Apuleius

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Apuleius (Lucius Apuleius, born around 124 CE at Madauros in Roman North Africa) was a Latin orator, novelist, and Platonic philosopher whose work sits at the meeting point of literature, philosophy, and the mystery religions of the later empire. He described himself as a philosophus Platonicus, and the description fits: most of what he wrote turns on questions of the soul, the divine, and the powers that move between them. He was a provincial of the educated kind the second-century empire produced in quantity — Numidian by birth, schooled at Carthage, then at Athens, then for a stretch at Rome, fluent in Greek and Latin both, and able to make a living from declamation in either. The world he moved through was the high Antonine peace, a Mediterranean in which a man from a small inland town could become a celebrity of the lecture-hall and, late in life, a priest of the imperial cult at Carthage with his own statue.

Much of his life is reconstructed from his own mouth, since the surviving works are saturated with self-presentation. The Florida — an anthology of excerpts from his public declamations, assembled in antiquity from the showpieces that made his name — shows the working sophist: a virtuoso who could open a lecture on the parrot or the eagle, glide into a praise of philosophy, and flatter a proconsul, all in the ornate, archaizing, rhythm-conscious Latin that is his signature. The career these fragments imply is that of a star of the Second Sophistic, the Greek-led revival of display oratory that swept the empire in his century; Apuleius is its leading Latin practitioner, and the only one whose range runs from the courtroom to the novel to the philosophical lecture-room within a single body of work.

He is read today above all for the Metamorphoses, the only Latin novel to survive entire, known since Augustine as The Golden Ass. It follows a young man, also called Lucius, who dabbles in magic, is accidentally turned into a donkey, and passes through a long, often bawdy sequence of misfortunes before the goddess Isis restores his human shape and receives him into her cult. A shorter Greek version of the same plot survives — the Lucius, or the Ass transmitted among the works of Lucian — and behind both lies a lost Greek original; Apuleius’s achievement was to take a piece of comic entertainment and graft onto it a frame of religious meaning the Greek tale never carried, turning a story about a man who becomes a beast into a story about a man who is saved. The texture of the book is comic and grotesque — robbers, adulteries, a murdered husband who returns to speak, a wife who keeps her lover in a jar — and for ten of its eleven books the donkey simply endures, an eye and an appetite carried from owner to owner. Then the eleventh book turns abruptly grave. On a moonlit beach Lucius prays to the queen of heaven, and she rises from the sea to answer him by every name the peoples of the empire have given her, declaring that her true name among the Egyptians is Isis. The speech she makes is an aretalogy in the form the cult itself used — a litany of the goddess’s names and powers, the single mother under whom Cybele, Minerva, Venus, Diana, Proserpina, Ceres, Juno, Hecate, and the rest are local masks of one queen of the elements — and it is among the fullest pagan statements of the impulse to gather the gods of the empire into one. He eats the roses that lift the enchantment, joins her procession, and is initiated — in language deliberately withheld from the uninitiated, the narrator stating only that he approached the boundary of death, trod the threshold of Proserpina, and was carried through all the elements before returning. The reticence is itself doctrine: the mystery is precisely what cannot be told to those outside it, and the text performs the silence it describes. He dedicates his life to the goddess, takes on the shaved head of her priesthood, and is initiated a second and a third time, into the rites of Osiris at Rome. How seriously this religious turn is meant — genuine devotion, or a satirist’s last surprise sprung on a reader lulled by ten books of farce — has been argued over for centuries.

Embedded near the center of the novel is the longest of its inset tales, the story of Cupid and Psyche: a mortal girl so beautiful she draws the jealousy of Venus, married in the dark to a husband she is forbidden to see, who loses him when she lights a lamp to look, and who must wander the earth through a sequence of impossible labors — sorting a heap of mixed grain, fetching golden fleece, descending into the underworld for a box of Proserpina’s beauty — before she is reunited with him and made immortal. The Greek word psychē means soul, and erōs means love, and readers from late antiquity onward took the tale as an allegory: the soul that loses the divine through curiosity, suffers, descends, and is restored. The mythographer Fulgentius, writing around 550, already read Psyche as a soul driven from paradise by forbidden looking; the Renaissance Platonists made the reading systematic, fitting the descent and return of Psyche to the soul’s fall into the body and its ascent back toward the One that runs through later Platonism and the Neoplatonism that grew from it. Whether Apuleius built the allegory in or the allegory was built onto him, the tale became the single most reproduced piece of pagan narrative in Western art.

The other works are firmer ground for his thought. The Apologia — its full title roughly In Defense of Himself on the Charge of Magic — is the published text of a real defense speech, delivered around 158 or 159 CE before Claudius Maximus, proconsul of Africa, at Sabratha. The young Apuleius had married Aemilia Pudentilla, a wealthy widow of Oea many years his senior whom he had met through her son, his former fellow-student; the family of her first husband, fearing the fortune would leave the line, charged him with having won her by magic. The prosecution assembled a portrait of the sinister philosopher — secret rites, strange fish bought from fishermen, a boy who fell in a fit during a private ceremony, a wooden figure kept wrapped in a cloth — and Apuleius answered each item by turning it back into something ordinary and learned: the fish were dissected for natural philosophy, the boy was an epileptic, the figure a Mercury commissioned as a devotional object. The speech is the fullest first-person account of an ancient magic trial that survives, and it is double-edged: in clearing himself of being a magus in the criminal sense, Apuleius cheerfully concedes that the true philosopher does study the hidden workings of nature and the commerce of gods and souls — that there is a respectable magic, the priestly art the Persians gave the word to, which is not what he is accused of. The defense thus draws the line later writers would keep redrawing — between forbidden sorcery and the licit knowledge of hidden causes that the philosopher, and later the theurgist whose rites would occupy the Neoplatonists, claimed for their own. He won; the marriage stood.

His philosophical writings — On the God of Socrates (De deo Socratis), On Plato and His Doctrine (De Platone et eius dogmate), and the cosmological On the World (De mundo, a Latin adaptation of a Greek treatise) — belong to the movement scholars call Middle Platonism, the long reworking of Plato in the centuries between the Old Academy and Plotinus, a current also carried by his near-contemporary Numenius of Apamea. On Plato is a school handbook, dividing philosophy into physics, ethics, and logic and laying out a three-tier divine order. On the God of Socrates is the more original. Its starting point is the inner voice Socrates said warned him away from wrong actions — the daimonion — which Apuleius lifts out of biography and into cosmology. Between the high gods, who are perfect and impassive and never touch the world directly, and mortal beings, who are subject to time and change, there must be a middle order: the daemons, airy beings who feel as men feel and live as long as gods, ferrying prayers and vows upward and divine influence downward across a gap the two ends could not bridge alone. He sorts them into kinds — some never joined to bodies, some that are the souls of the living, some the souls of the dead — and ranks the highest as the personal guardian each person carries, of which Socrates’ voice was the clearest case. The architecture is drawn from Plato’s Symposium, where love is named a great daemon between gods and men, and it is the most complete statement of the doctrine to reach the Latin West. That picture of a populated middle realm would echo through later Platonism and, in a different key, through Christian thought — where it became the ground both of angelology and of the demonology that argued against it.

For the Christian readers were listening. Augustine devoted long stretches of The City of God, in its eighth and ninth books, to refuting Apuleius by name: the daemons that On the God of Socrates offered as benign intermediaries he recast as the fallen spirits of the Latin tradition, mediators not of reconciliation but of vice, and the very fullness and respectability of Apuleius’s account made it the best target. The earlier apologists had taken the same materials in the same direction. Tertullian, writing in the same African world a generation later, and Lactantius, the Christian Cicero of the early fourth century, both built their case for the demonic on the philosophers’ own teaching that the air is thick with intermediary spirits — granting the pagan daemonology its furniture and inverting its valuation. The pagan map of the middle realm was not erased; it was annexed.

Late antiquity remembered Apuleius as a magician as much as a philosopher, and the reputation outgrew the man. By Augustine’s day his name was set beside Apollonius of Tyana as a worker of wonders, a figure the Christians had to explain away and some pagans held up as a counter to the Gospel miracles. The folk memory of North Africa kept him a sorcerer for centuries. One transmission fixed the association in writing: the Latin Asclepius, the great Hermetic dialogue in which Hermes Trismegistus instructs his pupil on god, cosmos, the making of god-bearing statues, and the prophesied desolation of Egypt, came down through the medieval manuscripts grouped with Apuleius’s philosophical works and under his name. Modern scholarship sets that attribution aside — the Latin is not his, the original Greek Perfect Discourse belongs to the third or fourth century, and Augustine, who quotes the Asclepius and the De deo Socratis together, already noticed they did not read like one author. But for the long Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance the Asclepius was Apuleian, and the pairing tied his name into the Hermetic current for readers who never checked the philology — the one strand of the Hermetica known in the Latin West across the centuries when the Greek Corpus Hermeticum had been lost to it.

The Renaissance Platonists read all of it as a single testimony. To Marsilio Ficino and the Florentine circle, Apuleius was at once the witness to a saving Egyptian wisdom — the priest of Isis, the transmitter of Hermes — and a master of the doctrine of intermediary spirits that underwrote their own theory of natural magic and the soul’s ascent — a man who had, in the language of fable, transmitted a saving knowledge of divine things. His daemonology fed the period’s elaborate hierarchies of spirits; his Isis-book was taken as evidence that the ancients had possessed, under the veil of fable, the same hidden theology the Corpus Hermeticum seemed to teach. The tale of Psyche was read as the descent and return of the soul, the Golden Ass as a parable of the man who falls into the brute and is raised by grace, and the whole was folded into the prisca theologia, the ancient wisdom the Platonists believed ran from Egypt to Plato to themselves.

Texts, editions, and scholarship

The standard Latin texts are in the Loeb Classical Library and the Teubner and Oxford editions; for the Apologia, an open-access Latin text with running commentary is hosted by the Dickinson College Commentaries, edited by Christopher Francese and collaborators, which sets the trial in its legal and rhetorical context. The major English study of the corpus is S. J. Harrison’s Apuleius: A Latin Sophist (Oxford, 2000), which reads him as a performer first, a sophist whose philosophy and fiction are facets of one rhetorical career; B. L. Hijmans’s survey of Apuleius philosophus Platonicus (in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, 1987) maps the philosophical works. Richard Fletcher’s Apuleius’ Platonism: The Impersonation of Philosophy (Cambridge, 2014) argues against any clean split between the novelist and the Platonist, treating the whole output as a sustained performance of what it is to philosophize. On the contested authorship of the Latin Asclepius, Vincent Hunink’s study Apuleius and the ‘Asclepius’ (in Vigiliae Christianae, 1996) lays out the manuscript and stylistic grounds for the modern verdict. For the Hermetic dialogue itself, Brian Copenhaver’s Hermetica (Cambridge, 1992) gives the authoritative translation and notes; the older public-domain English of the Corpus is available through G. R. S. Mead’s Thrice-Greatest Hermes in the Library. For the Cupid and Psyche reception and Augustine’s polemic, the trail runs from Fulgentius through Ficino to the modern handbooks; Augustine’s own refutation stands in Books 8 and 9 of The City of God, where the daemonology of On the God of Socrates is quoted at length and turned against itself.

What the surviving texts give is narrower and stranger than the legend: a brilliant rhetorician who wrote the era’s one complete novel, took Plato’s god seriously, mapped the airy country between the gods and the dead, and left behind the most vivid pagan account of what it felt like to be received into a mystery.

→ In the library: The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — II.(III.) To Asclepius · Mead — Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. I

→ Related: Numenius Of Apamea · Neoplatonism · Hermes Trismegistus · Gnosis · Isis · Psyche · Mystery Religions · Magic · Demonology · Plato · Platonism · Socrates · Asclepius · Corpus Hermeticum · Theurgy · Lactantius · Tertullian · Marsilio Ficino