Apuleius - The Golden Ass

THE GOLDEN ASS

APULEIUS (we do not know his other names) was born about AD 125 in Madaura or Madauros, a Roman colony in North Africa, now Mdaourouch in Algeria. His father, from whom he inherited a substantial fortune, was one of the two chief magistrates (duouiri) of the city. For his education Apuleius was sent first to Carthage, the capital of Roman North Africa, and then to Athens. During his time abroad he travelled widely, spending some time in Rome, where he practised as a pleader in the courts. While detained by illness on his way home at Oea in Tripoli, he met and married the wealthy widow Pudentilla. This was at the instance of one of her sons, whom he had known at Rome; but other members of her family objected to the marriage and prosecuted Apuleius on various charges, principally that of winning Pudentillas affections by magic. Their accusations were brilliantly, and it would seem successfully, rebutted in his speech De Magia or Apology, delivered in or shortly before AD 160. He appears to have spent the rest of his life in Carthage, where he became a notable public figure, holding the chief priesthood of the province and receiving other public honours.

The age in which Apuleius lived was that of the Antonine emperors Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, described by his contemporary the Greek sophist Aelius Aristides in his oration To Rome as a period of unexampled prosperity and felicity, a verdict echoed by Gibbon in the opening chapters of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was an age in which success in public speaking offered a passport to fame, and Apuleius owed his contemporary reputation to the mastery of language deployed both in his many display speeches, of which we have excerpted specimens in his Florida, and in the Neoplatonic philosophical writings which earned him a statue in his native city. Of these the most important which survive are On the God of Socrates (De Deo Socratis) and On Plato and his Doctrine (De Platone et eius Dogmate). An imposing range of other writings in both prose and verse we know of only from fragments and references in other authors. The modern world knows him best as the author of the great serio-comic novel The Golden Ass or Transformations (Metamorphoses), which he is generally thought to have written after his return to Carthage. He probably died about AD 180.

E. J. KENNEY is Emeritus Kennedy Professor of Latin in the University of Cambridge. He was born in 1924 and was educated at Christs Hospital and Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he was Scholar and Fellow. In the Second World War he served in the Royal Signals in the United Kingdom and India, being commissioned in 1944. From 1953 to 1991 he was a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, where at various times he held the offices of Director of Studies in Classics, Senior Tutor, Librarian and Domestic Bursar. His publications include a critical edition of Ovids amatory works (1961; second edition, 1995) and editions with commentary of Lucretius De rerum natura III (1971), Apuleius Cupid and Psyche (1990) and Ovids Heroides XVIXXI (1996); and he is currently preparing a commentary on Books VIIIX of Ovids Metamorphoses, to appear in a five-volume edition of the entire poem. In 1968 he was Sather Professor of Classical Literature at the University of California at Berkeley; his lectures were published in 1974 as The Classical Text (Italian translation, 1995). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a past President of the Joint Association of Classical Teachers and of the Classical Association, and is currently President of The Horatian Society.