…sed pro his praeoptare me fateor uno chartario calamo me reficere poemata omnigenus apta uirgae, lyrae, socco, coturno, item satiras ac griphos, item historias uarias rerum nec non orationes laudatas disertis nec non dialogos laudatos philosophis atque haec et alia eiusdem modi tarn Graece quam Latine, gemino uoto, pari studio, simili stilo.

Apuleius Florida 9

…but in place of these I confess that I prefer to employ one single reed to bring to life on papyrus poems of all kinds, ones attuned to the rod, the lyre, the slipper, the buskin, likewise satires and riddles, likewise various accounts of things, and of course speeches that win plaudits from experts, and again dialogues that win plaudits from philosophers—and these and other things of the same kind in both Greek and Latin: double offering, equal application, similar style.

non respondeo tibi, Aemiliane, quem colam βασιλέα; quin si ipse proconsul in-terroget, quid sit deus meus, taceo.

Apuleius Apology 65

I am not telling you, Aemilianus, who I worship as my king; nay, even if the proconsul himself should question me as to what my god is, my lips are sealed.

‘immo uero,’ inquam, ‘impertite sermone non quidem curiosum, sed qui uelim scire uel cuncta, uel certe plurima.’

Apuleius Metamorphoses 1.2

Apuleius of Madauros was a Romano-African, a provincial from Africa Proconsularis who, most of the time, conveys the impression of being fully assimilated, more steeped in Graeco-Roman culture than his contemporaries in the cultural centre, disdainful of his countrymen who know no Latin, and even an agent of Romanisation. Yet, given the new ways of thinking about provincial identity and centre vs periphery under the Roman Empire, it may be time to revisit the complicated hybrid and fluctuating identity of someone who, on the one hand, actively imparted Roman culture to his homeland and, on the other, pronounces his allegiance to Carthage (over Athens and Rome) and who, at least in certain contexts, refuses to be ashamed of his Numidian-Gaetulian roots. Weighing both Apuleius' few explicit statements about his allegiances to his homeland (and rejection thereof) and his fictionalised portraits of cultural outsiders, this essay argues that Apuleius expresses a dual and conflicted sense of Romano-African identity. Reading Florida 3 (Marsyas and Apollo) against the grain of current scholarship, I argue that Apuleius is not simply an Apollo, but both a Marsyas and an Apollo, with implications for a reading of what might be provincial and African in his works.

This paper rereads Apuleius' Apologia through its Platonic readings. I claim that the recent focus on the ‘literarisation’ of the speech based in the speaker's learned use of literary citations needs to be contextualised within the Apuleian corpus as a whole and that one way of doing this is to emphasise the role of Platonic citation in the speech. I argue that Apuleius' strategy of literary citation as juridical defence in the first half of the speech (4-65) undergoes a process of ‘Platonisation’ that relies upon the direct quotation of Plato's Greek. I show how this ‘Platonisation’ chimes with two related themes in Apuleius' brand of Platonism that is manifest across his multifarious corpus: firstly, the role of the philosopher's biography as a heuristic device for encouraging an induction into philosophy and, secondly, the uniting of Platonic philosophical theory with Apuleius' particular literary (dramatic and rhetorical) concerns. From this basis, I show that in the second half of the speech (66-103), in spite of the absence of literary and Platonic citation, the general ideas of citation and Platonism developed in the first half are still very much at work in the contested place of Apuleius' wife Pudentilla's Greek letter as evidence for both the prosecution and the defence. While the citation of the letter by both sides raises some troubling questions for the role of literary citation in the first half of the speech, it operates as a powerful argument for the dissemination of Apuleius' Platonic message beyond the event of the trial.

Seruitium amoris, the notion of love as slavery, is a frequent theme in Roman elegy. It inverts Roman reality in representing a free Roman citizen dominated by a woman, evidently from a lower social class. The elegiac amator (‘lover’) elevates his beloved puella (‘girl’) and treats her as a slave would treat his mistress (domina), obeying her orders and yielding to her wishes and moods. Although it has been widely observed that Lucius, the protagonist of Apuleius' Metamorphoses, acts like a slave towards his beloved, the slave girl Fotis, the idea of elegiac seruitium amoris has not been analysed systematically as an explanation of this strange relationship, and affinities between the Metamorphoses and Roman elegy have even been denied altogether. To date, most investigations have focused not on the mode but on the consequences of Lucius' servile behaviour, culminating in his transformation into an ass and a series of painful adventures brought to an end by the intervention of the goddess Isis.

My discussion will argue that in presenting Lucius and Fotis as an elegiac couple, Apuleius adds yet another form of love to the broad spectrum of relationships between the sexes that he presents in the Metamorphoses. It will also contend that by introducing the theme of seruitium amoris, he helps his audience interpret the complex and richly described relationship between protagonist and slave, a key theme throughout the work.

In the course of the evolution of an epic hero, there comes a point at which he has to make a choice between two ways of life. It is a motif that goes right back to the Iliad:

In the chapter called ‘Terce’ of the Second Day, the Franciscan monk William of Baskerville and his young apprentice Adso visit the scriptorium of an abbey in northern Italy, and discover, among the papers of the murdered Greek translator Venantius, a surprising text:

This paper will consider the 1887 Japanese translation of Apuleius' Golden Ass from the angle of classical reception. Although this was the first translation of Greco-Roman literature to appear in modern Japanese, it has, at least in print, never been examined by a classicist before. With the rising interest in the study of classical receptions, including those taking place outside the West, the time may be ripe for a serious look at this early Meiji translation by Morita Shiken—its content, source, intellectual climate surrounding its production, and its own subsequent reception in Japan.

The ancient novel, as Whitmarsh observes, is a genre uniquely suited for reception studies, especially of the more usual kind that is concerned with the modern period. Although a late and ignoble genre within antiquity, despite its often considerable linguistic and literary artistry, it came to enjoy relatively wide cultural recognition and circulation in the early modern period, before being outshone by the modern Western novel and sinking back into relative obscurity again both in the public and in academia—and its literary character is still very much controversial, to the extent that it is debated whether the ancient genre may justifiably be called ‘novel’. The history of the reception of the novel therefore may show more intriguing twists and contradictions than that of such established and uncontroversially ‘great’ genres as epic or tragedy.