Search Results

This epilogue begins with a brief discussion of the topics not covered in the preceding chapters. It then describes how Apuleius continues to exert his influence well beyond Milton in England. It also contends that many of the poetic and pictorial effusions inspired by ‘Cupid and Psyche’ have been bland, trite, or insipid.

This concluding chapter presents a synthesis of discussions in the preceding chapters. This book sets out to trace the use of tragedy, comedy, and mime in the different works of Apuleius. In using Seneca’s tragedies and Aristophanes’ and Terence’s comedies in addition to the fashionable poetae veteres, Apuleius is much more inclusive than his contemporaries Fronto and Gellius. It can be shown not only that his philosophical texts use Plautine language for the purposes of archaizing colour, but that dramatic quotations from several genres can be applied to illustrate various other elements of philosophical discourse, for example by integration of a dramatic quotation into the argument, or manipulation of its meaning. The dramatic genres, however, play their part amongst many other genres.

This chapter examines the value of the description of the ‘Judgement of Paris' pantomime in book 10 of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, as evidence for pantomime. The performance, which takes place in the theatre at Corinth, involves the characters Paris, Juno, Minerva and Venus all dressed in beautiful costumes. The chapter attempts to offer a solution to the notorious ‘problem’ of the elements in this description which do not conform to the accepted view of what a pantomime performance conventionally involved, such as for examples the use of multiple soloists. The discussion takes a closer look at these unusual elements in the description of the performance and discusses them in light of other evidence relating to pantomime, such as the pulpitum in the theatre of Sabratha. The passage is then placed within its context in the narrative and the novel as a whole. The chapter makes the suggestion that description of the pantomime may have substantial significance for the interpretation of the work as a whole.

This chapter describes the role of poetic language in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, and how that role has been differently perceived in Apuleian scholarship. The Metamorphoses is the Apuleian work in which poetic elements figure most prominently, for which its kinship with poetry through its character as a literary fiction is a primary explanation. The examples discussed come from especially marked moments of the novel’s plot, since it is at such moments that poetic allusion and language are likely to come to the fore, but poeticism is a universal strategy in the Metamorphoses. The chapter also argues that traditional views about poetic elements in the novel as evidence of post-classical Latinity can be superseded by a more positive and contextualized approach which opens up new perspectives on Apuleius’ place in the history of Latin prose. It then addresses a further case in which poetic language contributes to impressive and heightened scenes in the novel, and in which one can see the diction of Apuleian prose not only employing existing poetic terms, but creating new ones by analogy with poetic models.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of debates concerning The Golden Ass. It then explains that the growth in the study of ancient prose fiction has grown enormously as the narrative sophistication and hermeneutic complexity of these texts have become more generally recognized.

This chapter explores the Metamorphoses of Apuleius from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. From Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages various strategies to accommodate, within a Christian culture, the pagan pantheon of classical Greece and Rome evolved. Apuleius was not only born into the Christian era but, as an educated philosopher, in a position to embrace or reject Christian Truth. In the Metamorphoses, he could actually be seen to be advocating an Egyptian cult which, at the beginning of the first millennium, was one of Christianity's strongest rivals.

This chapter explores Apuleian influence in the Middle Ages. The importance of Monte Cassino in preserving (and providing early responses to) Apuleius' works is discussed. Evidence is presented that the most educated minds of the period could (re-)create Apuleian effects through their imitation of narrative and descriptive sources (such as the De nuptiis), which were themselves suffused with Apuleian themes and diction.

This chapter explores the rediscovery of The Golden Ass. Evidence of first-hand acquaintance with The Golden Ass exists from the beginning of the trecento. By the middle of the 14th century, copies are in the hands of the leading humanists Petrarch and Boccaccio. By the end of the century, Psyche has been re-enthroned in the Genealogia, and The Golden Ass is on its way to becoming part of the common property of the Italian Renaissance.

This chapter explores the printing of Apuleius' works. In 1464, two German clerics, Konrad Sweynheim and Arnold Pannartz, arrived at the Benedictine monastery of Santa Scolastica in Subiaco, 47 miles to the east of Rome. What made these new arrivals unique was their baggage. They brought with them items that had never been used before in Italy: cases of movable type, that marvel of 15th-century German ingenuity which had transformed the familiar technology of agricultural extraction (the screw-press) into an engine of reproduction. In 1469, the editio princeps of Apuleius' works appeared (without commentary) in Rome, the colophon being dated 28 February. The folio was edited by Sweynheim and Pannartz's corrector, the Bishop of Aleria (in Corsica), Giovanni Andrea de Bussi (Johannes Andreas de Buxis), and dedicated to no less a personage than Pope Paul II (1464-71) who had appointed him papal librarian in 1467.

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (‘The Strife of Love in a Dream of Poliphilo’) — first published in Venice in December 1499 — has long been regarded (particularly by art critics and bibliophiles) as one of the great glories (and curiosities) of Western civilization. This chapter argues that the Hypnerotomachia is probably the most remarkable piece of prose fiction to emerge in the 15th century and deserves an honoured place in the Western Canon between the Decameron and Gargantua and Pantagruel. It is also the work of Renaissance literature that displays most exuberantly its debts to Apuleius.

This chapter focuses on William Adlington's translation of The Golden Ass. It argues that Adlington gave English readers a reasonably complete, adequately accurate, and eminently readable Ass, unburdened by the weight of Beroaldo's commentary or the exegetical yoke of Fulgentius, Boccaccio, and Michel, but spared the emasculating knife wielded by Boiardo, Firenzuola, and la Bouthière.

This chapter explores Apuleian influences in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Upon his death in 1586, Sidney left behind two versions of Arcadia: the so-called Old Arcadia, a pastoral tragicomedy ‘in five books or acts’ completed in about 1581; and a so-called New Arcadia, a much revised and expanded version in two and a half books which was abandoned in 1584. It is argued that the revision manifests contradictory impulses — an attempt to Heliodoreanize the work, to render it more serious, edifying, and stable, coupled with a centrifugal tendency to explore more dynamic possibilities of narrative and characterization (including those provided by The Golden Ass). The paradox is that the very qualities — the moral and imaginative dynamics — which invest the New Arcadia with such interest, also account for its formal failure. But that failure was as productive as it was inevitable. The Arcadia is one of the earliest examples of comparative criticism of the ancient novels and it serves as a case study of the sorts of tensions and possibilities facing early-modern writers of fiction.

This chapter discusses Apuleian influences in Shakespeare's works. It argues that although it may appear that Shakespeare's natural genius made him a particularly acute reader of The Golden Ass, the accumulated evidence of Apuleian presence in the Shakespearian corpus suggests that The Golden Ass exerted a profound influence, providing a rich resource of interactive elements which contributed to the proteanism of his own dramatic art.

Having considered the Romans' relationship with Greek culture from Cicero by way of the Elder Seneca, Quintilian, the Younger Pliny, and Suetonius down to Apuleius, in particular, the implications of code-switching and the linguistic annexation that made Greek a resource for the improvement of Latin and a mark of superior Roman education, the chapter turns to the specific cases of Fronto, in whom Greek negotiates social complications (as in the correspondence with Marcus, does the language of love), particularly between superior and inferior, and of Gellius, who is far more relaxed about Greek discourse and ready to admit that Latin cannot always compete, but brings out cases where it does. Moreover, he expects a Roman to be master of the latter, his own language, as well as Greek. Finally, these authors' practice in respect of Greek is compared with those of Tertullian, Aelian, and Ulpian.

Chapter 3 states that the library need not be a physical collection of texts, and it explores the phenomenon of the learned literary individual who becomes a virtual library. The personified library grows out of the person who had to personify literature in an earlier period and he becomes an authorized and authorizing figure, who, as the example of Aristophanes, the first librarian at Alexandria, shows, can attest to the legitimacy of texts. Individuals such as Longinus, Nepotianus, and Apuleius come to embody their society's learning and culture, although in later antiquity, with Athenaeus, the memorization of literary texts places the library‐individuals under great pressure as the attempt to accrue literary authority becomes an exaggerated and ridiculous venture.