Week 7: contextualising Apuleius

1. A Latin ‘sophist’ … or a fabulist on the make?

• Apuleius’ Greek sources.
• Apuleius as ‘sophist’, declaiming at Carthage: Florida.
• A provincial made good: Metamorphoses proem.
• A cosmopolite surrounded by hicks: Apology.

Other extant work:

• De deo Socratis (cf. Plutarch De genio Socratis).

Lost works included:

• Collections of speeches (Florida is a ‘best-of’).
• Light verse (Ludicra).
• De proverbiis.
• Didactic prose texts: De medicaminibus, De arboribus.
• Eroticus (also didactic?).
• Hermagoras (‘another novel’, says OCD3).

Ps.-Apuleiana include:

• Physiognomonia.

Further reading:

H. J. Mason, ‘Fabula Graecanica’, reprinted in Harrison (ed.) (1999).
K. Dowden, ‘The Roman Audience of The Golden Ass’, in Tatum (ed.) (1994).~
S. J. Harrison (2003), Apuleius: A Latin Sophist.

2. Apuleius, Lucian, and the Greco-Roman Other

• Theorising ‘the Other’.
• Novels from the margins?
• Apuleius as self-conscious outsider.
• Apuleius as anti-Atticising ‘Asianist’.
• Lucian as anti-Sophist.

Lucian and the Other:

• De Dipsadibus.
• De Dea Syria.

Some further reading:

Lucian:

H. G. Nesselrath, ‘Lucian’s Introductions’, in D. A. Russell (ed.) (1990) Antonine Literature.

Novels and the margins:

S. A. Stephens, ‘Who Read Ancient Novels?’, in Tatum (ed.) (1994).
J. S. Romm, ‘Novels beyond Thule’, in Tatum (ed.) (1994).

Also by Romm, and highly recommended: The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought (1992).

Apuleius’ novel as social document of a (largely absentee) Roman administrative and judicial order:

Fergus Millar, ‘The World of the Golden Ass’, JRS 71 (1981) 63-75: reprinted in Harrison (ed.) (1999).