(ca. 125-after 170) novelist, philosopher, rhetorician
Apuleius was born in Madaura, a Roman city in North Africa. His father was a duumvir, or provincial magistrate. Apuleius attended the University of Carthage and then studied philosophy in Athens, where he followed the teachings of plato. In 155 he married Pudentilla, a wealthy widow, but was brought to court and accused of seducing her by magic to acquire her money. Apuleius freed himself from the charge by giving a speech, known today as Apologia, in his own defense. He then settled in the African city of Carthage, where he wrote and gave lectures, but nothing is known about his later life.
Though Apuleius wrote a number of philosophical works, he is best known as the author of the Metamorphoses, or Transformations (also called The Golden Ass), the only complete Roman novel to survive from antiquity.
The novel relates the adventures of a young man named Lucius, who engages in a love affair with a slave girl to persuade her to show him the forbidden magical practices by which her mistress transforms herself into an owl. Lucius tries to transform himself but turns into a donkey instead. He then goes through a series of bizarre, dangerous, and humiliating adventures under different masters. Finally he prays to the Egyptian goddess Isis, “the loftiest of deities, queen of departed spirits, foremost of heavenly dwellers, the single embodiment of all gods and goddesses.” Isis appears to him and changes him back to his human form, and he devotes himself to her as a priest.
For a long time, it was thought that the Metamorphoses was autobiographical, but it is actually based on an earlier novel by lucian, Lucius, or the Ass. Apuleius embedded some other stories within the narrative and changed the ending to reflect the hero’s salvation by Isis. Most of the embedded stories are in the style of the “Milesian tales,” the bawdy stories, written in extravagant language, told by Egyptian street-corner storytellers.
Since Apuleius’s novel is largely comic, many critics have believed it was intended as simple entertainment without any moral message. Others see it as a serious story of religious conversion. Carl Schlamm describes the novel as “a work of narrative entertainment. .. [A]mong the pleasures it offers is the reinforcement of moral, philosophic and religious values shared by the author and his audience.” In this sense, the story is allegorical. It also gives readers an excellent picture of the lives of people in the second century, especially of the popularity of the mystery religion of Isis.
One of the embedded stories in the Metamorphoses has become much better known than the novel itself—the myth of Cupid and Psyche, for which Apuleius is the earliest source. The character Lucius listens to the myth when he is in his donkey form. Psyche is so beautiful that people worship her instead of the goddess Venus, and the jealous Venus arranges to have Psyche exposed on a mountain as prey for a monster. But Venus’s son Cupid (Love) falls in love with Psyche. He rescues her and visits her by night as her husband, but forbids her to see his face. Urged by her jealous sisters, Psyche looks on her husband’s face one night with a lamp, but he awakens, rebukes her for her lack of faith, and deserts her. The grieving Psyche wanders far and wide and must perform many labors assigned her by Venus, but she finally wins back her husband and becomes a goddess.
This story contains the themes of the entire novel. Both Lucius and Psyche are led by curiosity to try to see forbidden secrets of the gods, for which they both pay dearly. Both stories illustrate Plato’s conception of the striving of the soul (psyche in Greek) for union with God.
Apuleius’s philosophical works The God of Socrates, Plato and his Doctrines, and On the World, helped transmit knowledge of the teaching of Plato and his followers to the middle ages. The Florida is made up of excerpts from Apuleius’s lectures in Carthage.
The Metamorphoses has had a great influence on world literature since it was rediscovered in the renaissance. Boccaccio and a host of successive writers have analyzed, been influenced by, and retold the tale of Cupid and Psyche, as can be seen in William Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and John Keats’s “Ode to Psyche.”
An English Version of a Work by Apuleius
Apuleius: The Golden Ass. Translated by P. G. Walsh. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1994.
A Work about Apuleius
Schlamm, Carl C. The Metamorphoses of Apuleius: On Making an Ass of Oneself. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
