for example); that Carthage is mostly absent from the Metamorphoses largely because of the preexisting requirements of the Greek model; that survival of the manuscript at Rome does not preclude survival at Carthage as well. Though, as Graverini adds, the Metamorphoses is fictionally written at Rome, Lucius’ identity as Madaurensem seems designed to appeal to an African readership.

9. Graverini (n.2 above), 227.

10. Graverini (n.2 above, 231) apparently retreats from his earlier arguments in ‘Corinth, Rome and Africa: A Cultural Background for the Tale of the Ass’, in M. Paschalis and S. Frangoulidis (eds.), Space in the Ancient Novel (AncNarr Supplementum 1 2002), 58–77Google ScholarPubMed, that the centrality of Corinth, destroyed in the same year as Carthage, evokes conflict and a degree of anti-Roman sentiment.

11. Bradley (n.7 above ‘Ap. and Carthage’), 17, lists some of the terms currently being used to describe the more nuanced process of cultural blending and local survivals involved in Romanisation: ‘accommodation, acculturation, adaptation, assimilation, negotiation, and resistance.’

12. Mattingly, D., ‘Being Roman: Expressing Identity in a Provincial Setting’, JRA 17 (2004), 5–25Google Scholar. ‘Discrepant experience’ is a phrase and concept borrowed from Said, E., Culture and Imperialism (New York 1993Google Scholar). There is, of course, a growing bibliography on ‘Romanisation’, which I will not reproduce here. Apart from Mattingly, particularly useful for me were Webster, J. and Cooper, N. (eds.), Roman Imperialism: Post-Colonial Perspectives (Leicester 1996Google Scholar); Edwards, C. and Woolf, G. (eds.), Rome the Cosmopolis (Cambridge 2003Google Scholar); Woolf, G., Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (Cambridge 1998CrossRefGoogle Scholar); as well as the conference at The Getty Villa organised by Erich Gruen, ‘Representing the Alien’, March 2008. Initially, it seemed to me that this bibliography would help solve some of the mysteries about Apuleius’ character as African, but it turned out that Isaac’s, BenjaminThe Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton 2004Google Scholar) has posed questions closer to those I pose here. Much work on Romanisation focuses on material culture: e.g. what does the consumption of wine vs ale among the military say about the retention of Roman tastes in Britain vs the adoption of local habits? can we discern a mixed Romano-Gallic self-presentation by means of hair-style in sculpture (E. Barton at the Getty conference)? These investigations, while utterly fascinating, ultimately say less than I would like about the individual experience and subjective feelings about the state of being a provincial under Rome.

13. Other criticism on the question of Apuleius and Africa appears passim in Kahane, A. and Laird, A. (eds.), A Companion to the Prologue of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (Oxford 2001Google Scholar): Yun Lee Too (‘Losing the Author’s Voice: Cultural and Personal Identities in the Metamorphoses Prologue’, 177–87) explores Lucius’ multiple simultaneous identities; Katherine Clarke (‘Prologue and Provenance: Quis ille? or Unde ille?’, 101–10) discusses the re-orientation of the world in which Latin becomes an alien language and centre and periphery are redefined; Mark Edwards (‘Reflections on the African Character of Apuleius’, 47–54), in an exploration of the Africanness of Apuleius alongside Tertullian, remarks that ‘the Latin culture of Africa is the best, if not the only, Latin culture of its time; yet its exponents know that they are not at the heart of the Roman world’ (48).

14. Invents the aulas: Pindar Pyth 12.4–27, Hyginus 165; throws away the flute: Hyginus 165, Apollodorus 1.4.2, Aristotle (below), Athenaeus Deipn. 14 616e (citing Melanippides)—among others. Aristotle and others object that Athena would not be so vain and superficial, but that she had other reasons to reject flute-playing; Pol. 8.6.1340b, 1341b. For a discussion of the unusually flexible and expressive nature of the Marsyas myth as a test case for thinking about reception, see Saunders, T., ‘Discipline and Receive, or Making an Example out of Marsyas’, in C. Martindale and R. Thomas (eds.), Classics and the Uses of Reception (Oxford 2006), 32–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Apollodorus 1.4.2, Hyginus 165. The challenge to Apollo is presented in different ways, but seems the core of the story.

16. Roman denarii struck by L. Marcius Censorinus depict the rivals on opposite sides of the coin: Rawson, Piers B., The Myth of Marsyas in Roman Visual Arts (Oxford 1987), 11Google Scholar.

17. Muses appear as judges in Greek visual representations, but Rawson (n.16 above), 14f., argues that their frequent and prominent appearance in Roman contest scenes, on Marsyas sarcophagi (which he connects with a vogue for Muse-sarcophagi, 31), corresponds interestingly with their first literary appearance at the contest in Lucian, Apuleius and Hyginus.

18. Some visual representations, described for example in Philostratus Junior 1.3, depict a barbarian executioner standing by with a large knife.

19. Rawson (n.16 above), 12, notes the separation of this Forum Marsyas from the visual images of Roman artists and mythological writers.

20. The meanings and propagandistic use of this forum Marsyas are discussed most fully in Paoli, J.,‘Marsyas et le ius italicum’, MEFRA 55 (1938), 96–130CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘La statue de Marsyas au Forum Romanum’, REL 23 (1945), 150–67Google Scholar; Veyne, P., ‘Le Marsyas “colonial” et l’independence des cités’, RPh 35.3 (1961), 87–98Google Scholar; Small, J.P., Cacus and Marsyas in Etrusco-Roman Legend (Princeton 1982Google Scholar); Schertz, P., Seer or Victim? The Figure of Marsyas in Roman Art, Religion, and Politics (Diss. Southern California 2005Google Scholar). Reinach, S., ‘L’Origine du Marsyas du Forum’, Klio 14 (1914), 321–37Google Scholar, speculates that this statue of a divine Marsyas was brought to Rome in 188 BCE from Phrygia, perhaps in connection with the Romans’ increasing interest in their Phrygian roots. Schertz devotes many pages to the interpretation of the footwear, concluding that they are boots with a special upper fold, though others interpret them as broken shackles, representing freedom. See also Wiseman, T.P., Unwritten Rome (Exeter 2008), 99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. Small (n.20 above), 68. Wiseman (n.20 above), 99, suggests that it was Liber, Marsyas’ protector, who freed him.

22. Small (n.20 above) and Scherz (n.20 above) argue that the gesture of Marsyas’ right arm is that of exauguration and that, as Apollo was associated with divination, Marsyas held the sphere of augury, though Horsfall in his review of Small, CR 34 (1984), 226–29Google Scholar, argues that this connection remains unverified.

23. Small (n.20 above), 73f. Servius ad Aen. 4.58: Patrique Lyaeo: qui, ut supra diximus, apte urbibus libertatis est deus, unde etiam Marsyas minister eius per ciuitates in foro positus libertatis indicium est, qui erecta manu testatur nihil urbi deesse (‘Father Lyaeus who, as we said above, is rightly the god of liberty for cities; whence also Marsyas, his minister, placed in the forum by cities, is a sign of liberty who, by his raised right hand, calls to witness that nothing is lacking in a city’).

24. The aulos was banned from Plato’s ideal state as a disruptive instrument, creating havoc and misrule and associated with satyrs, foreigners, women and the lower classes. Peter Wilson, in two closely argued and detailed essays, lays out the nature of the opposition, among other things, in terms of the relationship of the two instruments to the body: ‘In somatic terms, the lyre “fits well”. Unlike the aulos, which disrupts, overruns, and distorts the body, the lyre creates “good skhema”…’ (Wilson, P., ‘Athenian Strings’, in P. Murray and P. Wilson [eds.], Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousike in the Classical Athenian City [Oxford 2004], 269–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 276); ‘The aulos was a danger: it threatened self-control; it marred the aesthetics of the body; it introduced the allure of the alien’ (Wilson, P., ‘The Aulos in Athens’, in S. Goldhill and R. Osborne [eds.], Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy [Cambridge 1999], 58–95Google Scholar, at 58). At the same time, Wilson points out that the iconic rejection of the aulos by Athena, enshrined on the Acropolis in the sculpture group by Myron, also ironically, while expelling it, gives it a permanent and fixed place in the city. Martin, Richard, ‘The Pipes are Brawling: Conceptualizing Musical Performance in Athens’, in C. Dougherty and L. Kurke (eds.), The Cultures within Greek Culture (Cambridge 2003), 153–80Google Scholar, responds by situating the rejection of the aulos within Athenian aristocratic culture and recognising that the discourse on the harmful effects of lyre-playing on Athenian male citizens belongs only to one restricted part of that culture. Nonetheless, the contest clearly was of importance in delineating certain oppositions both in literature and the visual arts of the period.

25. See Wiseman (n.20 above), who reconstructs an early period when Liber and Marsyas represented a liberation from the Kings, followed by a period under Augustus when the princeps publicly identified himself with Apollo and hence converted Marsyas into a figure of licentia to be suppressed and controlled. His statue in the forum was by this time an empty promise of ‘freedom’.

26. Feldherr, A. and James, P., ‘Making the Most of Marsyas’, Arethusa 37 (2004), 75–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar, explore all the various twists of disconnection and dismemberment in the Ovidian narrative: various parts of the myth have been disconnected and are supplied from internal references to other related myths (e.g. Pan); Marsyas’ mouth is peeled from its speaker; Ovid as author is divided, as an artist within the story and as the auctor outside it.

27. As others have noted, the technical vocabulary here reminds the reader that Apuleius is the author of a lost De Musica. The genealogy of Marsyas is inconsistent; some make him the son of Hyagnis (ps.-Plutarch de Musica 1132f); some the son of Olympos (Apollodorus 1.4.2, Plato Symp. 215b, Rep. 399e), and Hyginus makes him son of Oiagros (Fab. 165). See Burckhardt, , Marsyas (6) RE 14.2 (1986–99Google Scholar) ad loc.

28. Apuleius here cleverly turns Vergil’s shepherd Menalcas’ attack on Damoetas’ musical abilities (Ecl. 3.25–27) into a general condemnation of the state of Italian rural music of some indefinite early period.

29. I have used ‘Graeco-Roman’ and ‘Greeks and Romans’ as if there were no distinction, which actually seems warranted by the passage which presents a Greek myth while mentioning Italian shepherds and using the Roman name for the goddess. Greek vs Roman cultural markers are generally lacking otherwise, and the opposition is that between the Graeco-Roman and barbarian. Also see Zanker, P., The Masks of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity, tr. A. Shapiro (Berkeley & Los Angeles 1995), 202fGoogle Scholar., in which he observes that the dichotomy of Greek and Roman has disappeared in favour of a ‘classical’ culture, a common culture of the empire.

30. On the other hand, some critics quite validly point out that in 3.6 Marsyas is contrasted sharply with his father (Phryx cetera et barbarus, ‘in other respects he was a Phrygian and a barbarian’). Both points of view seem true: Marsyas’ abilities are established firmly via his father and the verb patrissaret (‘followed in his father’s footsteps’) while it is Marsyas who most firmly represents barbarian culture.

31. Critics are fairly unanimous in their identification of Apuleius and Apollo: Hunink, V., Apuleius of Madauros: Florida (Amsterdam 2001), 69–79Google Scholar (quotation at 76); Harrison (n.4 above), 99; La Rocca, A., Il filosofo e la città: commento storico ai Florida di Apuleio (Rome 2005), 149f.Google Scholar; Lee, B., Apuleius’ Florida, A Commentary (New York 2005), 72–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gaisser, J.H., The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass: A Study in Transmission and Reception (Princeton 2008Google Scholar), lOf. See, however, Fletcher (p.48 below). Hunink argues that it is wrong to bring contemporary feelings of empathy to the passage; rather, a hardened Roman audience would find the passage unquestionably humorous. Addressing this issue in Ovid, G.|Tissol, The Face of Nature: Wit, Narrative and Cosmic Origins in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Princeton 1997Google Scholar), argues that Ovid does not revel in gruesome details or delight in cruelty as some other critics have maintained, but that ‘he wanted the Metamorphoses to be disturbing, and regarded the violation of his readers’ sensibilities as a valuable experience for them’ (124). Ovid wants to jar the reader to confront violence and cruelty. Given Apuleius’ negative portrait of the Muses and his direct evocation of the Ovidian gruesomeness, I find this a useful way to think about Apuleius as well.

32. Harrison (n.4 above), 99.

33. Gaisser (n.31 above), 10. It is in the Apology that Gaisser argues that Apuleius strives to deconstruct the opposition between beauty and philosophy, but it is unclear how the Marsyas passage, with its clear oppositions between the two, furthers this project.

34. La Rocca (n.31 above), 40, 149 and passim.

35. La Rocca (n.31 above), 149f.

36. La Rocca (n.31 above), 41.

37. Lee (n.31 above), 72, cites for support Lausberg's rhetorical handbook (Lausberg, H., Handhuch der literarischen Rhetorik [Leiden & Boston 1998]Google Scholar) on the practice of annominatio. His arguments are very compelling, but his references to Lausberg present problems: (1) The examples of annominatio or paronomasia in section 637 address the trope as a pseudo-etymological play in which a letter or two is transposed, resulting in a sort of pun, rather than the changing of prefixes at issue in this passage; (2) Lee’s prescriptive reading fails to take into account Apuleius’ anomalous style. For example, in one of the examples in Lausberg, Rhet. Her. 4.23.32, the Auctor advises restraint in the kind of paronomasia being discussed, saying that the effect of too much punning in this way is to deprive the passage of grauitas and seueritas and is rather childish. Yet this sort of thing is exactly Apuleius’ style in his rhetorical works as well as the Metamorphoses.

38. Ferrari, M.G.,’Aspetti di letterarietà nei Florida di Apuleio’, SIFC n.s. 40 (1968), 85–147Google Scholar, at 137, points out that Marsyas’ speech abounds in neologisms as well as alliteration and verbal play which accentuate, she feels, the ‘tono caricaturale’ which Apuleius wanted to give to Marsyas’ speech. Facchini Tosi, C., ‘Forma e suono in Apuleio’, Vichiana 15 (1986), 98–168Google Scholar, at 150, also sees the satyr’s speech as a caricature, pointing to many of the same linguistic features as Ferrari, in particular the rarity of vocabulary and the repetition of praemulsis/promulsis which are ‘quasi sinonimi’. On the other hand, Ferrari, in her general analysis of neologisms (105), points out that Apuleius is less daring in his formation of new words in the Florida than in the Met., mainly forming new words via known nouns and verbs. One wonders whether any of these critics would have formed this judgment of the style here if the speaker were not Marsyas.

39. Hunink (n.31 above), 75f. Hunink objects that Ferrari’s (n.38 above) and Facchini Tosi’s (n.38 above) claims of caricature are ‘unfounded’ given Apuleius’ propensity for archaism and neologism (76).

40. La Rocca (n.31 above), 146f., suggests that Florida 3 is aprolalia which might have introduced an actual contest between Apuleius and a rival.

41. Harrison (n.4 above), 99.

42. La Rocca’s (n.31 above) discussion is an exception. He, however, sees the opposition between barbarian and cultivated as much more distinct than I will argue, and he presents Apuleius as an unquestioned advocate of the aristocracy.

43. This slant on Apuleius’ re-telling is noted by Feldherr in Feldherr and James (n.26 above), 80: ‘Even more striking is Apuleius’ later use of Marsyas as an index of response to a whole range of highly charged cultural antitheses.’ See also La Rocca (n.31 above), 47 and 15 If. Harrison (n.4 above), 98, also notes that much is made of the ‘barbarous and uncivilized appearance of Marsyas…and its contrast with the divine elegance of Apollo’.

44. Still, it is surely a musical contest, pace Hunink (n.31 above), 78, who says it could equally be a contest of beauty or oratory. The traditional nature of the material and the known punishment, along with cecinit et cecidit and the extensive coverage of Hyagnis’ developments in the art point clearly to the known musical contest.

45. If this Marsyas has a tail as many do in visual representations, or animal ears, they are not mentioned; rather, he is hairy and fierce, an animalistic human more than a satyr.

46. La Rocca (n.31 above), 152, sees a nexus between barbarism and the plebs and asserts that ‘la proclamata superiorità di Apuleio evoca il dominio delle aristocrazie cittadine sulle classi oppresse’; see also 47 n.130). There is never an explicit proof of Apuleius’ sympathies and identification, and Florida 3 is used repeatedly as evidence that Apuleius disdains the plebs and the barbarian. One of La Rocca’s arguments for Apuleius’ non-barbarian nature centres around his association of linguistic impurity with barbarism as shown in Florida 9, and yet that passage provides fodder for the opposite view; Apuleius himself is at risk of committing a linguistic barbarism. La Rocca’s quotation of Charles-Picard, G., La civilisation de l’Afrique romaine (Paris 1959Google Scholar), proclaiming ‘la victoire de la culture aristocratique sur la rusticité’ (152) presents a dated colonialist conception of the relationship between Roman aristocratic and local cultures.

47. See Hunink (n.31 above), 74. This is Apollo’s only appearance in the Florida unless one accepts the re-positioning of the ‘False Preface to De Deo Socratis no 4’ with rather negative implications for Apollo, on which see below. Apollo also gives the oracle at Met. 4.32.

48. Gaisser (n.31 above), 11.

49. See above, but also, for example, in Lucian’s D.Deor. 16, Hera scathingly tells Leto that Apollo is really not so good at music and would have been flayed by Marsyas if the Muses had judged fairly.

50. It is assumed by the three commentators mentioned that Apuleius speaks in his own persona when he uses the first person in the Florida and that much of the corpus is self-referential. Perhaps this premise should be questioned, but clearly the rhetorical works, delivered by the author, represent a different relationship between narrator and historical author than does the Met., also delivered in the first person. Below, it will be argued that Apuleius half identifies with Marsyas, an argument which requires some element of autobiographical reading, but it should be noted that these commentators have made this assumption already.

51. Hunink (n.31 above), 76 n.l, though he concedes that Marsyas sounds like Apuleius, comments that Apuleius does not engage in Petronian ‘realism’ and that all his characters sound the same; hence it means nothing that Marsyas sounds like Apuleius at his most himself. While there is certainly truth in this view, it is contradicted by what other critics are saying about the passage and is also something of a simplification. See below on 9.39, but also cf. the work of Callebat, L., esp. ‘Formes et modes d’expression dans les oeuvres d’Apulée’, ANRW II.34.2 (1994), 1600–64Google Scholar, who sees stylistic variation by character and situation in Apuleius, not according to strict realism in a modern sense, but according to a creative logic whereby levels of diction are matched to character types.

52. Lee’s argument that Marsyas’ description of Apollo’s hair crines eius praemulsis antiis et promulsis caproneis anteuentuli et propenduli is comically bad ultimately helps my argument, but one can also argue that the phrases are not as completely redundant as Lee implies. Praemulsis and promulsis are essentially synonyms, and antiae and caproneae, as well as anteuentuli et propenduli may be ridiculously repetitive as well. However, antiae seems to mean bangs (capilli demissi in frontem, Hildebrand, G.L., Apulei Opera Omnia [Leipzig 1842]Google Scholarad loc.), while caproneae refer to locks of hair falling onto the neck. Prae indicates forward positioning while pro marks forward and downward movement (OLD), so the bangs are smoothed down in front, while the cascading locks of hair are smoothed actively forward and down. Lee also finds the repetition of quid quod to be particularly heinous and yet it is a completely legitimate Classical phrase.

We should also keep in mind Marsyas’ own satirical bent. His rhetoric is more persuasive here if he conveys the disdain he feels for the elaborate care Apollo takes in smoothing and arranging his hair just right, a disdain conveyed by repetition, a standard device of satirists. Cf. Braund’s .comments (Braund, S., Beyond Anger: A Study of Juvenal’s Third Book of Satires [Cambridge 1988], 130–34Google Scholar) on Naevolus’ style in Juvenal Sat. 9: tropes such as repetition, angry questions (including repetition of similar sounds) and diminutives all distinguish Naevolus as a speaker and convey his bitter anger. At the beginning of the satire, Naevolus is compared to Marsyas at some length.

53. See Keulen, W., ‘Gellius, Apuleius, and Satire on the Intellectual’, in L. Holford-Strevens and A. Vardi (eds.), The Worlds of Aulus Gellius (Oxford 2004), 223–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 234 and 242, for the argument that Apuleius engages in satire of himself as intellectual in his portrait of Lucius. See also Rosen, R., Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient Satire (Oxford 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar) on the complex poetics of self-mockery in Juvenal’s Satire 9. Here, Naevolus, compared at the outset to Marsyas, is an annoying figure and yet a satirist like the author, leading to a mixture of revulsion and self-mockery.

54. At 2.9, Fotis’ hair is described as ceruice dependulos ac dein per colla dispositos which seems as repetitive as this passage in Flor 3.

55. It is time for a reconsideration of ‘African Latin’.

56. Florida 4, for example, also about a tibicen, moves from the musician Antigenidas’ particular skills to his resentment that undertakers who play the horn are also called tibicines, thence into mimes and costume, and finally to an assertion that both corpses and philosophers are covered by the pallium, the essential message seeming to be that outward appearance can be deceptive.

57. For the question of whether the passage belongs to the DDS or to the Florida, see Harrison’s discussion in Harrison, S., Hilton, J. and Hunink, V. (eds.), Apuleius: Rhetorical Works (Oxford 2001), 177–80Google Scholar.

58. Harrison (n.4 above), 99, points to Apol. 4 for attacks on Apuleius’ personal appearance and Apol 5–10 for the attacks on his talents.

59. Yet Fl. 9.27–28 actually presents a much wider variety of talents and does not particularly echo Marsyas’ criticisms.

60. Lee (n.31 above), 72; Harrison (n.4 above), 99.

61. Hunink (n.31 above), 73 and 75.

62. Zanker (n.29 above), 234. Apuleius is discussed on pages 233–42.

63. Zanker (n.29 above), 240.

64. Harrison (n.4 above), 97–99, apparently sees Apuleius attacking Marsyas as a Cynic who mistrusts outward appearance. He does not elaborate, and it is conceivable that too many people were going around posing as Cynics and that such a stance was worthy of ridicule, but it seems too close to Apuleius’ own identity to dismiss its legitimacy without discussion.

65. See n.23 above.

66. Apia uirgae at the beginning of the list at Fl. 9.27 has been interpreted to mean ‘suited to the rhapsode’s rod’ but perhaps instead the uirga refers to the punishment inflicted by satirists.

67. This position of Keulen’s (n.53 above) complexifies Harrison’s arguments about the Met. as a sophistic novel, injecting elements of self-satire into the portrait of Lucius as sophist and connecting the negative elements with Apuleius himself.

68. Keulen, (n.53 above), 228. In ‘Comic Invention and Superstitious Frenzy in Apuleius>’ Metamorphoses: The Figure of Socrates as an Icon of Satirical Self-Exposure’, AJP 124 (2003), 107–35Google Scholar, Keulen argues that the enigmatic figure of Socrates in Metamorphoses 1 is portrayed as exhibiting gestures of the original Socrates such as pulling his cloak over his head before speaking.

69. See Keulen (n.53 above).

70. Hunink (n.31 above), 76, puzzles over the repetition: ‘one may wonder whether Marsyas’ words add a new thought of his’ and seems to conclude that expansion and variation are a feature of rhetoric.

71. Hilton translates ‘the opposite characteristics’ while Vallette translates the first occurrence as ‘mérites’ and the second as ‘vertu’.

72. Fletcher, R., ‘Apuleius: Philosopher, Biographer, Stylist’, paper delivered at the Ohio State University 26 January 2006Google Scholar..

73. Fletcher (n.72 above) and Keulen brilliantly and subtly tread a path between autobiography and disinvolvement, making interesting contributions toward thinking about the early forms of indirect self-expression.

74. La Rocca (n.31 above), esp. 43 and 76, nicely points to the complex and contradictory position of Apuleius as sophist and philosopher, roles which were viewed in vastly different ways and were difficult to reconcile with each other, a view that runs counter to the communis opinio as he demonstrates at 43 n.117. Yet La Rocca still sees Apuleius as satirising and running down the Cynic stand-in, Marsyas. His views otherwise support this reading of a split and double identification for Apuleius.

75. Hunink (n.31 above) ad loc.

76. R. Miles, ‘Rivalling Rome: Carthage’, in Edwards and Woolf (n.12 above), 123–46, at 134f., discussing the depiction on coins of a symbolic reconciliation of Rome and Carthage: ‘Paradoxically, the aim of this ritual act of reconciliation was to bolster an imperialist discourse which required that the rivalry between Rome and Carthage should never be forgotten.’ Also see Isaac (n.12 above), 324–50, on ‘Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Syrians’, with summary at 350: ‘The factor that determines much of the Roman attitude [i.e. a proto-racist one] is the old enmity between Rome and Carthage…’

77. Graverini (n.2 above).

78. See also my earlier discussion of these passages in Finkelpearl (n.6 above), 141f. Dowden (n.3 above), 422f., argues that, although Carthage is elevated here and becomes a parallel Rome, it is derivative and dependent on somewhere else. His focus is on readership and his argument that eventually the Florida survived because they were read at Rome is a powerful one. Yet the picture is of Carthage lording it over Romans, and thus her characterisation as Camena becomes more a matter of cultural appropriation, by Carthage, of the deities of Rome. Also see above on Graverini’s interpretation of the passage.

79. The epithet used of her in the previous phrase, caelestis, evokes the Carthaginian deity ‘Caelestis’, an ancient Punic goddess brought back into currency by a population wishing to remember the glorious days of old Carthage. See Rives, J., Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustine to Constantine (Oxford 1995Google Scholar).

80. See the essay ‘Is Apuleius a Roman?’ at <http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/apuleius/>, the Jim O’Donnell Apologia Website. Also note other statements of allegiance to Carthage in the Florida: Fl. 9 paints a picture of some antagonism between Carthage and the ruling Roman powers by praising the current proconsul Severianus and his son as being the most revered and least feared (9.36); Fl. 16 discusses the statue of him that Carthage has apparently decreed; Fl. 18.36 further celebrates the Carthaginians and claims that Apuleius praises them everywhere he goes (thus, allegedly, not just in front of them).

81. See Gaisser (n.31 above), 5, with further references.

82. Isaac (n.12 above), 145f.

83. Mattingly, D., Tripolitania (Ann Arbor 1994Google Scholar), 29. Methy, N., ‘Fronton et Apulée: Romains ou Africains?’, RCCM 25 (1983), 41Google Scholar, is of the opinion that both Apuleius and Fronto are not descendants of colonists, but of ‘populations autochthones’. Birley, A., Septimius Severus, the African Emperor (London & New York 1988), 25Google Scholar, states that Apuleius is ‘doubtless of settler or mixed stock’, without further discussion. Cf. also the rather uncritical but passionate modern North African’s interpretation of these lines: ‘[Apuleius] must also be reclaimed by the Numidian and Gaetulian descendants of North Africa as their first literary figure in the world court of international human rights, the world court of international consciousness. Somehow, he set the stage for this stance in his own words: “I am a Numidian and a Gaetulian, and I am proud of it. I don’t see why I should be ashamed of this”’ (Hagan, Helene, ‘Apuleius of Madauros, Amazigh Philosopher and World Advocate’, at <http://www.tazzla.org/apuleius.htm> or for the print version Amazigh Voice Magazine 10.2 [Fall 2001], 8–13Google Scholar.

84. Bradley 2004,24.

85. Isaac (n.12 above), 149–66.

86. On this passage, see Isaac (n.12 above), 333. Obviously, writers who pay attention to different levels of civilisation and barbarism make careful distinctions between e.g. Libyans in the urban centres and those on the frontier. See Marshall, E., ‘Constructing the Self and the Other in Cyrenaica’, in R. Laurence and J. Berry (eds.), Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire (London & New York 2001), 49–63Google Scholar, at 50–52. Yet those distinctions seem to be lost both in the process of derisive name-calling and the joking, self-deprecatory, self-characterisations of e.g. Apuleius and Fronto or Lucian.

87. G. Woolf, ‘The City of Letters’, in Edwards and Woolf (n.12 above), 203–21, at 206 and 218.

88. Woolf (n.87 above), 218, with reference to Plin. Ep. 9.11.2.

89. Woolf (n.87 above), 219, on Mart. 12 praef.

90. See also Dench, E., From Barbarians to New Men: Greek, Roman and Modern Perceptions of Peoples of the Central Apennines (Oxford 1995), 72–80Google Scholar, on the inclusion of non-Roman Italians in the early Republic among those considered culturally barbarous and even animalistic. At 298–302 Dench discusses Cicero’s distinctions in the Brutus and de Oratore between Roman and non-Roman Latin oratory: ‘In “Cicero”’s comments on non-Roman orators, there is nothing particularly unusual about the insistence that Rome is the only centre of urbanity in Italy or about the characterization of Italy outside Rome as “foreign” in terms of language, culture and even descent’ (300). We are looking at a different period in the case of Apuleius, but these passages show even Italians as barbarous and foreign. Also relevant, though of a different moment, is Ovid’s complaint in Tomis that barbarus hie ego sum (‘here I am the barbarian’). The implication, it seems to me, is that one would expect the Tomitans to be the barbarians, the emphatic ego oppposing itself to the implied other (i.e. I am the barbarian, not those to whom I speak whom, under normal circumstances, I would consider to be the barbarians). In that case, again, the term ‘barbarian’ is used by implication of provincials who do not speak Latin although Ovid makes it very clear that the inhabitants of Tomis itself are not to be equated with the barbarians across the river. Further, one sees, as in the case of Fronto, a wry, facetious, mockingly self-deprecatory and yet also somewhat heartfelt declaration of the educated man’s shortcomings—in Ovid’s case involving a repositioning, a new understanding that barbarism is a matter of perspective. Calling oneself a barbarian in Latin or Greek must always involve re-defining of centre and periphery.

91. Isaac (n.12 above), 333.

92. See also Fronto 1.20 and 1.142, both of which express insecurity about the quality of the writer’s Greek. In this section, I am indebted to Daniel Richter for sending me a work in progress on Anacharsis and ethnic identity. Richter explores the ways that different early imperial authors, both Latin and Greek, use the Scythian sage ‘as a sort of metaphor, which articulates and resolves tensions between ethnic origin and claims of cultural identity’.

93. Isaac (n.12 above), 344.

94. Whitmarsh, T., Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation (Oxford 2001), 206Google Scholar, with reference to works of Victor Turner, Stuart Hall, Benedict Anderson, et al.

95. Bracht Branham, R., Unruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions (Cambridge MA 1989), 102fCrossRefGoogle Scholar. Branham also comments on Anacharsis, interestingly for current purposes, ‘These characters (Anacharsis, Demonax, and Socrates] are satyrlike, as Alcibiades says of Socrates, in that they were regarded as not entirely civilized and, precisely for this reason, as free of certain conventional ways of seeing and thinking: they are Hminal figures who are in society but not of it’ (83).

96. Whitmarsh (n.94 above), 125.

97. Mattingly (n.12 above), 22.

98. Too (n.13 above).

99. Finkelpearl, E., ‘Apuleius, the Onos and Rome’, in M. Paschalis, S. Frangoulidis, S.J. Harrison and M. Zimmerman (eds.), The Greek and Roman Novel: Parallel Readings (Groningen 2007), 263–76Google Scholar, at 271. See especially Too (n.13 above) and Rosati, G., ‘Quis ille? Identità e metamorfosi nel romanzo di Apuleio’, in M. Citroni (ed.), Memoria e Identità: la cultura romana costruisce la sua immagine (Florence 2003), 267–96Google Scholar, who stresses the complex interplay between the identities of Lucius and Apuleius in the Prologue.

100. See Frangoulidis, S., Roles and Performances in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (Stuttgart 2001CrossRefGoogle Scholar) and May, R., Apuleius and Drama (Oxford 2007Google Scholar).

101. For discussion of the issue of Lucius’ status as provincial immigrant facing a difficult assimilation into Roman culture see J. Alvarez, ‘The Coming of Age and Political Accommodation in the Greco-Roman Novels’, in Paschalis et al. (n.99 above), 3–22, at 4–10, and Finkelpearl (n.99 above), 263–76, which focuses on a comparison with the Onos.

102. Pace Connors, C., ‘Cities, Empires and Spectacle in the Greek and Roman Novels’, in T. Whitmarsh (ed.), Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel (Cambridge 2008), 162–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

103. According to Alvarez (n.101 above), 10, ‘The infamous crux, Madaurensem probably offers a metatextual reference to. Apuleius himself….Apuleius presents a similar figure who tried to move from the provincial margins to the center. His reader might suspect that Apuleius expresses through the Metamorphoses some ambivalence concerning his own Romanization, for Lucius’ career is hardly a hearty advertisement for such cultural abandonment.’ See also Finkelpearl (n.99 above), 275.

104. This aspect of the designation Madaurensem has received little attention, yet surely place names in themselves have resonance. To call an Abraham Lincoln surrogate ‘the man from Knob Creek Farm’, for example, evokes the 16th president’s humble and rustic origins rather than, say, his greatness as the president who abolished slavery. Obviously, every place-name has its associations—Trenton, Chino, Cleveland, Wassilla—and in this case, the associations are surely provincial and hence rather backward.

105. There is much more to say about Apuleius’ narration of the life of an animal from the inside and the ways the animal stands in for either the slave (as several scholars have discussed) or the cultural outsider. The latter is part of an on-going project.

106. Bradley, K., ‘Animalizing the Slave: The Truth of Fiction’, JRS 90 (2000), 110–25Google Scholar; Fitzgerald, W., Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination (Cambridge 2000CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Isaac (n.12 above), 249, makes a similar point from a different angle: peoples who had long been subjugated by Rome are reduced to the state of degenerate slaves; at the same time, foreigners are often compared to animals in order to deny their humanity and/or in order to reinforce the legitimacy of stereotypes since fable operates on the basis of dividing up groups according to set types. Isaac adds that an important idea in antiquity was that ‘slaves and foreigners are less than human and therefore to be categorized in between animals and full-fledged human beings’. See also Isaac’s full discussion at 194–215.

107. Marsyas is associated with donkeys mainly through the Silenic associations of donkeys. See Wiseman 2008, 104 and passim. In my paper at ICAN IV 2008, ‘Refiguring the Animal-Human Divide in Apuleius and Heliodorus’, I discussed the ways that both these authors intermingle the collapse and blurring of human-animal distinctions with the confusion of cultural identity. In Heliodorus, for example, Kalasiris’ discussion of Homer’s Egyptian identity is combined with the paradoxical assertion that a large growth of hair on Homer’s thigh is a proof that Hermes was his father. Confusion of animal/human/god hierarchies often accompanies or stands in for that of ethnic identity.

108. Penwill, John, ‘Ambages reciprocae: Reviewing Apuleius’ Metamorphoses’, Ramus 19 (1990), 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 15 with 25 n.75., points out that Lucius’ acquisition of Latin followed soon after his Greek, the Greek acquired in his early boyhood and the Latin soon after (mox, 1.1). As Penwill notes, Lucius demonstrates a knowledge of Latin at several points during his travels and we should not assume that he learns his Latin upon arrival at Rome. Nonetheless, for him Latin is still exoticus even if one might attribute his claim of being a rudis locutor partly to false modesty.

109. That rudis veils rudere seems to me clear given the prologue’s rich plays on words—as, for example, in the words exoticus and forensis. See Winkler, J.J., Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 1985), 146Google Scholar.

110. Cf. Rosati (n.99 above); Graverini (n.2 above).

111. Of course, Apuleius did not invent the basic plot of his novel and these issues need to be thought through in relation to the Onos. On which, see Finkelpearl (n.99 above), arguing that Apuleius has not diminished any of the Onos’ flavour as a text oppositional to Roman authority (as argued by Hall, E., ‘The Ass with Double Vision: Politicising an Ancient Greek Novel’, in D. Margoulis and M. Joannou [eds.], Heart of the Heartless World: Essays in Cultural Resistance in Memory of Margot Heinemann [London & Boulder 1995], 47–59Google Scholar), but rather transferred it to Roman Africa and sometimes intensified elements appealing to an anti-Roman audience. Further, the addition of the Isiac conclusion along with its saga of Lucius’ immigration to Rome, establishes the Met. as a text even more concerned with Roman/non-Roman than the Onos. Certainly, one cannot argue that any such elements are simply baggage inherited from the Greek source. More could also be made of the uneasiness of the Metamorphoses’ own interplay between Greek and Roman culture. As our editor points out to me, the novel itself is a ‘cultural immigrant’, a ‘Greekish’ tale rendered into Latin which, in a Plautine manner, sometimes plays with the question of which language is really being spoken.

112. Keulen (n.53 above). See also Finkelpearl, E., ‘The Ends of the Metamorphoses’, in Maaike Zimmerman and Rudi van der Paardt (eds.), Metamorphic Reflections: Essays presented to Ben Hijmans at his 75th Birthday (Leuven & Paris 2004), 319–342Google Scholar, on other ways of approaching the confusing conclusion to the novel.

113. See Harrison (n.4 above), 238–59, for the latter point.

114. Rushdie, S., Imaginary Homelands, Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London 1991), 365Google Scholar.

115. Isaac (n.12 above), however, by posing questions about proto-racism rather than focusing on the separateness of provincial material culture as does the recent literature on Romanisation, has much more to say about the subjectivity of provincials as non-Romans—though little about Apuleius.

116. The Metamorphoses is filled with scenes of mocking laughter and humiliation—though obviously these need not be about cultural outsiderness.