Apuleius

• 1. Introduction

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  Apuleius was born around 124 AD in Madauros, a colonia on the North African coast, and he described himself as "half-Numidian half-Gaetulian." He left behind the only ancient Latin novel to survive in its entirety, a courtroom defense that still reads as a work of literature, and philosophical treatises that attracted the hostile attention of no less a figure than Augustine of Hippo. Who was this man who traveled from North Africa to Athens, Rome, Egypt, and Asia Minor, accumulated initiations into multiple mystery cults, married a wealthy widow under suspicious circumstances, and then stood trial before a Roman proconsul on a charge of witchcraft? How did a philosopher end up defending himself against accusations of magic spells? And how did a donkey end up at the center of the only complete Latin novel the ancient world left us?

• 2. A Life in Motion

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  Madauros, the city where Apuleius grew up, stood well away from the Romanized Mediterranean coast, yet it contained what ancient visitors recognized as pristine Roman ruins. That same city later hosted the early education of Augustine of Hippo, a fact that plants Apuleius in a lineage of remarkable thinkers from the same provincial soil. When Apuleius and his brother lost their father, a duumvir or municipal magistrate, they each inherited close to two million sesterces.

  Apuleius studied first at Carthage, where he later settled, then traveled to Athens for Platonist philosophy, then to Rome for Latin rhetoric. He is thought to have worked in the law courts there before returning to North Africa. His journeys to Asia Minor and Egypt deepened his knowledge of philosophy and religion, but they also drained his inheritance.

  He became an initiate in several Greco-Roman mystery cults, including the Dionysian Mysteries. He served as a priest of Asclepius. Augustine recorded that he also held the position of sacerdos provinciae Africae, meaning priest of the province of Carthage. By the time he set out for Alexandria, Apuleius was a man of considerable religious experience and depleted funds.

• 3. The Trial at Sabratha

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  On the road to Alexandria, Apuleius fell ill at Oea, the city now known as Tripoli. A man named Sicinius Pontianus, someone he had befriended in Athens, received him into his home. Pontianus's mother, Pudentilla, was a very rich widow. With Pontianus's own encouragement, Apuleius agreed to marry her.

  The arrangement made enemies. Pontianus's father-in-law, Herennius Rufinus, stood to lose access to Pudentilla's wealth once she remarried outside the family. He assembled a coalition of accusers: Pontianus himself was drawn in, along with Pontianus's younger brother Sicinius Pudens, described in the source as "a mere boy," and their paternal uncle, Sicinius Aemilianus. Together they charged Apuleius with winning Pudentilla's affections through charms and magic spells.

  The case was heard around 158 AD in Sabratha, near Tripoli, before the proconsul Claudius Maximus. Apuleius delivered his own defense, and that speech was subsequently published under the title Apologia, formally known as Apulei Platonici pro Se de Magia. The defense is organized in three parts: first, refuting charges against his personal conduct and arguing that his marriage to Pudentilla carried no mercenary motive; second, reframing his so-called magical activities as scientific experiments befitting a follower of Aristotle and Hippocrates; third, narrating the events at Oea since his arrival and dismantling the prosecution's specific arguments one by one. In the process, Apuleius turned on Herennius Rufinus directly, accusing him of turning his own house into a brothel and prostituting his wife. The defense, by all surviving accounts, was spirited and successful.

• 4. The Golden Ass

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  Lucius, the protagonist of Apuleius's Metamorphoses, introduces himself as a relative of the philosophers Plutarch and Sextus of Chaeronea. He experiments with magic and is accidentally transformed into a donkey. In that animal form he witnesses and overhears events no ordinary person would encounter, traveling through a series of misadventures before escaping his predicament in an unexpected way through the intervention of the goddess Isis.

  Nested inside this frame story are several digressions. The longest is the tale of Cupid and Psyche, which scholars have noted is a rare example of a fairy tale preserved inside an ancient literary text. The novel's closing section follows Lucius through the rituals of Isis worship: he abstains from forbidden foods, bathes, purifies himself, and is introduced to the Navigium Isidis. The secrets of the cult's books are explained to him in stages. His initiation involves a trial by the elements on a journey to the underworld. Isis then directs him toward Rome, where he seeks initiation into the cult of Osiris. He eventually joins the pastophoroi, a group of priests who serve both Isis and Osiris.

  The praenomen "Lucius" now attached to Apuleius himself does not appear in any ancient source. Late-medieval manuscripts assigned it to him by borrowing the name of his novel's own hero.

• 5. Philosopher and Controversialist

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  Florida is a compilation of twenty-three excerpts from various speeches and lectures Apuleius delivered during his career. De Platone et dogmate eius, or On Plato and His Doctrine, outlines Plato's physics and ethics across two books and opens with a life of Plato himself. These texts, along with the Apologia, provide most of what is known about Apuleius's personality and activities.

  His treatise on the existence and nature of daemons, those intermediaries between gods and humans, drew sustained hostile attention from Augustine of Hippo, who attacked it across Books VIII through X of The City of God. The same work was taken up more briefly by Lactantius. Within that treatise, Apuleius included a passage comparing gods and kings, and embedded in that passage is the first recorded occurrence of the proverb "familiarity breeds contempt." His Latin phrasing reads: parit enim conversatio contemptum, raritas conciliat admirationem.

  Apuleius occasionally gave public speeches that drew large audiences. He was also entrusted with organizing gladiatorial shows and wild beast events in the province. The senate of Carthage and other senates honored him with statues. He also wrote technical treatises on politics, dendrology, agriculture, medicine, natural history, astronomy, music, and arithmetic, and he translated Plato's Phaedo into Latin. None of those works survived.

• 6. Legacy and Lost Threads

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  No record of Apuleius's activities survives after the year 170. Some scholars take this silence as evidence that he died around 171; others argue he may have lived until 180 or even 190. The date, place, and circumstances of his death remain entirely unknown.

  Works circulated under his name that he did not write. These include Peri Hermeneias, a Latin guide to Aristotelian logic; the Asclepius, a paraphrase of a lost Greek dialogue featuring Asclepius and Hermes Trismegistus; and the Herbarium Apuleii Platonici, attributed to a figure scholars call Pseudo-Apuleius. The Apuleian Sphere, a magical prognosticating device for predicting whether a patient would survive, appears in a text addressed from Petosiris to Nechepso and carries his name under the alternative titles "Columcille's Circle" and "Petosiris' Circle." Its association with Apuleius says something about the reputation his name acquired long after his death. A philosopher charged with magic in 158 AD became, over centuries, a name that lent authority to occult instruments he never touched.