What's the Price of Admission? Audiences and Spectacles in the Golden Ass
A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School
of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Art
by Aaron Donald James Kelsh
May 2013

Abstract The Golden Ass of Apuleius is a novel with an apparent radical break in continuity between the first ten books and the eleventh. On a plausible natural reading, the first ten books, which describe the comic adventures of Lucius and contain several inset tales on themes of deception and adultery, do nothing to prepare the reader for Lucius' entry into the priesthood of Isis and the homily upon the goddess, which provide the material for the eleventh book. This literary analysis will argue for the thesis that the novel's structural and narrative unity resides in the theme of audiences and their reactions to various spectacles. On my reading, audiences in the novel act as a study of the psychology of spectatorship, and spectatorship is a metaphor for the reading experience. Storytelling, narrative, and even religion have an element of performance that the Golden Ass explores.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Aaron Kelsh was born in Oshawa, Ontario in 1979 and received a BA in Classical Languages from the University of Guelph in 2005. He is married to Nicole Lahaie and is father to his treasured son, Jasper James Morgan Kelsh. He hopes to earn a PhD in Classics and pursue an academic and teaching career.
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Acknowledgments I would like to thank Charles Brittain, Hayden Pelliccia, and Michael Fontaine for serving as my advisory committee. Their invaluable advice and support saw me through this project and will stay with me in my future undertakings. I owe the deepest thanks as well to my wife Nicole who has been my side from my earliest undergraduate years.
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Table of Contents 1. Autobiographical Propaganda and Allegory 2. Audiences and Spectacles in the Golden Ass 3. Curiositas and Platonic Psychology 4. The Reader as Spectator
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Chapter 1: Autobiographical Propaganda and Allegory In the eleventh book of the Golden Ass, Lucius, the narrator and protagonist of the novel, who has undergone innumerable trials and cruelties while magically transformed into an ass, is finally granted relief from his suffering and returned to human form. His re-transformation is the result of the intervention of the goddess Isis, who appeared to him towards the end of the tenth book and took pity on him. The scene is this: in full view of a crowd of pious and joyful Isis-worshipers, he approaches her priest and takes from him roses, the cure for his affliction. The assemblage, full of delight and reverence before the solemnity and power of the cult, exclaims that they are witnessing a miracle worthy of the might of their goddess, and that furthermore, this young man is obviously an upright and virtuous person, to have so earned her blessing. The enthusiasm already stirred up by the impressive procession of cult-objects and the more devoted worshipers is amplified, just as the anxiety felt by the sympathetic reader, who has been Lucius' companion through innumerable beatings, humiliations, and brushes with death, is at last dispelled. Benevolent divinity alone has been able to rescue our hero from endless torment: in the words of the crowd, only a man who has lived an innocent and pious life could be worthy of such divine favour (felix hercules et ter beatus, qui vitae scilicet praecedentis innocentia fideque meruierit tam praeclarum de caelo patrocinium).1 In this incredible sight, the power and wisdom of the goddess are confirmed! The problem is, they are completely wrong.
Lucius is far from innocent. He has in the course of the novel pretended to love a girl just to gain access to her mistress, who was a witch, watched with pleasure as a boy who was mean to him was eviscerated by a bear, and listened with lascivious attention to several stories of adultery and murder.
Nor is he pious. In the words of the priest of Isis himself, he has given in to a curiosity for the
1 11.16.10-13.
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unholy magical arts and sought knowledge of divine matters he was forbidden by heaven to learn about, a curiosity that was the direct cause of his transformation and everything that he endured while in the form of an ass.
The crowd is swept up with religious enthusiasm, and they know nothing of Lucius personally. So why is their mistake a problem? First, I am not arguing that this passage is the central problem of the text. It is rather a symptom of a problem that comes into focus when one looks at the several descriptions of crowds and audiences in the novel and how they react to what they see, how they understand or misunderstand what happens in front of them and their relationship to it. Spectators and spectatorship compose a persistent theme from the novel's beginning to here, at its end. On a preliminary examination of these scenes it is clear that they contribute something substantial to the novel's meaning, although as such they have received comparatively little attention from scholars, who have traditionally been more concerned with other overarching themes such as whether the novel contains a serious religious message, whether it is a moral warning about the dangers of curiositas, and to what extent it is informed by what is known about Apuleius' professed Platonism.
'Lucius et Apulée ne sont pas une seule et même personne.' (Fick-Michel p.18) That much is not in doubt. Lucius is a Greek from Corinth, Apuleius is an African from the provincial town of Madaura; Lucius learned Latin in adulthood, Apuleius was perfectly at home with the language; Lucius was turned into an ass and is a fiction inhabiting a fictional world that obeys laws of its own. However, some scholars have seized upon certain details in Book 11 to support the hypothesis that somewhere toward the end of the novel, the separation between author and protagonist breaks down, and that Lucius effectively becomes Apuleius. This move is meant to deal with the infelicitous break in
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continuity between the ass-tale of the bulk of the novel, and the sudden apparently serious introduction of Isis. Between the ridiculous fantasy of Lucius' transformation and the end of the novel, a very serious reality intervenes. I will refer to the various interpretations that advance this hypothesis as autobiographical propaganda. The claim made is that in Book 11, Apuleius is proselytizing for the Isiscult, of which he is a devoted member, and that he is doing so by transforming Lucius into himself. The denouement of Book 11 is its 'autobiographical ending' (Dietrich ?, p. 206), and from it several critics have inferred that Apuleius himself was a member of the Isis cult, as Anderson does when he asks of the book 'Why does Apuleius opt for Isis (out of his many conversions)?' (?, p. 82) and2, and when he even simply refers events in the narrative to Apuleius rather than Lucius: 'Moreover it is particularly striking that the two final initiations of Apuleius are said to be profitable to his career' (Anderson p. 83, my emphasis). The position rests on this claim and two further observations: first, the disruption in the narrative is real. Whether we judge it the work of a competent artist or not, the fantastic adventures of Lucius are now left behind as the book builds towards his return to human form, he loses the characteristics he gained as a fictional entity, and in their place takes on the more general faults that led Apuleius himself to the worship of Isis. After his transformation, Lucius/Apuleius then tells us about the blessings he received as a devotee of Isis, in order to glorify the cult and hopefully procure new members from among his readers. I label this line of interpretation autobiographical propaganda to distinguish it from another, broader type of inquiry, that collects incidents from anywhere in the Golden Ass and tries to match them up with known facts about Apuleius' life. Autobiographical propaganda is specifically an attempt to account for the content of Lucius' conversion and Book 11, as well as the fact that it is there at all, by reference to Apuleius' biography. P.G. Walsh, one of the most eloquent proponents of an autobiographical reading of Book 11 summarizes the view nicely, although it should be noted that he does not hold the view that all the 'mystical' details of Lucius' initiation need to
2 See also Moreschini, Apuleio e il platonismo p. 13.
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be read as autobiographical; what remains is an Apuleius who was a supported of the Isis-cult and capped a piece of light entertainment rather ineptly with a serious work of religious propaganda:
Apuleius commenced his romance without a serious purpose. His initial plan was to expand the short story which he found in his source by the exploitation of its chilling, comic, and romantic potentialities; so he developed the characterization, described situations in more amusing detail, and above all incorporated anecdotes to adorn the narrative. After he had completed the main lines of his novel, he later decided to reorient it for the serious and indeed propagandizing purpose of glorifying the Isaic cult. In this he was moved by personal feelings and loyalties. But this autobiographical element need not have taken the form of a mystical experience, as many scholars have assumed; instead, it may have been chiefly provoked by a reaction to the growth of Christianity in Africa. ('Lucius Madaurensis', p. 156)
Second, the basic shape of the narrative as well as many of its details were drawn by Apuleius from a Greek text, but to judge from its epitome, the Ὄνος, and Photius' summary, not a whisper of anything like Book 11 was present in the original, and is wholly Apuleius' invention. This new material that wholly transforms the novel must have some deep significance, and since there is little to nothing in the way of humour in it, it must be meant to celebrate in serious terms the power of the Egyptian goddess.
Third, we know from the Apology that Apuleius belonged to mystery cults, and further, from the Apology and his other writings, that he treated religious observance as a serious and solemn matter, and at Apology 55.8, Apuleius says that he was initiated into several cults (sacris pluribus initia...particitavi). Although not explicitly mentioned anywhere in his corpus, there is no reason to suppose that the Isis-cult didn't occupy a prominent position among his religious commitments, or
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indeed that it didn't become, at some point in his life before he wrote the Golden Ass, the supreme focus of his religious activities.
Finally, at 11.25 Lucius, who we know from elsewhere in the story is a native of Corinth, is suddenly referred to as from Madaura (Madaurensem), the birthplace of Apuleius himself. Such a striking shift can only be meant to indicate that with the narrative's turn to Isis, Lucius is no longer a fictional Greek fixated on magic, and is now the author. Once we feel a deep break with everything in Lucius' history, and with the logic of the world of the Golden Ass, in which there is plenty of magic but not a hint that gods are active in the world, we are in the presence of Apuleius. Madaurensem is the stroke that casts this identification beyond all doubt.
Autobiographical propaganda deals with the problem of Book 11's lack of connection to the rest of the novel by conceding that there is indeed little or none to be found, but at least offers an answer to the problem of Book 11's existence. The novel's claim to be a coherent work of art is sacrificed, but in its place we gain on this reading a deeper understanding of the psychology of a committed religious man of the 2nd century, a rare and precious possession. But this line of interpretation suffers from serious problems. To begin with, from the fact that the contents of Book 11 are apparently entirely absent from the Greek original, it does not follow that they are Apuleius' invention. We know that, on the whole, Apuleius was more an adapter than an original creator: besides the frame-story of the Golden Ass itself, the De Platone is sufficiently like Alcinous in many of its details to suggest that it is an adaptation of another work, the De Mundo is a translation of an Aristotelian text, and there is reason to believe that much of the Cupid and Psyche was imported from elsewhere. Indeed, everything in the Apuleian corpus can reliably be traced back to Greek models (Sandy, Greek World p. 38).
Next, although Apuleius claims cult affiliations, we have to ask why he never mentions Isis at all in any of his other works, and why the statue erected in his honour at Madaura bore the inscription
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Philosophus Platonicus, the mark by which he apparently wanted most to be known, judging from all his extant writings and speeches. Why not mention his affiliation with the Isis-cult, when at the time of Apuleius' career, it was anything but a fringe religion, and was 'most respectable and chaste' (Heisermann, The Novel Before the Novel, p. 148)? We know that he held the priesthood of Asclepius, but this, like priesthoods in most established cults, was a political and honorary position that alone tells us nothing about the extent of the holder's devotion. We have to conclude that Isis only became a central focus of his life sometime before he wrote Book 11 and after all his other writings, in which he displays no more than a conventional piety--a religious feeling not nearly extreme enough to accompany the massive step of shaving his head and adopting all the outward signs of devotion to one particular cult. There is nothing to rule out such a decisive break somewhere in his later life, although it must be remembered that the only evidence for it would be Book 11 itself. Remember, autobiographical propaganda, in order to contribute anything to our understanding of why Apuleius would include all the many details he does about Lucius' life as a member of the cult, has to account for all these details by referring them to real facts of the author's life, or leave us in a position no better than the one we started in, wondering what contribution Lucius' conversion makes to the meaning of the novel.
Also, why would Apuleius, who continued to be read for centuries after his death, and whose reputation took on a fantastic life of its own in the minds of posterity, never be remembered as a priest of Isis? According to Moreschini, Apuleius was remembered as a magus and a Platonist, principally through an oral tradition based only remotely on his writings, and on the De deo Socratis and the De Platone.
la fama di Apuleio nella tarda antichità è basata piú su di una tradizione orale, non letteraria, che su di una lettura delle sue opere; tra di esse furono sopratutto il De magia e il
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De deo Socratis che dovettero esercitare la loro influenza a diffondere la fama di Apuleio mago. Esattamente le avventure di Lucio nelle Metamorfosi furono pertanto referite allo scrittore Apuleio nella sua individualità. ('Elementi Filosofici', pp. 117-118)
While it is true that some of the beliefs people held about Apuleius as magus (reflected particularly in Augustine) were strange growths only casually based on the Golden Ass and the fact that ancient readers evidently did identify Apuleius with Lucius, as well as the charges of magic leveled against him in the Apology, those in later antiquity who had anything to say about Apuleius seem better acquainted with the texts themselves than Moreschini allows here. Readers sufficiently familiar with the Golden Ass to pick up Lucius' self-identification with Odysseus, and by extension to identify Apuleius himself with the Homeric figure, would not likely be so completely silent on his dedication to Isis if there were any trace of it at all in his biography outside of the extant works.
Furthermore, there are details about Lucius' life in Book 11 that do not match up with everything we know about Apuleius. For example, Lucius is poor and can barely afford the cost of his initiations, while Apuleius appears always to have been quite comfortable financially, having received an expensive education and inheriting two million sesterces from his father. Also, as I have already mentioned, Apuleius everywhere and always presented himself as a philosophus Platonicus, while the most we can say about Lucius is that he is a man of letters (for both these points, see Fick-Michel p. 18). But there seems to be more going on here than just the fact that Apuleius and Lucius do not match up as characters. Lucius is at points described as exactly the opposite of the Apuleius who appears in the Apology. There Apuleius remarks on his hair, a tangled mess through the neglect attendant on a life devoted to study, while Lucius is complemented on his handsome long hair. Lucius' aunt Byrrhena remarks on his 'suculenta gracilitas' (2.2), while the Apuleius of the Apology responds to the 'charge' that he is a handsome philosopher by claiming that hours over texts, the 'continuatio etiam litterati
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laboris', 'sucum exsorbet' (Apology 4.10). This and other perplexing lines of convergence between the Apology and the Golden Ass feed the suspicion that there is indeed some sort of intended connection between the two, although they do little to support the idea that Lucius at any point simply is Apuleius.
Putative connections between the Golden Ass and the Apology pose problems of chronology as well, if their accepted dates are correct. The Apology is usually dated to ? and the Golden Ass to ?, so roughly twenty-five years separate the two. The Apology would have to have been a document of some notoriety if it could be expected to be fresh in the mind of a reader of the novel, let alone relevant enough to Apuleius after such a lapse of time if such cross-references were to have any effect. There need not, however, been such a great lapse of time between the two. The dates for the Apology are quite solid given the internal evidence, but for the Golden Ass they are rather thin. Based on a single reference to two Caesars, we can perhaps fix the date of its publication, but not the composition of the whole or many of its parts. It remains a possibility that Apuleius at the very least wrote parts of the novel, such as those I have just mentioned, far closer to his trial than is usually assumed.
The physical, intellectual, and moral correspondences between Apuleius and Lucius that Hitcher pointed out are either counterbalanced or canceled by the considerations I have listed above. Strict identification of the two through the bulk of the novel is unsustainable, and patchy identification through the first ten books unenlightening. The firmest anchor for autobiographical interpretations lies in the single word Madaurensem, which comes close to the novel's end (11.27). This reference to Apuleius' birthplace becomes the point from which significance can be found for the unobvious series of correspondences that before the reader arrives here don't really amount to anything. For Scobie, this backwards movement was 'retrospective doubt' about Lucius' 'fictional authenticity'.3 Rohde saw this as the point after which Apuleius and Lucius merge. Not very impressed with the loose correspondences

3 'Structure' p. 47.

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between the two before 11.27, which were for him at best a 'flüchtig Durcheinanderschillern,'4 he felt that looking forward from Madaurensem there was a change in some of the details of Lucius' biography that conflicted with what we learn about him earlier, particularly his paupertas and his cultivation of the gloria studiorum. While these two details are not necessarily consonant with what we have come to know about Lucius, it is the arresting Madaurensem that occasions the most assured assertions about an autobiographical foundation for the Isis affair.
While there have been attempts to do away with the problem by positing either a corruption or later insertion at this point, all that would give any reader pause about this word is the interpretive confusion it causes. Nothing in the manuscript suggests that there is anything out of place about it. Moreschini is likely right in his judgment that
il cui significato, sebbene talora sottoposto a nuove interpretazioni e correzioni sul piano testuale, a mio parere deve essere conservato intatto, per cui si deve accettare che implichi un riferimento di Apuleio a se stesso.5
Right not only in rejecting the efforts made to make the word dissolve, but also right to choose his words carefully. Strictly speaking, Madaurensem itself doesn't announce an 'identification' of Lucius with Apuleius, but rather is a 'riferimento' to the author. If we grant that this is what the word does, it still doesn't necessarily follow that it means what happens to Lucius is autobiographical. Lucius doesn’t become a different person, and since he wasn't the same as Apuleius in personality, history, etc. (pace Hitcher), he was always separate from his author. Madaurensem could mean 'everything that now happens to the character Lucius happened to me, although we're quite different people', or 'this didn't happen to me, but I endorse the general message', or simply 'Apuleius hoc fecit'.

4 Zu Apuleius, p. 77 n. 31. 5 'Elementi Filosofici' p. 116.

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Even granting that Book 11 was entirely Apuleius' invention, that he was an enthusiastic consumer of religions, and that Madaurensem is meant to draw the reader's attention to the novel's author, autobiographical propaganda leads to problems when it is followed through to its conclusions. Lucius' experiences with Isis and the Isis-cult are Apuleius'; throwing away the utterly fantastic, we are left with these facts: Lucius/Apuleius is a priest of Isis at Rome, marked by a shaven head, and enjoying a successful career as a prominent orator there. Apuleius inserts Madaurensem into his account so that the identification between the two is absolutely clear. But we have no evidence at all that Apuleius spent any appreciable amount of time at Rome. As far as we know, the only time he ever spent there was a brief stay during his educational travels as a young man, just after he had been to school at Athens, although the feeling that Book 11 must be autobiographical has led at least one scholar to conclude that it must have been written at Rome, and in Apuleius' youth, since Lucius is presented as a young man (Dietrich, Golden Art p. 202). And if Madaurensem is supposed to identify him, who is it meant for? If it is meant for friends, people who already know him intimately, then Book 11 isn't really propaganda, because these friends would already know about his devotion to Isis. If it was meant for a wider public, we have to deal with the fact that we have no reason at all to think that Apuleius was so famous at the Imperial capital that a single reference to his place of birth would have been recognizable to anyone who knew him only by reputation. It does not seem particularly likely that many people at Rome would even know of Madaura, which, although a prosperous town at the time, was still a second-tier outpost in a distant province. As far as the evidence goes, and this we gather exclusively from comments in the Florida, we know only that Apuleius enjoyed some degree of renown at Carthage, which is certainly insufficient to lead to the conclusion that he was of note to anyone at Rome.
Of course, in the face of these difficulties we can throw out the details, which I have singled out
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as problematic, and simply maintain that Book 11 is autobiographical only insofar as it shows that Apuleius thought Isis was important and worthy of serious attention. But this stripped-down position has lost the foundation of autobiography, and brings us right back to where we were when we first asked the questions Why is Book 11 there? What does it do? Autobiographical propaganda sought to answer these by conceding that Book 11 marks an artistically sloppy break, while at least explaining the break by postulating a higher purpose for the novel, one that can be explained by the life and commitments of its author. But that position lacks support in any text outside the novel, and any argument that tries to justify Book 11 by reference to Apuleius' life, when the aspects of that life have to be drawn from the book itself cannot be convincing when subjected to scrutiny. The most reasonable response to these difficulties is to conclude that 'Lucius et Apulée ne sont pas une seule et même personne' (Fick-Michel p. 18), and that 'We do not in fact even know that Apuleius was initiated into the cult of Isis, and it is highly unlikely that he ever served in a priestly rank as a pastophoros, with a shaven head' (Schlam, p. 10). The novel has far more to offer when Book 11 is read as a particularly striking instance of problems of consistency and meaning that riddle the whole text from beginning to end, a final building-block of the strange fictional world that we stumble into when Lucius arrives in Thessaly.
Suspect as it is when it comes to questions of intention or meaning, autobiographical propaganda at least offers a solution to the problem of Madaurensem, and outside of that suspect framework, attempts to explain it have generally been unsatisfactory. One natural response has been to ask whether it can simply be made to go away, postulating some kind of copyist's error or addition. From quite early on, ancient readers identified Lucius with Apuleius, of that there is no doubt. So it is possible that a later reader either thought he saw Madaurensem when he saw something else, or that he in fact inserted it. ?'s attempt to demonstrate how Madaurensem could be a corruption of
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Corinthiensem has found very few adherents. That a later hand replaced Corinthiensem or some sort of identifying mark consistent with Lucius' history with Madaurensem, because he had either forgotten that Lucius is from Corinth or had only read portions of the novel up to this point is possible but of course cannot be proven. If we toss the ball back to Apuleius and hold that he wrote it himself, the best we can manage is to say that it is his imprimatur, a way of assuring that the audience will recognize him as the author--as if the style of the novel alone weren't enough to accomplish this. At least, unlike the case with autobiographical propaganda and an Apuleius resident at Rome and writing for an audience in the capital, we can remain agnostic about whom Apuleius was writing for and who would know him well enough to recognize him on the basis of this identifying mark. In any case, Madaurensem remains a puzzle.
In recent decades, and especially since the publication of Jack Winkler's landmark ?, critics have been moving away from autobiographical propaganda as a solution to the problems posed by Book 11. On many newer readings, the book still marks a collapse of narrative continuity, but instead of being the intrusion of sincere religious convictions external to the fiction of the novel--an intrusion that can only be held to be inept and unconvincing--it is recast as in a significant way as carrying on everything that came before: comedy. The Golden Ass is a series of jokes in an impossible world, and Book 11 is the final joke, either on Lucius, who in his simple-minded willingness to believe anything has been taken in one last time, and now at significant cost to himself; or on the reader, who has read a series of stories designed to entertain and provide light diversion, and now is subjected to an unwelcome chastisement for enjoying stories of magic and adultery, and told that the only way to find happiness and release from the type of inappropriate pleasures the book itself has encouraged is to accept Isis.
For proponents of this view, two threads preserve the novel's continuity even in the face of such
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a shift in tone, comic irreverence before everything that might ordinarily be treated as serious, and the character of Lucius, who as a gullible fool, and by no means a reliable guide to the significance of what happens to him. For example, that a character should be named Socrates and then be subjected to horrible indignities and then suffer a completely unceremonious death under a plane tree, and that the only religious organization besides the cult of Isis, the wandering priests of the of the Dea Syria, should be nothing but a pretext for debauchery, and importantly, for swindling the gullible out of their money, contribute to the construction of a world in which religion and philosophy are either not treated with respect, or are meant to arouse disgust in the reader. How is the reader expected to see anything of value in the Isis cult after this? Why should he look at this last cult with anything but irony and dismissal after such a preparation? All he has to go on is the personal testimony of a flawed and at best partially sympathetic narrator.
The Golden Ass is a text that frequently comments on itself and provides plenty of cues to the reader about the direction its narratives--main and embedded--will take. Right on its surface, it encourages the reader to be an active interpreter, offering suggestions as to what direction that interpretation might take, particularly through the numerous passages in which Lucius breaks off his narration to address the reader directly. The text is also busy at work on a somewhat more subtle level, generating its own interpretive clues through character names, for example, which are in the main descriptive, and available for analysis by any reader familiar with Greek. But, helpful as the novel may at first seem to facilitating its own interpretation, it is often wrong about itself, and this fact has to be dealt with by any attempt to extract a meaning from it.
The Golden Ass is not the only work of prose fiction that Apuleius wrote; we know also of a Hermagoras. Unfortunately, we know of this work only through one fragment preserved in Priscian
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(Instit. III.1.4). Here I will offer a brief synopsis of the story and describe what is known about its relationship to its purported model, the Metamorphoses of a 'Lucius of Patrae', and to the work known as the Ὄνος, which is apparently an epitome of the latter and preserved in the corpus of Lucian.
With its playful mastery of language new and old, its variety of incident, reflection, and mood, and its constant refusal to be pinned to one specific final meaning, the Golden Ass is a deeply original novel. But, like so much else in the Apuleian corpus, it is an adaptation all the same. And because we are fortunate enough to have a good sense of the form the original on which it is based took, we can find solutions to some of the puzzles it offers the interpreter, although not to the deepest. It is the story, delivered as a first person, retrospective narrative, of a young, educated, well-mannered, and somewhat naive Greek named Lucius. On a journey to Thessaly, Lucius, stimulated by his interest in witnessing the workings of magic, in which he is an entirely unskeptical believer, finds himself drawn closer to it than he either intended or expected. He is transformed into an ass, and although the remedy for this transformation should be easy enough to procure--he only needs to eat roses--through a series of misfortunes, all concocted from above in the interest of a good story, his recovery is delayed until he has endured numerous comic sufferings and lived alongside a multitude of characters. In the end, he is restored to human form, both he and his audience left to shake their heads at this improbable but entertaining series of events.
The story, as I have summarized it here, could just as easily stand as an accurate description of two other works known from antiquity: Loukios or the Ass, preserved in the manuscript tradition of Lucian, and the Metamorphoseis of a 'Lucius of Patrae', known to us only through Photius. Photius tells us that Loukios or the Ass, most commonly referred to as the Onos, is an epitome of the longer Metamorphoseis. Even without Photius' testimony, careful reading of the Onos would reveal it to be an epitome, because the epitomizer occasionally slips and refers back to events not actually present in the
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narrative he gives us. There has been much scholarly debate as to the extent of the epitomization, some holding that the comparatively short Onos did not differ widely from the Metamorphoseis in length, others that the Metamorphoseis was a much longer work. Since in all three novels, the foundational plot is basically the same, a much longer Metamorphoseis would require either many more adventures for Lucius himself, or the presence of inserted stories of the sort found in the Golden Ass but not the Onos, and there is some evidence that this may have been the case. Likewise, there has been argument as to the authorship of the Greek works, some arguing that the Onos is indeed an epitome by Lucian's hand, intended as a parody of the work by the credulous and superstitious Lucius of Patrae. This, at least, is what Photius implies. Others argue that the Metamorphoseis was a purely comic tale, written by Lucian, and mostly competently, but sometimes sloppily, epitomized by an unknown hand. This would account just as well for the Onos' place in the Lucianic manuscript tradition. Of course there is also a third, entirely reasonable option, namely that the authorship of neither Greek work is knowable, and that the Onos appears in the Lucianic tradition either entirely by a lucky accident, or because of its light-hearted tone and somewhat Atticizing language.
Lying behind many serious readings of Book 11 is the feeling, sometimes expressed, sometimes implicit, that with the final book the novel takes on a 'serious tone' (Dietrich, 'Golden Art'), and that this new voice forces us to take everything in it as representing the earnest convictions of the author himself. The methodological separation of author, narrator, Lucius-now, Lucius-then is particularly helpful on points such as this. It forces us to ask, whose tone? Lucius'? But Lucius has been both an earnest narrator and narratee from the beginning to the end. Lucius-then doesn't laugh when he discovers the real meaning of the Risus trial, nor does Lucius-now laugh at it retrospectively. His claims to unfair persecution are made as seriously then as they are taken now. Is it then Apuleius, the author, whose tone has changed? Well, how can we decide what the author's tone is at any point; how can we decide
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his attitude to what his narrator tells us? Not through direct statements made by the narrator, unless we want to collapse the distinction between author and narrator completely, which becomes an intensely problematic stance as soon as we see the two diverge in any way. This happens when Lucius says anything that we know Apuleius knew was false. Identification between the narrator and author cannot be absolute, even if there are points of convergence. So we simply can't take Lucius' assertions, like 'x is good', 'x is evil' as statements of the author. The author might in fact endorse them, but in order to decide whether he does, we have to examine how reliable Lucius is as a narrator, and how much confidence we have that he is any guide to truth as a character and narrator. To do this, we have to gather clues, and form a judgment on Lucius much the way we would of any person: what does he say, and more specifically, what does he say in reaction to this or that circumstance? The big difference between this ordinary process of forming judgments on people in real life and on fictional characters is that there is an additional element, the author who has constructed those circumstances. What does the author make the character say or do in response to the circumstances he himself has invented? Just as we learn a lot about the authorial attitude towards Encolpius with his mock heroics on the beach, we learn about Lucius in the temple. Just because Lucius has experienced something 'serious' and reacts to it with 'seriousness', we cannot conclude that the authorial tone has shifted towards the serious. Authorial tone can probably be determined, at least with a fair degree of confidence, but only through compiling clues, not through direct statements. Just because Lucius decides to 'get serious'--and this shift in narrator tone, if there at all, is slight--that doesn't tell us anything at all about authorial tone. A shift that in all fairness does at first seem quite obvious, as unmissable as a thunderclap, begins to fade rather quickly when exposed to narratological interrogation. I would say that the feeling that there is a shift in tone in Book 11 is in fact prompted by something real in the structure of the narrative, namely the passage from a strange, enclosed world with its own opaque rules--the novel's Thessaly, to the real
16

world, whose boundaries stretch across Greece, Italy, North Africa. In this second world, actions and their motivations can more confidently and comfortably be judged by the audience; magic and the supernatural return to their natural state of semi-existence behind impenetrable curtains.
17

Chapter 2: Audiences and Spectacles in the Golden Ass Themes and Patterns
In this chapter I will examine patterns that emerge across several scenes in the Golden Ass, each involving in some way an audience and a spectacle. I am using the terms 'audience' and 'spectacle' in an wide sense, in order to include incidents ranging from obvious cases such as Lucius' trial at the Risus festival in Book 3 and the crowd that witnesses his transformation at Corinth in Book 11, to less obvious ones, like Aristomenes watching Meroe from under his bed (Book 2), and Lucius munching hay while the family of the 'wickedest boy in the world' mourns his death. Thus, as I will use these terms, 'audience' can cover a large crowd self-consciously assembled to witness something, as well as a single person forced into the role of spectator without expectations or consciousness of himself in that role.
I use the term 'pattern' for my object of study in this chapter to distinguish it from a theme. A pattern, in the sense in which I am using the word, is wider and more inclusive than a theme, although it is necessarily constructed from themes. By 'theme' I mean the recurrence of an image, idea, or situation across a text. What I have chosen to name a 'theme' is essentially what E.M. Forster calls 'easy rhythm' in the eighth chapter of Aspects of the Novel. He defines it as 'repetition plus variation,'6 and assigns it varying degrees of importance depending on the nature of the novel in which it appears. When discussing Proust's À la recherche du

6 p. 168.

18

temps perdu, he gives an important role to play, 'to make us feel that we are in a homogeneous world,'7 in effect, to make the novel feel like a unity. For Forster, a work like Proust's requires of something so basic as 'rhythm' such an important function because his novel is chaotic, and patched together.8 I would argue that the same can be said about the Golden Ass, which from the beginning is promised to be a collection of different stories somehow woven together (1.1: varias fabulas conseram). In this novel, the primary function of themes, or Forster's rhythms, is to give the reader the sense that the action takes place in a homogeneous world, an effect that is strengthened by the fact that themes occur across the many narrators in it, even when these narrators come from very different backgrounds.
The most easily detectable signal that we are in the presence of a theme is verbal correspondence. On this most basic level, the Golden Ass is extremely fertile territory for themehunting, as words and groupings of words continually reappear in it. Perhaps the most obvious example of a theme in the work is curiosus/curiositas, whose many appearances I partially documented in the previous chapter.
Scholars have worked for decades on the various themes in the Golden Ass, often in the service of a larger interpretive goal. As I said, the novel is full of them, and the work of documenting them has essentially reached a the saturation-point. Here are a couple of less obvious themes, taken from R. Merkelbach's Roman und Mysterium in der Antike. in the tale of Cupid and Psyche, the old woman who narrates the story is describing how the throngs treated Psyche as an object of worship,
(4.29) It was the girl that people worshiped: they sought to appease the mighty goddess's power in a human face. When the maiden walked out in the morning (matutino progressu) people would invoke the name of the absent
7 p. 165. 8 p. 165: 'The book is chaotic, ill-constructed, it has and will have no external shape; and yet it hangs together
because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythms.'
19

Venus with feasts and sacrifice...9
Merkelbach compares the Matutinae of the Isis-cult in Book 11.10 Staying with Merkelbach's treatment
of Cupid and Psyche, the inset tale whose thematic correspondences with the rest of the novel critics
tend to find most illuminating, Merkelbach compares the description of Venus' trip across the sea,
where a Triton holds a mirror in front of her as she travels (4.31 alius sub oculis dominae speculum
progerit) with 11.9, where in the parade in honour of Isis, women carry mirrors before the image of the
goddess.11 These two are examples of what I mean by a theme. The first relies almost entirely on verbal
correspondence, while the second is more of an image.
Now, what is the reader to do with themes such as these? Repetition alone is insufficient to
establish a meaning or message. As R. Heine pointed out, there is plenty of verbal repetition in the
novel that cannot be plausibly read as carrying a message. We are dealing with an author of 'limited
resources,' and in a work of this size, verbal repetition should strike us as nothing particularly
surprising.12 The problem is to distinguish between casual repetition and theme, and can be approached
in two ways:
First, an interpreter can do as Merkelbach does, take lines or correspondence within the work
and triangulate them with a point of reference outside of it, in his case the technical proceedings of the
9 'Puellae supplicatur et in humanis vultibus deae tantae numina placantur; et in matutino progressu virginis victimis et epulis Veneris absentis nomen propitiatur...'
10 p. 8 n. 2. 'Man denkt an die Matutinae des Isisdienstes (11.20; 11.23; 11.27).' 11 Merkelbach p. 9 n. 3. 'Others had shining mirrors reversed behind their backs, to show homage to the
goddess as she passed.' (aliae quae nitentibus speculis pone tergum reversis venienti deae obvium commonstrarent obsequium) 12 'Picaresque Novel vs. Allegory', p. 34: 'there are, within books 1-10, great many correspondences (either merely between words, or between ideas, motives, actions, and situations) that no one would surmise to have been planned by the author deliberately. On the contrary: where these parallels had not been imposed on him by the Greek source, they lead to only one conclusion: that our author's wealth of words and ideas and his structural resources are not totally unlimited. To put it another way: the passages presented as a proof of Apuleius' having intended a connection between books 1-10 and 11 from the very beginning are open to skepticism not because they did not exist, but because Apuleius' narrative method in books 1-10 does not differ at all. Here, too, many correspondences exist that are evidently not intended by the author to relate to one another.'
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Isis-cult. This is an appeal to an external 'master text' in Winkler's sense,13 a procedure in which a 'synoptic comparison' between the Golden Ass in whole or in part and some external text or body of texts is required in order to make sense of 'an ambiguous message.' This is a style of interpretation that I do not wish to ignore, but for the most part my concern in this and the following chapter will be with the second possible way of dealing with themes in an attempt to find meaning of them: to argue for points at which they coalesce in such a way as to produce patterns.
Patterns are constructed from themes, and allow the reader to deduce a message from a text without appealing to anything outside of it. These possible messages range from the simple to the complex, depending on how widely distributed the themes are--the greater the variation in their 'repetition plus variation, the more complex the resulting pattern can be--and how many different themes can be woven together. I will offer an example of a simple pattern that can be built off of the theme of curiositas to give a sense of what I mean.
Most readers of the Golden Ass will easily see in curiositas more than a simple theme, and will try to build a meaningful pattern out of it. The path of least resistance to this end is perhaps to begin at the beginning, to observe that Lucius names curiositas--at least retrospectively--as his defining trait, and that at the beginning of his trip to Thessaly, it has a clear object: magic. This interest clearly gets him into trouble, as it is the direct cause of his transformation into an ass and all the sufferings that result. This is enough to give the reader a simple message: 'You don't want to wind up like Lucius, do you? So stay away from magic, or bad things will happen to you.'
Now, this message requires a fairly credulous reader to be effective. She would have to believe that magic is real. For the period in which the novel was written, this alone would apparently be nothing too unusual. But there is a big difference between believing in a subtle type of magic that can influence people's emotions, or set into motion events that in themselves are nothing unusual, and the
13 See p. 7 for his discussion of this idea.
21

type of overt, laws-of-nature-bending magic apparently taken for granted by most in the utterly strange world of the Golden Ass. If we suppose that even the credulous reader never really expects that she herself could employ magic to bring down the moon or reverse the course of rivers, or that she might some day see magic accomplishing such utterly incredible things, the curiositas-message has to be watered down to an unimpressive 'Well, nothing this bad or strange will happen to you, but something might.'
This second version of the message could well stand as the point of the whole novel, and we could plausibly imagine a reader prepared to receive it, but it has clearly always been felt unsatisfactory by the majority of interpreters. Would our author invest so much time in order to reach such a reader? Why would he try to deliver this message by means of a mostly comic and farcical tale?
So, this simplest curiositas-pattern leads to a generally unsatisfying message. Can a more complex pattern yield a deeper meaning that the text on its own can sustain? I think the answer is a pretty clear but qualified 'yes'. A natural place to look is the inset tale of Cupid and Psyche, which takes up roughly three books, stands in a central position, and appears to have been an Apuleian addition.
Psyche, after Lucius, is the character most prominently described as curiosa by her narrator.14 But Psyche's world is not Thessaly, and is in a sense even stranger, as it is a sort of indeterminate fairytale-land. Magic there is not a separate category from 'ordinary' life; everything is enchanted. Consequently, the object of her curiositas is not magic, but something we might call 'the divine'. Because, unlike Lucius, she is not the narrator of her own story, she cannot retrospectively see herself as curiosa, as Lucius is able to. She is entirely un-selfconsciously curiosa, and we can define the object of her curiositas only by seeing the pattern it follows: what things does it turn out continually excite irresistible interest in her?
14 Assuming for now as real the fiction that we read the very words of the anicula, uncoloured by Lucius, who gives us the frame-narrative.
22

First, there is the identity of her mystery-husband. To be sure, her evil sisters act as a catalyst in this case by maliciously telling her that he might be a dragon. Nonetheless, they do not implant this quality in her, but rather stimulate something that was already in her nature. When she beholds him, and especially when she accidentally wakes him, she realizes that she is in the presence of a god. But by giving in to her curiositas, she loses this close contact with the divine, because Cupid leaves her.15
Second, there is the chest that Venus orders Psyche to get from Proserpine. She is explicitly warned not to look in it; like Cupid, the reader gets the sense that its contents are somehow 'too divine' for her to behold. With no external push this time, Psyche again gives in to her instinct, and is accordingly punished. But in the end, Venus' anger abates, and Psyche is welcomed into the divine family, reunited with Cupid, and bears him the child Voluptas. Like Psyche, it is Lucius' curiositas that initially gets him into trouble. Like Psyche, Lucius is eventually 'saved' from his torment and winds up in the arms of a divinity, although neither explicitly repent of their curiositas.
So, adding Cupid and Psyche to her search for the novel's meaning, what deeper curiositaspattern can the reader construct for herself? Something along these lines: 'Lucius' desire at bottom is to gain knowledge of and contact with the divine, and there is nothing inherently wrong with this. In fact, it is a good thing. But his method of approach is all wrong, because his curiositas is directed in the wrong direction; by trying to experience the divine through the superficially astonishing wonders of magic, he sees things which he should not, and misses out on the true wonders of divinity, which are far greater than what magic is capable of. Both he and Psyche approach the divine in the wrong way to begin with, but finally discover that contact with it is possible, but only by the right means and after much suffering.'
15 The story is not quite so straightforward as this, because it is her deliberately illuminating him with a lamp, plus the accidental circumstance that she wakes him by dripping hot oil on him, that causes her to lose him. Nevertheless, it was her curiositas that set things in motion. Similarly, it was Lucius' desire to watch Pamphile transform, plus Photis' mistake in giving him the wrong potion, that starts his sufferings.
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This is a simplified example of the sort of complex pattern that can be constructed from the themes of curiositas, magic, and divinity, and yields a fairly satisfying message that is certainly deeper than the first two I offered. In various forms, the 'right and wrong paths to the divine' message has been favoured by many interpreters, and it certainly is attractive. Partly because this style of interpretation has received so much attention, and partly because one of its assumptions is that the events of Book 11 are meant to be read as a serious shift in the novel's tone, and that we are meant to rejoice alongside Lucius as he joins the Isis-cult--an assumption I am not convinced is correct, in this chapter I will outline a different pattern constructed from the same starting-point, curiositas, and consequently a different message. One of the primary qualities of curiositas in the novel, whether it is directed towards magic, one's neighbor's affairs, or something else, is that it is a desire to witness something interesting, without actually becoming a part of what is witnessed; essentially, to act as audience to some sort of spectacle. The pattern I want to construct is based on dividing the audiences in the Golden Ass into two basic types, which I will call Type A and Type B audiences. The basic distinction between the two is this: Type A audiences are safe from the spectacle they watch, while Type B audiences are not. Type A audiences may react with strong emotions to the spectacle they witness, may respond with violence or laughter, but are never dramatically drawn in to the spectacle the way that Type B audiences are. I use 'dramatically' here in a literal sense: they are never addressed directly by those whom they watch, and their lives are not deeply affected by the spectacle. By contrast, Type B audiences are dramatically drawn into the spectacle, against either their expectations or their hopes. This general pattern is a useful one because it can be sustained across multiple scenes in the novel, and in Chatper 4 I will build on it to argue that the text itself invites the reader to think of herself as an audience witnessing Lucius' adventures as a spectacle. At the outset, the novel places the reader in the position of a Type A audience, safely removed from the spectacle of the story, a position from which she can form her
24

sympathies with and and antipathies towards various characters, and evaluate it as an observer. The Type A audiences in the novel itself reflect back three of the possible attitudes a reader could take: derisive pleasure in Lucius' sufferings and his foolishness, skepticism towards his narrative and the embedded narratives of other characters, and joy at his eventual salvation and conversion. Every time an audience in the novel takes one of these attitudes towards its own spectacle, this is always mixed with a certain ambiguity that can awaken discomfort in the reader: in the Golden Ass, laughter is ugly, skeptics are violet, cruel, and self-satisfied, and religious enthusiasts as naive and quick to make the wrong judgment on inadequate grounds as Lucius.
Type A Audiences In this section I will offer in general outline the characteristics of what I am calling Type A
audiences in the Golden Ass, and look at three examples of them, adding some supplementary remarks on other audiences of this type from the novel. The three examples I have chosen represent three different attitudes the reader can take towards the novel, in parts or as a whole.
These audiences are undifferentiated crowds, and in their numbers stand in a position of safety and power with regard to the spectacle they watch. Anonymous, and standing at a remove from what they watch, they can give a unified response to a spectacle without being dramatically drawn in the way Type B audiences can be. Power is a tricky but important idea to keep in mind when thinking about audiences and spectacles in the novel. Type A audiences seem to exercise power over what they watch, but they are sometimes quite unstable in their reactions, appearing at points almost to enjoy being or to expect to be manipulated. Finally, these audiences always stand in a relationship of epistemic superiority or inferiority with regard to the 'performer' they watch; that is, they either know more or less about the performance than he does, and this further defines the power relationship between the
25

two.
The Audience is in on the Joke: Lucius at the Risus Festival At the dinner-party Lucius attends in Book 2, his aunt Byrrhena tells him that the whole town is
about to celebrate its annual festival in honour of Risus (2.31). Lucius graciously accepts the offer, and then makes his way back to his host Milo's house, quite drunk. When he arrives, he sees what he takes to be three robbers trying to break in, and heroically kills them with his sword. As Book 3 opens, he wakes up, terrified that he will be accused of murder, and is promptly arrested and taken to the theatre for trial. Here the whole town appears to be in attendance, and they listen to Lucius' speech in his defense--which the reader can see is full of fictitious details of the encounter--before it is revealed to him that what he took to be robbers were in fact wineskins. The crowd has a good laugh at him, and finally disperses, leaving him to deal with the trauma of realizing the trial had been a joke at his expense.
Lucius had been set up to misidentify the wineskins by Milo's maid Photis, with whom he had begun to have an affair. Before he leaves for the party, she warns him that he should return early, because the town is being terrorized by a violent gang,
(2.18) Now take care, and come back early from supper,
because an insane gang of young aristocrats has been disturbing the public peace. You will see people lying murdered everywhere right out in the street, and the governor's troops are too far to relieve the town of all this slaughter. Heus tu, cave regrediare cena maturius. Nam vesana factio nobilissimorum iuvenum pacem publicam infestat.
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Passim trucidatos per medias plateas videbis iacere,
nec praesidis auxilia longinqua levare civitatem tanta
clade possunt.
Although this description of mutilated corpses lying in the streets is not enough to deter Lucius from
going out at all, or from stumbling home alone16 and drunk in the dark, it does set him on edge and
prepare his imagination to see robbers where there are none. At 3.18 she will plead innocence regarding
the joke, while admitting that she was in part responsible for the whole affair, because it was her
mistake as Pamphile's assistant that caused the wineskins to become enchanted. But she does not
concede that this warning to Lucius played a role as well.
Photis already exerts a measure of control over Lucius through manipulating his imagination
and attention.17 Although he declares in his soliloquy at 2.6 that he will seduce Photis in a cynical
attempt to use her to get to her mistress Pamphile (Photis illa temptetur), from the moment he actually
beholds her, and especially through their sexual encounters, he acts as the submissive member of the
16 He was at least apparently alone on the return trip. At the party itself, Lucius mentions having one slave there with him. This is an instance of a phenomenon pointed out by Helm p. 18, 'So wechselt die Zahl der Diener des Lucius'. that the number of Lucius' slaves throughout the novel is in flux. Upon his arrival at Hypata, Lucius speaks of having slaves with him (2.15), but then talks as though he had only one (2.31; 3.8; 7.2), until Book 11, where he again refers to them in the plural (11.2). Here that single slave is with him, and then completely disappears, or does nothing to help him in his battle with the wineskins. It makes sense in terms of the narrative that Lucius should be alone for the battle, since a sober companion would have been able to point out his delusion. Clearly the slaves are an afterthought, fading in and out when necessary, their fluctuating number the result of Apuleius' working from a model. But Lucius himself is not indifferent to the life of the downtrodden; in the later books, he gives us some detailed pictures of the world slaves and the poor, featuring characters ranging from the self-serving slaves of the rich Corinthian, to the likable and heroic gardener who is assaulted by a soldier.
17 Slater, 'Passion and Petrification' p. 24, on Photis at 2.17 seductively feigning modesty before Lucius, and becoming, in his eyes, like a statue of Venus, 'Note Lucius' interpretation, though: he perceives not true resistance but rather a complicity of Fotis' part with the male gaze.... [the end of the passage] seems to imply that Fotis conceals herself with the intent further to arouse his desire rather than out of genuine modesty. But is Lucius' interpretation correct? Does Fotis resist the gaze, as the original Venus did? In that case, Lucius' interpretation is just his own vanity. He may in fact be right about Fotis' intentions, since she seems an enthusiastic participant in their sexual encounter hereafter. Yet there is an undercurrent as well, which Lucius seems not to recognize: if Fotis uses resistance to the gaze as a strategy, she can in fact to some degree control it. I suspect most male readers would simply identify with Lucius' point of view and interpretation on a first reader of this passage. But the question lingers and we will return to it: Who controls the gaze?'
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pair, seems genuinely to like her, and to want to please her. He approaches her carefully to ask about going to the party, as though he needs her permission,
(2.18) Therefore I had to approach Photis and consult her will as if I were taking auspices. Ergo igitur Photis erat adeunda deque nutu eius consilium velut auspicium petendum.
Is she manipulating him here, or simply lying, just to get him home? The answer depends on what Photis means by factio nobilissimorum iuvenum. As de Jonge remarks ad loc.,18 bands of violent welloff youths were not uncommon in this period (nor in antiquity generally). Fear of such a factio would not be unrealistic on Lucius' part. However, if a gang of local nobles were littering the streets with corpses, no one else mentions them. Byrrhena describes the town as a peaceful resort (2.19: it offers quies villatica), and shows no concern at Lucius' being out at night, even though she clearly does care about him, warning him to be very careful around Pamphile,
(2.5) 'My dearest Lucius, I swear by this goddess (sc. Diana) that I am very worried and afraid for you, and I want you to be forewarned far in advance, as if you were my own son. Be careful! I mean watch out carefully for the evil arts and criminal seductions of that woman Pamphile.'... Byrrhena told me all this with great concern. 'Per hanc deam, o Luci carissime, ut anxie tibi metuo et ut pote pignori meo longe provisum cupio, cave tibi, sed cave fortiter a malis artibus et facinerosis illecebris Pamphiles illius.'... Haec mecum Byrrhena satis anxia.
If this is what Photis means by factio nobilissimorum iuvenum, the reader has reason to doubt
18 p. 80, 'grassationes nocturnae Athenis et Romae nequaquam insolitae erant. Simile periculum, pauperibus impendens a iuvenibus ebriis et petulantibus, describitur'.
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whether her warning is sincere. She may be vindicated, however, if she meant not local trouble-makers, but the latrones who rob Milo and steal the now-transformed Lucius in Book 3. These iuvenes are not locals who get drunk and make trouble, as de Jonge interprets 2.18, but professionals who live off of theft. If this is the case, Photis here anticipates the language used in the section where Lucius is the robbers' property in two ways. They continually call themselves a factio or secta, and Lucius frequently describes them with sarcastic superlatives, which is what nobilissimorum would then turn out to be.
The Risus festival crowd is in a position of complete superiority over Lucius, because they know from the beginning that no murder has been committed. Whether they understand that the wineskins were actually enchanted is unclear. Besides Milo, the whole town does seem to know that Pamphile is a witch, and to accept that such enchantments are a part of regular life at Hypata. That they know the trial is a joke all along, and that they will actually play a role in the spectacle--that of angry mob--is made clear by their being unable to stifle their laughter completely, long before the wineskins are revealed, as Lucius is led to the theatre.
(3.2) Although I was walking along gloomily with my head bent towards the ground...out of the corner of my eye I caught something extremely bewildering: among all the thousands of people sitting around there was not a single one who was not bursting with laughter. Et quamquam capite in terram...iam deiecto maestus incederem, obliquato tamen aspectu rem admirationis maximae conspicio. Nam inter tot milia populi circumsedentis nemo prorsum qui non risu dirumperetur aderat.
They enjoy a security that Type B audiences cannot, because they know more than their 'performer', Lucius.
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On the whole, in the Golden Ass laughter is most commonly a way of expressing one's
superiority or power over another. Characters take pleasure in the misfortunes of others, and show their
hollow satisfaction through laughing.19 The guests at Byrrhena's dinner party give expression to this
sort of feeling by laughing at Thelyphron, over whom they wield power. He is a kind of court fool for
them, there only for their entertainment. He does not want to relate the story of his disfigurement, but
they demand that he does. If all the details of his story are true, he is not one of them: they are the 'very
flower of society' (2.19: flos ipse civitatis), while he is a not too well off Milesian.20
The mocking laughter of the Risus crowd marks them as superior to Lucius and in control of the
spectacle, but this position of control is ambiguous. While they can freely trample Lucius' feelings in
the dust and leave him without a second thought, they are themselves mastered by their own laughter
and unable to control it. It bursts out of them (3.2, cited above: nemo prorsum qui non risu
dirumperetur aderat), consumes them like a conflagration (3.10: Tunc ille quorundam astu paulisper
cohibitus risus libere iam exarsit in plebem), and perhaps even dehumanizes them (3.10: hi gaudii
nimietate graculari,21 illi dolorem ventris manuum compressione sedare). The dinner-party crowd are
19 Schlam, On Making an Ass of Oneself, p. 40: 'Laughter, a richly developed theme in the Metamorphoses, is generally characterized as joyless and is frequently ironic, bitter, or mocking.'
20 Something we learn at the beginning of his story: (2.21) 'When I was still a minor I set out from Miletus to see the Olympic games. Since I also wanted to visit this area of the celebrated province, I traveled through the whole of Thessaly and, under dark omens, arrived at Larissa. Since my travel allowance had worn quite thin, I wandered all over town trying to find some remedy for my poverty.' (Pupillus ego Mileto profectus ad spectaculum Olympicum, cum haec etiam loca provinciae famigerabilis adire cuperem, peragrata cuncta Thessalia fuscis avibus Larissam accessi. Ac dum singula pererrans tenuato admodum viatico paupertati meae fomenta conquiro).
21 Graculari is an emendation suggested by Armini for the manuscripts' gratulari, and is accepted by Helm, who edited the Teubner edition of the Golden Ass, but rejected by Hanson, the Loeb translator, on the grounds that graculari is nowhere else attested. Gratulari remains a problem, however, because nowhere else in Apuleius is the word used with a simple ablative like nimietate. It appears with infinitives, as at Florida 16.39: 'He, a man to whom all provinces are pleased to put up four- and six-horse chariots throughout the world' (vir, cui omnes provinciae quadriiuges et seiuges currus ubique gentium ponere gratulantur); the dative, Apology 27.12: 'I congratulate myself for being rated among so many famous men!' (gratulor igitur mihi, cum ego tot ac tantis viris adnumeror), Golden Ass 7.26: 'I did the only thing I could: rejoice silently in my revenge, overdue as it was' (Sed, quod solum poteram, tacitus licet serae vindictae gratulabar); and the accusative, Golden Ass 9.22: 'I was grateful, not so much for freedom from toil, by Hercules, as for the fact that...' (non tam hercules laboris
30

also rendered ugly by their laughter, described at 2.20 and 31 as a cachinnus.22 As Heine says, 'the
laughter of a whole town, though at the feast of Risus, to me seems rather grotesque.'23
The audience are in control of their spectacle and the performer, but are overwhelmed by their
desire to see. Lucius reports that as he is being led into the theatre, every seat is filled and people are
putting themselves in danger just to catch a glimpse of the proceedings,
(3.2) Several wrapped themselves round the columns,
others hung from the statues, and some were half-visible
through the windows and under the cornices: all of them,
in their amazing zeal to watch, were disregarding the danger
to their own safety.
Plerique columnis implexi, alii statuis dependuli nonnulli per
fenestras et lacunaria semiconspiculi, miro tamen omnes
studio visendi pericula salutis neglegebant.
Further, they even act as though they are aware that they as spectators are susceptible to emotional
suggestion: when an old woman, playing the role of a mourner of one of the dead 'young men', asks
that the bodies be uncovered, so that the crowd can be roused to greater anger, even though Lucius has
already been found guilty, they applaud the idea,
(3.9) 'First, noble citizens...permit the victims' bodies to be
libertatem gratulabar quam quod...). If this emendation is correct, the verb would be formed from the name of the bird graculus, the jack-
daw, a type of crow, which was named, according to Quintilian, for its sound (gra gra?): Institutio 1.6.7. The audience would thus be subtly transformed into cawing birds in Lucius' imagination, which would not be the only example of an imagined transformation based on the emotion expressed by an audience, if we consider Aristomenes' transformation into a turtle through fear (1.12: 'So also in my excessive fear at that moment I was unable to keep from laughing, as I saw myself turned from Aristomenes into a tortoise.' (ita et in illo nimio pavore risum nequivi continere, de Aristomene testudo factus). If not, we have the audience taking pleasure in being overwhelmed by the excessive force (nimietas) of an emotion. 22 For cachinnus as ugly and disfiguring, see Ovid, Ars Amatoria 3.287, describing different unattractive ways women laugh: 'One woman will distort her face with a hideous guffaw' (Est, quae perverso distorqueat ora cachinno). 23 'Picaresque Versus Allegory' p. 36.
31

uncovered, so that by contemplating both their beauty and their youth you may be aroused to a higher and higher pitch of just indignation and match your cruelty to the crime.' Her words met with applause... 'Prius, optimi cives...permittite corpora necatorum revelari, ut et formae simul et aetatis contemplatione magis magisque ad iustam indignationem arrecti pro modo facinoris saeviatis.' His dictis applauditur...
At this festival of Laughter, a Type A audience enjoys the power it has over its helpless performer and victim, and expresses this through the mocking laughter typical of the Golden Ass. Secure as their position over Lucius is, they are nonetheless unable to control their laughter; it distorts them, and renders them ugly. Further, they are overcome by their lust for spectacle to such an extent that they forget themselves and risk death or injury just for the pleasure of watching.
Like the Risus crowd, the reader can respond to Lucius' sufferings with derision and dismissal. He is, after all, hopelessly naive, suspiciously free with the truth, and the object of incredibly bad luck. Whether the reader chooses to stop laughing by Book 11, or to continue mocking Lucius through all his initiations, the Risus crowd is a reminder that laughter, especially at another's misfortune, can be ugly, and may come from a position of power over the spectacle that is less secure than it appears to be.
The Audience as Detective: The Crowd in Thelyphron's Tale This is Thelyphron's story: he arrived in Thessaly and needing money, sought work. He
immediately found a job that was apparently commonly necessary and dangerous, but strangely underpaid. This job was to guard a corpse laid out for burial overnight against the predations of witches who would come and steal parts of the body for use in their incantations (2.22).
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Thelyphron takes the job, and while he is guarding the corpse, falls into a deep sleep despite his best efforts to resist. When he wakes up, he is relieved to find the body unmolested, accepts his payment, and decides to join the crowd watching the funeral procession. During the proceedings, an old man declares before those assembled that the dead man had in fact been murdered by his wife--the woman who hired Thelyphron for the job. To prove his accusation, he brings out the Egyptian propheta Zatchlas, who re-animates the dead man. The dead man confirms the story, but the crowd is divided on whether to believe the husband or the wife. To gain the crowd's trust, the dead man offers to tell them something that only he, the corpse, could know: that the previous night, witches had come to mutilate him, but mistakenly took the ears and nose of his sleeping guardian. In view of all, Thelyphron reaches for his face and discovers that his nose and ears are wax replicas, and the crowd erupts in laughter.
As Winkler points out, characters in the novel frequently engage in a sort of detective work.24 What we have in the funeral procession crowd is an example of a Type A audience doing this very thing. Whether they do it particularly well or not is an interesting question that I will take up later when discussing lying, narrative inconsistency, and the strange world of the Golden Ass. When the corpse speaks, the crowd is divided, some wanting to kill the wife right away, others saying that the 'lies of a corpse ought not to be trusted' (2.29: alii mendacio cadaveris fidem non habendam). This implies that the second group accepts that Zatchlas really has re-animated the corpse with the husband's spirit, but do not agree that the temporarily-returned husband should be believed any more than his wife. The corpse's response does not address this reservation, but at best shows that it is the spirit of the husband
24 See especially his third chapter, 'The Scrupulous Reader'. For Winkler, all this detecting within the novel shows that the author himself is constantly concerned to construct his story in such a way as to allow the reader to take a cue from this relentless interest in discovering the truth and exposing lies on the part of the characters, and to apply this attitude to the novel itself, which constantly plays with what he calls 'resignification'. P. 98: 'The presence of so much detecting by characters in the Golden Ass makes clear that the novelist is fascinated by problems of resignification, of revealing new meanings at the end that were in a sense already there. So put, the surprise of Book 11 begins to make sense as an extreme case of what has gone before.'
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that is now speaking through the corpse, as through the crowd suspected Zatchlas of some sort of magical ventriloquism. The way the narrative works, the 'camera' moves from the corpse's proof to Thelyphron's face, and then shifts scenes back to Byrrhena's party, since the story is all about his surprise disfigurement. We do not hear how the more skeptical element in the crowd reacted to the corpse's seemingly inadequate proof. What matters for my analysis here is to point out that this crowd takes pleasure in exposing liars. They are all keen to see what wonderful thing is about to happen when Zatchlas makes his dramatic entry and sets to work. This whole scene has a strongly theatrical colouring, from the old man's eloquent public entreaty of the propheta,
(2.28) In the name of the stars of heaven and the spirits of hell, in the name of the elements of nature and the silences of night and the sanctuaries of Coptus, in the name of the Nile's risings and Memphis' mysteries and Pharus' rattles: grant a short borrowing of the sun and pour a little light into eyes closed for eternity. We make no resistance, nor do we deny the Earth her property; we beg only for a tiny period of life to furnish the consolation of revenge. Per caelestia sidera, per inferna numina, per naturalia elementa, per noctura silentia et adyta Coptitica, et per incrementa Nilotica et arcana Memphitica et sistra Phariaca, da brevem solis usuram et in aeternum conditis oculis modicam lucem infunde. Non obnitimur nec terrae rem suam denegamus, sed ut ultionis solacium exiguum vitae spatium deprecamur.
To the audience's reaction to Zatchlas' introduction and this impressive speech as a scaena (2.28: 'With the visual effect of this holy spectacle he roused the audience to eager expectation of a great miracle.'
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venerabilis scaenae facie studia praesentium ad miraculum tantum certatim arrexit.) But even though they are drawn in by this dramatic scene, Zatchlas' exotic appearance with
shaved head and white linen, and the eloquent speech of the old man, they do not respond to the corpse's re-animation with dumb amazement, but with an immediate desire to solve the dispute now before them and to discover which of the two parties is lying. There is another crowd in the Golden Ass that takes a similar pleasure in uncovering fraud, which appears in the story of Diophanes the seer, who comes up in a conversation between Lucius and his host Milo at 2.12-14. When the subject of divination comes up during their conversation, Lucius excitedly says that he is inclined to believe in all such things, and brings up Diophanes the Chaldaean, whom he met when back home in Corinth. Diophanes was throwing the whole city into an uproar with his amazing predictions (2.12: Nam et Corinthi nunc apud nos passim Chaldaeus quidam hospes miris totam civitatem responsis turbulentat). Milo immediately recognizes Diophanes from Lucius' description, and says that he had been doing the same at Hypata until he met with some 'bad luck' (Fortunam scaevam). One day Diophanes, surrounded by a great crowd (2.13: frequentis populi circulo consaeptus) and delivering prophecies to them, was greeted by a young man whose appearance was enough of a surprise to him that he was temporarily shaken and lost his stage-presence (attonitus et repentinae visionis stupore et praesentis negotii quod gerebat oblitus). The young man asked how a recent voyage of the seer's had gone, and he responded, still forgetting himself (2.14: mente viduus necdum suus), with a list of sufferings he endured while at sea. After Diophanes finishes his self-pitying story, he realizes that during this conversation with a friend he has still had the full attention of the crowd all along, and can only watch as they mock him (cum etiam nos omnes circumsecus astantes in clarum cachinnum videret effusos).
The implication of the story, not drawn out by Milo, is that by unthinkingly revealing that he had a terrible voyage, Diophanes instantly loses all credibility with the crowd, because they assume
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fairly enough that if Diophanes truly has the power of foretelling the future, he could surely use it for himself to avoid such disasters. As a profit-making seer, Diophanes is a sort of performer, who relies on the power of the obscure and mysterious (2.12: multa respondit et oppido rara et satis varia) to gain and control an audience. But when, like so many other characters in the novel, he is surprised (attonitus) and struck with stupor, he loses that tenuous power he held over them, and is instantly neutered and dismissed by an audience that takes delight in discovering he is a fraud--a conclusion they jump to so quickly that one imagines they half-suspected it all along--and shows this complete reversal of their power roles with the satisfied cachinnus that ripples through them. To these two instances in which an audience enjoys exposing lies could be added a third, once again the Risus crowd. They differ from these other two in that for them, there is no truth to seek out or to be revealed, since they know all the facts of Lucius' case beforehand. However, the unrestrained delight they take in his trial must come in part from the fact that as he delivers his impassioned defense speech, they know that he is lying. As Lucius narrates his encounter with the wineskins he quotes the words of the 'leader' of the three robbers to his companions, which he says were meant to brace them for the coming fight. The audience knows that this is impossible, and part of the pleasure of the whole spectacle must have consisted in watching this young desperately inventing a story to save himself.
The Audience Gets it Wrong: The Crowd at the Isis Festival
Type B Audiences Lucius and the Risus Festival
We begin again at Byrrhena's party. Lucius is invited to watch Hypata's Risus Festival, an
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invitation he graciously accepts, not without some irony on the part of Lucius-auctor:
(2.31) 'Thanks,' I said. 'I accept your invitation. And by Hercules I wish I could find some material that so mighty a god could wear in flowing folds.' 'Bene,' inquam 'et fiet ut iubes. Et vellem hercules materiem repperire aliquam quam deus tantus affluenter indueret.'
The irony lies in the fact that Lucius will soon be the materies he wants to supply. When it is finally revealed to Lucius that the whole affair has been a cruel joke, that he has just provided the materies for this mock-trial--really the Risus Festival--he reacts in a way similar to Thelyphron; he becomes a blank, is dumbfounded (3.9: subito in contrariam faciem obstupefactus haesi).
Socrates' Tale Socrates' tale thematically straddles Thelyphron's and Lucius' tale of his Metamorphosis. It is
set at two removes from the reader, told by Aristomenes to Lucius, who then relates it to us. Like Thelyphron, he sets out in search of the pleasure of a spectaculum, in this case a gladiatorial show.
(1.7) Woe is me! I was pursuing the pleasure of a famous gladiatorial show when I fell into these tribulations. Me miserum, qui dum voluptatem gladiatorii spectaculi famigerabilis consector, in has aerumnas incidi.
The misfortunes he is referring to in this quote are his subsequent sexual enslavement to the powerful witch Meroe, and the loss of all his wealth and family connections. Before falling into her hands, however, while on his way to Larissa he was caught by robbers and had everything taken from him
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(1.7: a vastissimis latronibus obsessus atque omnibus privatus). Unlike Thelyphron or Lucius at the Risus Festival, Socrates does not suffer an immediate transfer from being a member of an audience to being the spectaculum himself. But the general pattern continues: a character, in pursuit of pleasure through passive spectatorship, as a member of an anonymous crowd, instead becomes an actor, someone centrally involved in action. The source of the title of John Winkler's famous book comes from a comment made to Lucius after his humiliation at the festival, when he is told that he should be proud of his role in the proceedings, because Risus will look favourably upon his actor and auctor,
(3.11) 'That god will propitiously and lovingly accompany the man who has been both his producer and performer, wherever he may go. Iste deus auctorem et actorem suum propitius ubique comitabitur amanter...
In Socrates' case, the transference is between being a passive audience member at a violent spectaculum, and himself becoming the victim of violence at the hands of robbers.
Aristomenes' Tale As Lucius is on his way to Hypata, he encounters two travelers, one of whom is never named,
and whose only contribution--an important one for the reader interested in the truth of the many fantastic tales to come--is to express complete skepticism about all tales of wonder and magic. He will always remain an unknown but eloquent Ille for the reader, but to many, his attitude is completely justified. When we meet him, he is in the middle of categorically rejecting the fantastic tale being told by his traveling companion, who we will later find out is named Aristomenes. In fact, he is more than a skeptic; he is accusing Aristomenes of lying, recycling the tired themes of stories people tell to entertain one another:
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(1.3) Indeed that lie you told is just as true as if someone should assert that by magic mutterings rivers can be reversed, the sea sluggishly shackled, the winds reduced to a dead breathlessness, the sun be halted, the moon drop her dew, the stars made to fall, daylight banished, and the night prolonged. Ne istud mendacium tam verum est quam siqui velit dicere magico susurramine amnes agiles reverti, mare pigrum colligari, ventos inanimes exspirare, solem inhiberi, lunam despumari, stellas evelli diem tolli, noctem teneri.
This ille, brief as his appearance in the Golden Ass might be, leaves a fundamental mark on the text in the mind of the skeptical reader. Since Aristomenes' tale is a personal anecdote, a story of a small-scale wonder, ille is right to cast doubt on it by contrasting it only with large-scale miracles, the kind that, for their size and wonder, would involve numberless witnesses, and render doubt nearly impossible. Lucius, like any good believer in the paranormal, dismisses this attitude, and attempts to refute it with the favourite tool of the believer, the personal anecdote.
At any rate, for the rest of the journey, Lucius is interested only in Aristomenes and the story he has to tell. It is the story of his encounter with his old friend Socrates, part of which I have summarized above. Aristomenes relates that some time ago, he came across his old friend in a sorry state, destitute and barely covered in rags. Although in terms of temporal sequence, this would be some time after his disaster on the way to the spectaculum, Socrates does now become one himself, in the eyes of Aristomenes. He cannot bear the sight of his old friend in such a miserable condition, and has to help him,
(1.6) I could no longer endure such pitiable spectacle of suffering, and so I took hold of him and tried to make him stand up.
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Nec denique perpessus ego tam miserum aerumnae spectaculum, iniecta manu ut adsurgat enitor.
The pair make their way to an inn for the night, during which the witch Meroe, Socrates 'lover', and her accomplice [?], break into the room and cast a spell on him that will ultimately kill him. As this is happening, Aristomenes hides under his bed, hoping to remain unnoticed, an uncomfortable witness to the grim spectacle. While under the bed, he has an experience similar to that of Lucius during his transformation scene in Book 3: he loses control of his mental state, an undergoes the novel's first-albeit metaphorical--bestial metamorphosis:
(1.12) At that time I experienced the natural phenomenon in which certain emotions are expressed through their contraries. Just as tears often flow from joy, so also in my excessive fear at that moment I was unable to keep from laughing, as I saw myself turned from Aristomenes into a tortoise. Tunc ego sensi naturalitus quodam affectus in contrariam provenire. Nam ut lacrimae saepicule de gaudio prodeunt, ita et in illo nimio pavore risum nequivi continere, de Aristomene testudo factus.
To his horror, he cannot remain a passive observer of his friend's misfortune, but is pointed out by Meroe, who even somehow knows him by name, and is rebuked for thinking that he can witness such things without suffering himself. Significantly, she declares that he will suffer for his curiositas (1.13: Faxo eum sero...ut instantis curiositatis paeniteat).
The Tale of Lucius' Metamorphosis Lucius, after he discovers that Pamphile, the wife of his host Milo, is a powerful witch, is
overwhelmed by a desire to see her practice her art. He begs her slave Photis to help him realize his
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voyeuristic desire, but it is noteworthy that at this point he isn't interested in being involved with witchcraft, but only to act as a spectator.
(3.19) Grant me something I clamour for with all my heart. Show me your mistress when she is working at some project of this supernatural discipline, and let me see her when she is invoking the gods, or at least when she is undergoing a transformation. Praesta quod summis votis expostulo, et dominam tuam, cum aliquid huius divinae disciplinae molitur, ostende, cum deos invocat, certe cum reformatur videam.
Photis consents, and as Lucius watches Pamphile transform into an owl, he is overcome by an unexpected desire to have a taste of this experience himself. His words suggest that this desire is a surprise to him, that to want to step out of the role of passive spectator is already to become something other than Lucius.
(3.22) I, who had not been enchanted by any spell, yet was so transfixed with awe at the occurrence that I seemed to be something other than Lucius. At ego nullo decantatus carmine, praesentis tantum facti stupore defixus, quidvis aliud magis esse videbar
quam Lucius.
Conclusion In this chapter I have divided the audiences that appear in the Golden Ass into two types, one of
which (Type A) stands in a position of security and power over the spectacles it witnesses, like an ordinary audience at an ordinary public performance, while the other (Type B) cannot keep up this wall
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of separation, but is drawn into the spectacle, and suffers for this. In the following chapter, I will argue that these audience types reflect the experience of the novel's reader in two ways, first that Type A audiences enact dramatically the possible responses the reader can have to Lucius' story in such a way as to provoke a feeling of discomfort and dissatisfaction which each of them. Second, I will argue that alongside moments where the narrator addresses the reader directly, the most important of which is the Prologue, there are moments when the novel itself, or the author, address the reader indirectly. These moments are marked by verbal echoes of the Prologue and the type of reading experience it promises. The force of this indirect communication is to turn the reader herself into a Type B audience, to draw her into the spectacle that unfolds before her, and to cause her to question the value of the investment of time and energy she has made in reading the novel.
Chapter 3: Healthy Mind/Sick Soul: Is Lucius a victim of psychic Πολυπραγμοσύνη? William James on Divergent Religious States
In the sixth, seventh, and eighth lectures of The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James contrasts two personality-types and the kinds of religious feeling associated with them: HealthyMindedness and the Sick Soul. The healthy-minded see the divine in everything, and for them the divine is good. The problem of evil, and hence, of ugliness, they reject as a morbid distraction, and for them it carries too little weight ever to be a problem. On a general level, it is absorbed by the theoretical commitment to an 'everything is for the best' outlook, while on the level of particular, concrete evils, this attitude is sustained by mental avoidance, a sort of lucky shortness of attentionspan.
One can but recognize in such writers as these the presence of a temperament organically weighted on the cheer and fatally forbidden to linger, as those of the opposite temperament linger, over the darker aspects
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of the universe.25

The Sick Soul, by contrast, has a morbid fixation on evil, ugliness, and suffering. This is not a matter, from the Sick Soul's perspective, of ignoring some aspects of the world in favour of others in order to form its impression of it, but of seeing what the ordinary person would perceive as evil as evil, and what the ordinary person would see as good as really evil at heart as well. Now, no unbiased reporter when asked to give an account of Lucius' character, would describe him as entirely morbid in this way. However, a major strain in interpretation of the Golden Ass makes Lucius something like a Sick Soul in order to make sense of the novel.
A great many interpretations belonging to the camp that sees the Golden Ass as a serious moral story from beginning to end, or as a serious conversion document, make Lucius in some form a representative of the Sick Soul type. If Lucius is a Sick Soul, it is a subtle matter, because for much of the novel he seems nothing more than a reasonably well-educated young man with an active interest in the world. There is, especially through the first ten books, nothing particularly morbid about him. However, a closer look reveals an undercurrent of the morbid: he is cheerful in his interests, but in the main they consist of the secret workings of witches (which is unlikely to be something he considers perfectly innocent; their appearances in earlier literature, at least, have them working contrary to the direction of nature) and stories of adultery.
Now, what are the advantages of applying a Sick Soul model to Lucius? First, it motivates the plot nicely. It makes the misfortunes and adventures of the first ten books what they are for a reason, and makes book 11 an unavoidable consequence of them. Lucius needs to become a Sick Soul (or realize that he is one) to undergo his true, spiritual metamorphosis. Here is James on the linearity of Happy-Mindedness--the 'once-born', in his terminology--contrasted with the punctuated progression of

25 pp. 95-96.

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the Sick Soul, the 'twice-born':
In the religion of the once-born the world is a sort of rectilinear or one-storied affair, whose accounts are kept in one denomination, whose parts have just the values which naturally they appear to have, and of which a simple algebraic sum of pluses and minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious peace consist in living on the plus side of the account. In the religion of the twice-born, on the other hand, the world is a double-storied mystery. Peace cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being. Canceled as it all is by death if not by earlier enemies, it gives no final balance, and can never be a thing intended for lasting worship. It keeps us from our real good, rather; and renunciation and despair of it are our first step in the direction of the truth. There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.26
On this view, Lucius the Sick Soul needs more than the natural world can possibly give him, nicely represented by something the fertile earth always gives in abundance: roses. These, he is told, are the easy remedy for his transformation into an ass. At several points, he comes close to acquiring them on his own, but he is always thwarted. Only at the festival of Isis in the 11th book does he finally eat them and regain his human form. For the Sick Soul reading, this stands as a nice allegory: he needs an external push into a new frame of mind, and this is provided by Isis and her cult.
26 Varieties of Religious Experience pp. 185-186, emphasis mine.
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To pause for a moment on the linearity of healthy-mindedness, let us look at it in light of the effects it has on a narrative. Put bluntly, the truly healthy-minded, when not contrasted in a narrative with more multi-layered characters, do not make for a good story: Their existence is too static. To take a literary example, let us look briefly at the residents of Rabelais' Abbey of Thélème, described in the 52nd to 57th chapters of the Gargantua, following immediately upon the strife and conflict of the 'cake-peddlers war'. Their motto is 'Do what you want (Fay ce que vouldras),' and although the invitation to reside there is open to all, men and women, it is yet restricted to those already free of psychological trouble and inner turmoil:
Honor, praise, delight Rule here, day and night; We're gay, and we agree; We're healthy, bodily; And so, we have a right To honor, praise, delight.27
Companions clean, Refined, serene, Free from avarice; For civilized bliss, See, the tools are keen, Companions clean.28
Rabelais' Thelemites are distinguished by their spotless physical beauty (Tous sont sains au corps), but
27 Translations from the Samuel Putnam edition. 'Honneur, los, déduit, / Céans est déduit / Par joyeux accords. / Tous sont sains au corps: / Par ce bien leur duit / Honneur, los, déduit.'
28 'Compagnons gentils, / Sereins & subtils, / Hors de vilité / De civilité / Ci sont les houstils / Compagnons gentils.'
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this is only, in his imagination, a necessary accompaniment to their spotless psychological lives (Compagnons gentils, / Sereins & subtils). They do what they will, and this, in practice, means moving, all in harmony, from one pleasant diversion to another.
If anyone, male or female, remarked: 'Let us drink,' they all drank. If anyone said: 'Let us play,' they all played. If anyone suggested: 'Let us go find some sport in the fields,' they all went there.29
I chose the Thelemites as a an extreme example of literary healthy-mindedness to show its effect on a narrative. For the reader seeking the entertainment of a good story, they are unrelievedly dull; nothing happens there. It is no accident that--as I have said--they follow immediately upon the 'cake-peddlers' war,' one of the most action-packed events of the novel, and are in fact the note upon which the Gargantua closes.
The question that Sick Soul-style interpretations answer in the affirmative is this: Is Lucius' lament on the beach in book 10 a crisis? By crisis, I mean a moment of fundamental transformation, inner (psychological) and outer (narratological).
Variations of the Sick Soul theme are plentiful in the secondary literature. One of the most prominent and influential is that of P.G. Walsh in his discussion of the Golden Ass in his 1970 book The Roman Novel. Walsh argues that Book 11 and the conversion it documents are 'serious', which in the context of Apuleian scholarship means that to whatever degree the comic is present in the first 10 books, it recedes completely into the background here, to be replaced finally by the novel's true redeeming message.30 This is not to say, however, that the first 10 books are not in some sense a
29 55.21-23: 'Si quelqu'un ou quelqu'une disait: Beuvons, tous beuvaient. Si disait: Jouons, tous jouaient. Si disait: Allons à l'ébat es champs, tous y allaient.'
30 p. 149, 'The final book, the third main section of which recounts the strange adventures of Lucius reformatus, contains no such division between the dramatic and the comic. Constructed wholly independently of the comic Greek original, it maintains a serious and indeed lyrical tone throughout.' Cf. also p. 6, 'In such scenes as the Cena Trimalchionis, the author is satirically criticising the society of which he is himself a part. With
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preparation for the 11th. In Walsh's presentation, Lucius' conversion is a necessary response to the
potentially endless misery he suffers in the first 10 books--more specifically, books 4-10, which follow
upon his metamorphosis--suffering that may to some readers be a comic drama in itself, and to others
may at least be clothed in the trappings of the comic. Lucius suffers because of his curiositas, but this
suffering is not something he has accidentally stumbled into, but is specifically a punishment incurred
for having that very quality.
The second part of the story, Books 4-10, describes the
penalty incurred by Lucius for his sins.31
Walsh's Lucius is pathologically drawn to sensual pleasure and is essentially characterized by
curiositas--which, for Walsh means obsession specifically with magic--and the only remedy for this
degenerate state is unrelenting suffering, then inner crisis, and ultimately conversion.
All that we can piece together of the psychology of the
author supports the assumption that Apuleius' romance is seriously intended as a fable in which the sins of Lucius, obsession with sexual lust and obsession with magic, are punished by his relegation to the world of the depraved majority, enclosed within the beast of Typhon. He is delivered from his life of helpless futility only after he commits himself to the protection of Isis.32
In a clear form, the recipe for a Sick Soul reading is here. A character has an inner flaw that
prevents him from standing in a healthy relationship to the world. This can either continue
Apuleius the personal involvement takes a different direction. Towards the close of the novel he identifies himself with the narrator not for a satirical but for an evangelical purpose. In portraying the progress of the hero to the mystical awareness of religious truth from a life of sensuality and unhealthy curiosity, he incorporates a detailed description of contemporary religious practice into the framework of his novel, which undergoes a metamorphosis from comic romance to moral fable and religious apologia.' (My emphasis) 31 p. 181 32 p. 184
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interminably, or result in a crisis in which the sick state of the soul is shed, through the intervention of some external agency. Scobie offers n interpretation along these lines as well.
Lucius of Corinth is, however, far from being a carbon-copy of Loukios of Patrae33, for not only does he appear to learn from his sufferings when they terminate in religious conversion, but his fictional identity is shattered by Apuleius' own identification with him at 11,27. The implications of these differences deserve further scrutiny.34
Scobie goes beyond Walsh in his understanding of the significance of curiositas. While Walsh is interested in curiositas as a misplaced fixation on the wrong type of object, Scobie pays it more attention as a state of soul: directionless interest in potentially profound matters that inherently lacks the patience or capacity to dwell on any long enough to achieve any real understanding of them, and hence to seize them securely and make them the basis for an inner life capable of real development. Significantly, Scobie ties his reading of Lucius' psychological state to the very form of the narrative. This fruitful idea will recur in the scholarship on the novel, sometimes wedded to the question of whether in form it is 'picaresque'.
Yet such a structure (picaresque) may be used by a writer to emphasize in an indirect manner the plight of his protagonist. Put in simple terms, a loose, fragmented structure may be considered as an appropriate symbol of the protagonist's life when it is not controlled by any specific or orderly philosophic or religious goal.35
R. Heine offers an interesting variation on the general type of Sick Soul reading I have been
33 The hero of the Onos and the lost Metamorphoseis. 34 'Structure' p. 46. 35 'Structure' pp. 47-48.
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outlining so far. He retains the sense of unitary direction in the narrative, of a progression towards increasing stress finally resulting in a moment of crisis and rejection; in this case, however, the sickness is located not in Lucius the protagonist, but in the world he inhabits.
Heine's principle concern in his paper is to argue that the Golden Ass is the earliest preserved example of a picaresque narrative. His argument has been challenged,36 but his observations on Lucius' character remain important. For him, Lucius is blank; a figure of minimal psychological interest and hardly capable of development. But development there is, none the less: not on the part of the empty protagonist, but in the progressively darkening world of the novel, which produces a concurrent darkening of the reader's mood. In Heine's ideal reader, this provokes a need for rejection, similar to the crises that underlie Sick Soul readings.
The demand, however, for redemption from chaos and the final renunciation of the world are no more immanent in the modern picaro's character, and come no less abruptly, than with Lucius, who is continually indocile up to the end of book 10. So fairly early a gap opens and widens permanently between the presentation of a chaotic and unfathomable world by the author and the impression it has on the reader on the one hand and the experience by the picaro without any deeply-felt reaction on the other hand. Thus, from the reader's point of view, the picaro, enclosed in a dark world within the boundaries of his own ego, gradually develops into the type of the to-be-delivered, gradually gains meaning beyond the limits of his individuality. [...] Much of
36 E.g. K. Dowden, 'The Unity of Book 8' p. 98: 'Heine has, in my opinion, been led into insensitivity by contemplating only two possibilities: either the book is just episodic ("picaresque") or it operates with a sustained allegorical pattern.'
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what the advocates of an interpretation of the Met. as "Entwicklungsroman" have put into the character of Lucius is nothing but a projection of the feelings they themselves had on being confronted with the world of the Met.37

The Many Faces of Curiositas Curiositas makes it's first appearance early on, when Lucius, eager to hear an apparently
unbelievable story, that his new-found traveling companions have been sharing pleads that his motives in wanting in on the fun are pure:
(1.2) [One of the travelers is speaks to the other] 'Stop telling such ridiculous and monstrous lies.' [Then Lucius] 'When I heard that, my thirst for novelty being what it is, I asked "Please let me share your conversation. Not that I am inquisitive, but I am the sort who wants to know everything, or at least most things."' ['Parce' inquit 'in verba ista haec tam absurda tamque immania mentiendo.' Isto accepto, sititor alioquin novitatis 'Immo vero" inquam "impertite sermone non quidem curiosum, sed qui velim scire vel cuncta vel certe plurima."] This passage is often taken by commentators to be an obvious joke, meant to show us right away that Lucius is a fool. The implication, according to them, is that Lucius is outright contradicting himself here, that curiositas precisely is the desire to know everything. This may be entirely correct. But there is another possibility that we can consider, if we remember the narrative structure of the novel. What

37 'Picaresque vs. Allegory' p. 36.

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we have here is Lucius-narrator, or Lucius-auctor, quoting himself in the past, Lucius-actor. By letting Lucius-actor speak for himself, Lucius-auctor leaves open the possibility that he that he believes these are not the same thing, that he has reasons for doing so, and that we should not automatically disagree with him. To be sure, Lucius-auctor will inevitably see curiositas in a different light from Lucius-actor, provided he accepts, as he appears to, the priest of Isis' moral condemnation of his behaviour in Book 11:
(11.15) '...you plunged into slavish pleasures and and reaped the perverse reward of your ill-starred curiosity.' [...ad serviles delapsus voluptates, curiositatis improsperae sinistrum praemium reportasti.] The priest gives us a grim picture of curiositas, condemning it, associating it with lust for pleasure, and blaming it for all Lucius' suffering. But way back at 1.2, we have no reason yet to take this attitude towards it, nor need we necessarily equate this quality with the desire for all kinds of knowledge, which by no means every single reader would be expected to be a bad thing. Curiositas is sometimes an explicitly negative quality, especially from the perspective of a person who is its object, as when the witch Meroe threatens Aristomenes for taking too keen an interest in her dealings with her pitiful lover Socrates, (1.12) 'I will make him regret his past raillery and present inquisitiveness.' [Faxo eum...ut et praecedentis dicacitatis et instantis curiositatis paeniteat.] And when the same Socrates is annoyed at the ianitor at the inn for barging into his room,
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(1.17) 'It's no wonder,' he said, 'that guests loathe all these innkeepers. Now this inquisitive fellow bursts rudely into the room...' ['Non' inquit 'immerito stabularios hos omnes hospites detestantur. Nam iste curiosus dum importune irrumpit...] Of particular importance for Book 11, curiositas can also have a religious aspect, again negative. At 2.4, Lucius describes a statue-group of Actaeon and Diana, and says that Actaeon looks on curioso optutu (optutus is one of Apuleius' favourite words for a look or glance). Psyche, at 5.6, is warned never to seek out the identity of her mystery-husband (Cupid), But he warned her time and time again, often with threats, never to yield to her sisters' pernicious advice to investigate her husband's appearance. Otherwise, through her sacrilegious curiosity, she would cast herself down from the exalted height of her fortunes... [Sed identidem monuit ac saepe terruit, ne quando sororum pernicioso consilio suasa de forma mariti quaerat, neve se sacrilega curiositate de tanto fortunarum suggestu pessum deiciat...] And significantly, continuing the religious theme, the reader herself is told that she can learn nothing of what Lucius saw during one of his initiations, (11.23) Perhaps, my zealous reader, you are eager to learn what was said and done next. I would tell you
52

if it were permitted to tell; you would learn if it were permitted to hear. But both ears and tongue would incur equal guilt, the latter from its unholy talkativeness, the former from their unbridled curiosity. [Quaeras forsitan satis anxie, studiose lector, quid deinde dictum, quid factum; dicerem, si dicere liceret, cognosceres, si liceret audire. sed parem noxam contraherent et aures et linguae illae temerariae curiositatis.] It's not all so grim and serious, however. Curiositas also has its playful aspect, as when a naughty breeze plays with Venus' clothes during the mime of the judgment of Paris in Book 10, (10.31) An inquisitive little breeze would at one moment blow this veil aside in wanton playfulness so that it lifted to reveal the flower of her youth, and at another moment it would gust exuberantly against it so that it clung tightly and graphically delineated her body's voluptuousness. [Quam quidem laciniam curiosulus ventus satis amanter nunc lasciviens reflabat, ut dimota pateret flos aetatulae, nunc luxurians aspirabat, ut adhaerens praesule membrorum voluptatem graphice liniaret.] This breeze is at once personified, and takes its personality as a transfer from the presumed actual wishes of the audience; and under 'audience' here I include the reader, since if this sensual description offends her, has to be asked why she stuck through the scatology, sex, and stories of adultery throughout the previous books.
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Finally, curiositas is often a quality of audiences, either single viewers, crowds, or members of crowds. When the robber Thrasyleon is in a bear costume and pretending to be vicious, a crowd gathers and watches with a curiosus aspectus (4.16). Thelyphron, not aware that he will soon turn out to be the object of laughter of the crowd he is part of, looks on at the spectacle before him,
(2.29) I watched everything with eyes full of curiosity. [cuncta curiosis oculis arbitrabar.] In these cases, note that the curiosi are fascinated by a spectacle, but consider themselves to be safe from any harm, the crowd from the fake bear, and Thelyphron from the scene unfolding in front of him. I believe that Aristomenes, cited above at 1.12, should be included under this heading as well, because at that point he is hiding under a bed and hopes not to be discovered. My principle aim in this chapter is to show that the most plausible mechanism postulated for this crisis does not stand up to close scrutiny. This will mean reaching back into the history of philosophy to get a hold on the concept of πολυπραγμοσύνη, which has been the basis for the clearest and most persuasive argument that, in spite of appearances to the contrary, Lucius is from the beginning a Sick Soul in need of regeneration.
Philosophus Platonicus
In all of his surviving works in which Apuleius makes reference to himself, he frequently calls himself a '(Platonic) philosopher', an authority on Plato to be respected, who is capable of teaching his audience something about Platonic philosophy, or an acolyte whose master is Plato. For example, in the Apology, Apuleius answers his accuser Aemilianus who has offered as evidence as to his suspect character certain amatory and playful verses he wrote. Apuleius responds by pointing out that such
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poetry was written by philosophers and serious thinkers in antiquity, including Plato, and then
rephrases the charge as the--false, on Apuleius' literary evidence--claim that such verses would not befit
a Platonic philosopher, by which he of course means himself. 'But Aemilianus...denies that this sort of
poetry befits a Platonic philosopher.' [Sed Aemilianus...negat id genus versus Platonico philosopho
competere.]38 Further on, he calls himself a member of the 'Platonic school' (qui se Platonicae scolae
meminerit).39 What scola meant in the context of second century Platonism and in the particular case of
Apuleius is not at issue here; it will suffice to say that he saw himself as participating in a tradition and
conforming to certain central doctrines and patterns of behaviour.40 Likewise in the Florida, a
collection of 'choice excerpts' from public speeches delivered by Apuleius mostly at Carthage, named
not for their style but for the method of collection,41 he represents philosophy as the pinnacle of his
learning.
I have drunk other bowls at Athens: the specially made
wine of poetry, the clear white of geometry, the sweet
muscat of music, the dry red of dialectics, and the never-sating nectar of universal philosophy.42
[Ego et alias creterras Athenis bibi: poeticae
commentam, geometriae limpidam, musicae dulcem,
dialecticae austerulam, iam vero universae philosophiae inexplebilem et scilicet et nectaream.]43
38 Apology 10.6. Likewise at 6.4, 'I ask you, what in these poems is there to be ashamed of, in either form or content? What is there that a philosopher would not want to admit ownership of?' [Quaeso, quid habent isti versus re aut verbo pudendum, quid omnino quod philosophus suum nolit videri?]
39 Ibid. 39.1. 40 For a detailed treatment of Apuleius' educational background and place in the Platonic intellectual tradition,
see G. Sandy, The Greek World of Apuleius. 41 S.J. Harrison, Apuleius (2000) pp. 92-94. 'In any case, the use of florida and similar terms to describe choice
passages culled from larger works seems beyond dispute,... the title Florida suggests "choice blooms" collected in an anthology.' 42 Translation from Harrison, Hilton, and Hunink, Apuleius: Rhetorical Works (2001). 43 Florida 20. Inexplebilem here is an interesting example of an Apuleian inversion. In context, it is necessary to
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Plato is noster Plato, and Socrates maior meus Socrates.44
He wants to be recognized not just as a serious student of the subject, but as someone with the
authority to teach. But he nowhere suggests that he is active as a private teacher; rather, he is a teacher
to those audiences that come to witness his public speeches. In the short Florida 5, Apuleius lists the
reasons why an audience will gather to witness various performances, last in the list comes the
philosopher, from whom the audience will learn.
For if it is a mime, you will laugh; if it is a tightrope-walker,
you will be afraid; if it is comedy, you will be in a genial
frame of mind; if it is a philosopher, you will learn.45
[Nam si mimus est (sc. in theatro), riseris, si funerepus,
timueris, si comoedia est, faveris, si philosophus,
didiceris.]
The one who speaks before the public and instructs them is doing what Apuleius elsewhere says
is a distinguishing mark of a philosopher, that he 'continually discourses before all mankind' (apud
omnis homines semper disserenti).46 For Apuleius, 'discoursing before all mankind' was not a secondary
occupation for a philosopher, as though his most important work would consist in composing treatises.
In the Apology, he lists the writings he had published at that time, none of which can be called properly
philosophical. And yet, as I have mentioned, that work is filled with references to himself as a
translate it as something like 'inexhaustible', since it modifies creterra, but the natural meaning of the word is something more like 'that cannot be filled', 'insatiable'. Cf. Seneca, Ep. 89 'inexplebilis stomachus'; Cicero, Rep. 1.43.66, 'inexplebilis populi fauces'. The state of the drinker has been transferred to the state of the cup. 44 Florida 15.26, 2.1. See also De Deo Socratis 3.125, 'meo Platoni'. 45 An interesting statement from a public performer; part philosopher, part sophist, to compare with the popular attitude in Plato's time. At Apology 19e, Socrates makes the following statement on sophists of the period: 'Although this also seems to me to be a fine thing, if he might be able to teach people, as Gorgias of Leontini and Prodicus of Ceos and Hippias of Elis are.' [ἐπεὶ καὶ τοῦτό γέ μοι δοκεῖ καλὸν εἶναι, εἴ τις οἷός τ´εἴη παιδεύειν ἀνθρώπους ὥσπερ Γοργίας τε ὁΛεοντῖνος καὶ Πρόδικος ὁ Κεῖος καὶ Ἱππίας ὁ Ἠλεῖος.] Socrates is being sarcastic here, and the implication is that 'παιδεύειν ἀνθρώπους' was a claim of the sophists he names. Centuries later, we see a self-branded philosopher advertising the same. 46 Apology 15.2.
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philosopher, and to his defense as a defense of philosophy47 (3.5, Sustineo enim non modo meam, verum etiam philosophiae defensionem).48 For him, the primary occupation of at least a contemporary philosopher was address the public and 'teach' them. Dissero is frequently used by Apuleius, always with the sense of delivering a public oration, as at Apology 55.10 and 73.2,
And I am not coming up with this merely for the occasion: about three years ago, when I first came to Oea, delivering a public discourse on the majesty of Aesculapius.49 [Nec hoc ad tempus compono, sed abhinc ferme triennium est, cum primis diebus quibus Oeam venerem publice disserens de Aesculapii maiestate...]
Meanwhile I recovered and at the request of friends I delivered a public speech. [Interibi revalesco; dissero aliquid postulantibus amicis publice.]
In both these cases, Apuleius is referring to a discourse delivered at some other time, but at De Deo Socratis 3.126, he uses dissero of what he is actually doing at that moment, lecturing publicly on Platonic theology (Sed nunc non de errorum disputatione, sed de naturae distributione disserimus). He was not a retiring personality; to all appearances, he made his name as a public performer, and lived publicly, a quality to which he attached a great deal of value. At several points in the Apology, he contrasts himself as one who lives out in the light of public awareness with Aemilianus, who lives in
47 G. Sandy, Greek World p. 23: 'At the time of the Apology, the only remotely philosophical thing Apuleius claims to have written is the work on ichthyology. And yet he already calls himself a philosophus platonicus.'
48 For a similar sentiment in roughly the same period, see number 77 in the letters attributed to Apollonius of Tyana, which is part of a response to the Stoic philosopher Euphrates, a frequent addressee in the collection: 'Every word I have spoken has been for philosophy's sake, not for Euphrates' [Διὰ φιλοσοφίαν εἴρηται τῶν εἰρημένων ἕκαστον, οὐ δι´ Εὐφράτην.]
49 Translation adapted.
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the obscurity of depravity and rustic ignorance.
In facing you, therefore, my experience is that of someone standing in the bright light, observed by the other from the dark. For similarly, you from your darkness may judge all that I am doing in the open and for everyone to see, whereas you in in turn are kept out of my sight by your lowly life that shuns the light.'
[Igitur hoc mihi adversum te usu venit, quid qui forte constitit in loco lumine conlustrato atque eum alter e tenebris prospectat. Nam ad eundem modum tu quidem, quid ego in propatulo et celebri agam, facile e tenebris tuis arbitraris, cum ipse humilitate abdita et lucifuga non sis mihi mutuo conspicuus.]50
In his stated preference for living openly, Apuleius resembles some of the orators of the Greek Second Sophistic, who in practice were quite comfortable sharing personal details with their audiences.51
Besides the Golden Ass, of the surviving works of Apuleius, three--the De Platone, De Deo Socratis, and De Mundo--are treatises on philosophical subjects, while the Apology is generously sprinkled with comments on philosophy, and the Florida less so. Given his self-characterization and abiding interest in philosophy, it is reasonable to suppose that this might inform the direction of the novel's narrative, or provide it with a message.52 The reasons for supposing that this would be a fruitful reading of the novel are neatly encapsulated by Winkler in his synopsis of the philosophical approach:
50 Cf. also De Platone 2.7.230, 'pessimi cives luce careant dignitatis'. 51 The most conspicuous example of this is Aristides, who shares many details of his personal struggles with
various illnesses. (E) 52 C. Schlam, On Making an Ass of Oneself (1992), p. 11, '...Apuleius can be seen as sufficiently a Middle Platonist
to support our recognition of ideas prominent in that tradition in play in the Metamorphoses.'
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Apuleius was known as Platonicus, a name based on his pamphlets expounding a Platonic philosophy, on his (lost) translations of Plato's works into Latin, and on his self-presentation as a philosopher in his Apologia. There are many themes and names and situations in the AA that can plausibly be read as references to Platonic dialogues and developments of Academic principles. The AA is a philosophic novel.53
What I am interested in here is examining the case for a philosophical reading of the novel, which I would contrast with readings that take into account the undeniable occasional references to philosophy or the somewhat more controversial allusions to philosophical topics and philosophers. In these latter, philosophy is at the service of some broader purpose at work in the narrative, religious, comic, or moralizing. A philosophical reading of the sort that I am considering here does not see such aspects of the text as ornamental or supplementary; it's message is much stronger: if you subtract the philosophical themes underlying the whole, you have not understood the text. As DiFilippo puts it,
While Apuleius' interest in magic and demonology obviously pervades the Golden Ass and his other works, I believe that considering this interest alone is not sufficient to reveal the true Platonist underpinnings of the novel.54
Relative Chronology of the Apuleian Corpus
Before examining some claims for a philosophical message in the novel, a few words on the
53 J. Winkler, Auctor et Actor (1985), p. 5. 54 'Curiositas and the Platonism of Apuleius' Golden Ass', AJP 111.4 (1990), p. 474.
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chronology of the surviving works of Apuleius. I am including this discussion because the relative dating of these works does have an impact on interpretation of the Golden Ass. For example, if an interpreter holds that the De Platone, De Mundo, Apology, and Florida (although this last one is less important) are reasonably close in time, and that the Golden Ass is much later, the way opens for hypothesizing, as Moreschini does, that Apuleius was a committed student of philosophy in his youth, but later abandoned or modified this commitment in favour of religious inspiration, mysticism, and obscurantism.55 The Golden Ass would thus be an anti-philosophical treatise in at least the sense that it does not advocate patient contemplation as the path to the divine, which instead requires only submission to the right deity. If, on the other hand, it can be shown that the Golden Ass and at least some of the philosophical works belong to the same period of Apuleius' authorship, it is more reasonable to conclude that apparent references to philosophy are genuine. The dating of these works cannot provide certainty to arguments about philosophy and the novel, but could be a useful source of support for various hypotheses.
The style of the De Platone, which is relatively colourless, gives us some reason to think that the work may be a product of Apuleius' youth. This style is especially striking given his confident handling of Latin in all his other works. To varying degrees, in the Apology, Florida, De Deo Socratis, and Golden Ass, he is on the cutting edge of second century modernism, regularly blending archaism with his own verbal inventions. This stylistic discrepancy between the De Platone and the other works, as well as the evident careful precision with which Apuleius treats Platonic doctrine there, in contrast to the looser and more interpretive De Deo, leads Moreschini to conclude that it was most likely the earliest of his surviving works.
non tanto il tono scialbo e incolore, dovuto
55 Apuleio e il Platonismo, p. 30: 'Le Metamorfosi rappresentano, quindi, la esperienza mistica di Apuleio, quale sviluppo di una dottrina platonica professata durante la giovinezza, anche se mai ripudiata.'
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evidentemente all'argomento che--trattandosi di un manuale di filosofia platonica--non si prestava ad una rielaborazione letteraria, quanto un certo impaccio nell'esporre in un latino chiaro e preciso e senza cadere in errori di interpretazione le dottrine dell'originale greco, errori che, all'occasione non ricompaiono più nel De deo Socratis.56
In essence, this view arranges the works of Apuleius chronologically in order of increasing literary sophistication. There are problems with it, however, which Harrison discusses in his section on the dating of the De Mundo and De Platone.57 First, there is the fact that both works are addressed to 'my son Faustinus',58 which as Sandy puts it, 'seems to presuppose a child old enough to appreciate their philosophical contents.'59 On this assumption, Apuleius would need to have a son around his mid-teens to serve as an addressee, which would put Apuleius at least in his mid-30s, refuting the hypothesis that the De Platone is a youthful work. However, this assumption is not indisputable. There are three alternative explanations that I can see for the address to 'my son Faustinus', the first of which is that Apuleius addressed the work to a son who was not yet of an age to appreciate the work, as a sort of future gift; the second is that he was referring affectionately to someone, a student, perhaps, who was called Faustinus; and the third is that it is just a literary ornament. If we look at its occurrence in the De Mundo, it comes at the opening of the text:
When giving the matter close and careful consideration, my son Faustinus, philosophy has often before seemed to me a searcher

56 Apuleio e il Platonismo, p. 14. 57 Apuleius, pp. 174-180. 58 De Mundo 285; De Platone 2.219. 59 Greek World p. 4.

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after virtue, an expeller of vices, and a participant in divine matters... [Consideranti mihi et diligentius intuenti, et saepe alias, Faustine fili, virtutis indagatrix expultrixque vitiorum, divinarum particeps rerum philosophia videbatur...]60
The wording recalls the opening of Cicero's De Oratore, which was addressed to his brother Quintus.
When, as often happens, brother Quintus, I think
over and recall the days of old, those men always seem to me to have been singularly happy, who... [Cogitanti mihi saepenumero, et memoria vetera repetenti, perbeati fuisse, Quinte frater, illi videri solent, qui...]
Beaujeu, at least, takes Faustinus to be a fictional addressee, since his comment on the opening of the
De Mundo is that it refers to the 'même destinataire fictif que dans le De Plat.'61 These dedications
unfortunately do not allow us to date the De Mundo and the De Platone with certainty.
A second piece of evidence in favour of a later date of composition for these two works comes
from a comparative analysis of prose rhythms in the Apuleian corpus. Both are alone in the corpus in
exhibiting the system of accentual clausulae known as the cursus mixtus. Thus setting them apart from
the rest, this feature has been used as an argument against Apuleian authorship. But the history of this
technique in Latin literature allows us to say more about these two works than that they are just
different from the others. The cursus mixtus appears in surviving literature the middle part of the 3rd
60 De Mundo 285. 61 J. Beaujeu, Apulée: Opuscules Philosophiques (1973), p. 310. At p. 53, Beaujeu calls Faustinus 'très probablement
fictif', noting that the pseudo-Aristotelian De Mundo of which the present text is a Latin adaptation, also had a fictional addressee: Alexander the Great. Why would Apuleius address two works to the same fictional person? Because this appears to 'bien révéler chez l'auteur le désir de signaler, par-delà l'hétérogénéité des doctrines exposées, une certaine continuité d'inspiration et d'intention entre les deux oeuvres.'
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century,62 thus after the lifetime of Apuleius. If we postulate--reasonably enough--that prose authors were playing with this technique for some time before its actual appearance in our record, we can push the date of its emergence in prose literature back a few decades into the lifetime of Apuleius. Parsimony would seem to require that we push this hypothetical date back as little as possible, which would mean placing it towards the end rather than the beginning of his literary career, i.e. around the 170s or 180s, rather than the 140s or 140s. On this basis it can be argued that the De Platone and De Mundo are later works, contrary to the impression a less quantitative examination of their style produces. Why not say that these two works themselves inaugurated the new fashion for the cursus mixtus? Because there is little reason to suppose that these two derivative and unentertaining texts would have reached enough of an audience to have any kind of effect on contemporary prose style. It is far likelier that they are instead our earliest representatives of a new emerging way of writing.
So, the crucial move in this argument for those interested in relative chronology is well warranted, but unfortunately does not allow any conclusions to be drawn with certainty. It is, as I have said, essentially parsimonious: because the De Platone and De Mundo feature the cursus mixtus, we have to push its birth date back in time. But we do not want to push it back any farther than we absolutely have to, because each year added to its life theoretically allows it greater time to disseminate and increases our expectation that it would appear somewhere in literature. This is in the face of complete silence in the second century with the exception of the two works under discussion. The latest we can possibly put them is toward the end of Apuleius' career.
I do not find the argument from Faustinus particularly compelling, because it can be met with at least three plausible counter-explanations. The argument from the cursus mixtus is more attractive, although it requires hypotheses that cannot likely be confirmed. What can be said with near certainty about the date of these works is that they cannot antedate the Apology, since there Apuleius essentially
62 Harrison, Apuleius p. 178.
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offers a catalogue of his writings, and mentions neither of them. Considering how anxious he was to depict himself there as a philosopher, it makes no sense to imagine that he could have authored either of them before that speech and yet fail to mention them.
Dating of the De Deo Socratis rests on similarly unsteady foundations. It contains no references to contemporary affairs that could shed light on the problem, with which the Apology, and to a lesser extent, the Golden Ass, do provide the scholar. Unlike the De Platone and De Mundo, it does not take the form of a treatise addressed to a particular person, but is presented as a public speech delivered before an audience. Harrison proposes that because it contains 'honorific references to Africa, Egypt, and the god Aesculapius, particularly prominent...in Carthage,' it is likely that it was delivered in Carthage as were the Florida, and should be dated alongside them to the 160s or 170s.63 Beaujeu also mentions this possibility, but also entertains the idea that it was delivered earlier in Apuleius' career, when he spent time at Rome after his studies at Athens.64 This flexibility on place and time of delivery is natural, since the only thing that can be said with certainty about the audience of the De Deo Socratis is that it was Latin speaking, and was not expected to be comfortable with Greek.65
Curiositas and Πολυπραγμοσύνη This section is not meant to be a comprehensive study of the word curiositas or the concept
behind it.66 Rather, I will address a more specific question, whether curiosus and curiositas in the Golden Ass should be read as translations of the Greek verb πολυπραγμονεῖν and noun
63 Apuleius, p. 139. 64 Apuleius: Opuscules Philosophiques, pp. 3-4. 65 For example, at 150, he wonders how to express the concept of a helpful, personal daemon in nostra lingua,
and settles on Genius. 66 For an excellent study of curiosus and curiositas and the concepts behind them, see N. Fick-Michel, Art et
Mystique pp. 354-366. C.C. Schlam, 'The Curiosity of the Golden Ass', The Classical Journal 64.3 (1968) pp. 120125 is a lucid and helpful presentation of the topic. Also, A. Labhardt, 'Curiositas: notes sur l'histoire d'un mot et d'une notion', Museum Helveticum 17 (1960).
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πολυπραγμοσύνη as they are used in Plato and the Platonic tradition.67 On the assumption that this is
the case, the Platonic connotations of these words would be sharply foregrounded in the mind of the
ideal reader. Whatever meaning they may have carried as Latin words, it is their Greek, and specifically
Greek philosophical meaning that loads them with their value as keys to this reader's interpretation of
the novel. Curiositas is unquestionably a vital word for any interpretation of the novel to take account
of, and if an interpreter can bind it to a coherent concept outside the novel itself, she has achieved
something of real consequence. The door opens for allegorical reading as well as (in this case) direct
moralizing. This would be for her a valuable key to the whole.68
To at least a small extent, the ground had been prepared for an idea like that expressed by
curiositas in Apuleius' source for the Golden Ass, since in the punchline to the Greek Onos its hero
Loukios blames his misfortunes on his περιεργία.69 The Onos, which survives in the Lucianic corpus, is
an epitome of a lost Greek work ascribed by Photius to 'Lucius of Patras'. Loukios, the narrator of the
Onos, is from Patras, and it is likely that Photius' identification of the author is a mistake the opposite
of that made by Augustine, who speaks of incidents from the Golden Ass as though Apuleius was
claiming they befell him himself.70 Augustine's apparent confusion on this point is odd, since the
Lucius of the Golden Ass is from Corinth,71 and elsewhere Augustine shows that he knew that Apuleius
67 For this position see J. DeFilippo, 'Curiositas and the Platonism of Apuleius' Golden Ass', American Journal of Philology 111.4 (1990) pp. 471-492.
68It is quite common in the secondary literature to approach curiositas this way. P.G. Walsh, 'The Rights and
Wrongs of Curiosity' (1988), calls it 'the key to the novel'. 69 56: 'Then I sacrificed and dedicated offerings to the gods who had saved me, now that after so very long and with such
difficulty I had escaped, not from the dog's bottom of the fable, by Zeus, but from the curiosity of an ass.' [ἐνταῦθα θεοῖς σωτῆρσιν ἔθυον καὶ ἀναθήματα ἀνέθηκα, μὰΔι´οὐκ ἐκ κυνὸς πρωκτοῦ, τὸ δὴ τοῦ λόγου, ἀλλ´ ἐξ ὄνου περιεργίας διὰ μακροῦ πάνυ καὶ οὕτω δὲ μόλις οἴκαδε ἀνασωθείς.] 70 City of God, 18.18: 'This is what Apuleius, in the work bearing the title The Golden Ass, describes as his experience, that after taking a magic potion he became an ass, while retaining his human mind. But this may be either fact or fiction.' [sicut Apuleius in libris, quos asini aurei titulo inscripsit, sibi ipsi accidisse, ut accepto ueneno humano animo permanente asinus fieret, aut indicauit aut finxit.] 71 The closest Lucius comes to saying he is from Corinth is at 2.12, where he begins a story with 'Nam et Corinthi nunc apud nos...' This is confused somewhat by the fact that the speaker of the Prologue claims to be from Athens, Corinth, and Sparta, and various solutions have been proposed that turn on his identity.
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was from the African town of Madauros.72 Later authors refer to Apuleius as Lucius Apuleius, and this
may have been his name. If Augustine knew the general contents of the Golden Ass, but not first hand,
or only from a partial reading, he may have been misled by its hero's name. Or perhaps this is
Augustine's response to the puzzling Madaurensem of 11.27.73 At any rate, Photius is probably
incorrect in ascribing the Metamorphoses to Lucius of Patrae. Some scholars treat the Metamorphoses
as of unknown authorship,74 while others hold that Lucian was its author.75
The scholarly consensus is that the original from which Apuleius worked to write the Golden
Ass was the Metamorphoses, not the Onos.76 The Metamorphoses was itself a comic or satirical novel,
playing with the fantastic stories common in prose fiction and perhaps the credulity of its consumers.77
The tale of Cupid and Psyche, along with the events of Book 11 were not part of the original. Helm
argued that besides the fact that Isis has nothing to do with the Onos, since Lucius doesn't actually need
divine intervention to find relief from his sufferings as an ass (as I have mentioned, all he needs are
roses, which Lucius observes in Book 10 were just coming into bloom), the whole Isis incident is an
Apuleian invention.78 C. Schlam, however, argues that Lucius' failed attempts to eat roses up to Book
72 City of God, 8.14. 73 Puzzling, because as I have mentioned, to all appearances Lucius is from Corinth, or is at the very least a
Greek, not a North African. For Lucius' Greek origin, see 1.1: 'Attic Hymettos and Ephyrean Isthmos and Spartan Taenaros, fruitful lands preserved forever in even more fruitful books, form my ancient stock. There I served my stint with the Attic tongue in the first campaigns of childhood.' [Hymettos Attica et Isthmos Ephyrea et Taenaros Spartiaca, glebae felices aeternum libris felicioribus conditae, mea vetus prosapia est; ibi linguam Attidem primis pueritiae stipendiis merui.] 74 E.g. H.J. Mason, 'Fabula Graecanica: Apuleius and his Greek Sources', in Aspects of Apuleius' Golden Ass (1978), pp. 1-15. 75 E.g., G. Sandy, The Greek World of Apuleius, pp. 235-236, restating the view of B.E. Perry. 76 Helm, Metamorphoseis oder der Goldene Esel, p. 5: 'Die beiden erhaltenen Schriften gehen also auf die gleiche Quelle zurück.' Perry, The Ancient Romances (1967), pp. 243-244. Harrison, Apuleius p. 218. 77 Any serious symbolism is an Apuleian addition: Moreschini, Apuleio e il Platonismo p. 42, 'Non vi è dubbio, quindi, che il significato simbolico-religioso della novella di Amore e Psiche, così come nel racconto dell'Onos, sia di Apuleio.' 78 Metamorphoses oder der Goldene Esel, p. 20: ' Auch da ist von göttlicher Einwirkung noch nicht die Rede, ein deutlicher Beweis, daß das Motiv der erlösenden Göttin erst nachträglich nach dem üblichen Romanschema aufgepfropft ist.'
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11 are meant to emphasize Lucius' helplessness and to convince the reader that Isis' intervention is the
only way Lucius could ever have regained his human form.79 This is not a question that admits of
definitive proof either way.
Lucius and Psychic Πολυπραγμοσύνη
I wish to discuss an important thesis and assess its merits:
(T) Curiositas, a trait fundamental to Lucius' character
is the equivalent of the Platonic concept of πολυπραγμοσύνη.
It will be useful to divide this thesis into two forms. First, (1') that in it πολυπραγμοσύνη is to be
understood as it is presented in the Platonic dialogues,80 and second, (1'') that curiositas is the
equivalent to πολυπραγμοσύνη not as it appears in Plato, but in later writers of more or less Platonic
allegiances. I hesitate to call 1' and 1'' the stronger and weaker verions, respectively, of this thesis, but I
think there are some good reasons to do so: we know for certain that Apuleius read Plato, not only
because of his frequent references to him as 'his master', or simply 'his Plato', and his self-identification
as a philosophus Platonicus, but also because of his quotation, adaptation, and translation of Platonic
material.81 In the case of later Platonist authors, while it would be unreasonable to doubt that Apuleius
79 On Making an Ass of Oneself, p. 35. 80 Harrison, Apuleius pp. 252-253, promotes the thesis in this form. 'Within the novel as a whole, as well as in the
tale of Cupid and Psyche, there is also the element of curiositas, the meddlesomeness with is the fault common to Psyche and Lucius and a favourite topic of Apuleian interpreters. This has been convincingly argued to be a version of Platonic polypragmosyne, psychic imbalance, in which the lower appetitive part of the soul exercises an undesirable dominance over the higher and more intellectual parts. Thus the unique prominence of curiositas as a theme in Apuleius' novel may be explained by its Platonic connections.' It should be noted, however, that although Harrison accepts the curiositas = πολυπραγμοσύνη equation, he does view all Platonic undercurrents in the novel as a matter of cultural display rather than serious moralizing. See, for example p. 259, 'Platonic material, like Isiac material, provides only one strand in the rich texture of Apuleius' novel, and though it must be assigned its full weight in the text's project of multifarious cultural display, that is no reason to allocate to it a dominant ideological importance.' 81 Fulgentius, Mythologies 123.1, mentions a translation by Apuleius of the Republic; Sidonius Apollinaris, Epistles 2.9.5 and Priscian 2.511 for reference to a Phaedo translation.
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was acquainted with their works and knew many of them well, we do not know which authors he knew in this way.82 The result in that in the case of 1', we have a master text to which we can appeal in deciding the question of the relationship between curiositas and πολυπραγμοσύνη; because the range of the Greek term is circumscribed, we can answer with finality whether the one appears to be dependent on the other. However, in the case of 1'', the field of πολυπραγμοσύνη is open-ended, and the best we can manage is to establish suggestive possibilities.
Πολυπραγμοσύνη in Plato Plato primarily uses the verb πολυπραγμονεῖν and the noun πολυπραγμοσύνη of persons, as in
the following passages:
(Charm. 161de) 'And do you think the writing master teaches you to read and write your own name only or those of the other boys as well? And do you write the names of your enemies just as much as your own names and those of your friends? "Just as much," he said. And are you a busybody and intemperate when you do this? "Not at all." But aren't you doing other people's business if to read and write are to do something?' [Δοκεῖ οὖν σοι τὸ αὑτοῦ ὄνομα μόνον γράφειν ὁ γραμματιστὴς καὶ ἀναγιγνώσκειν ἢ ἡμᾶς τοὺς παῖδας διδάσκειν, ἢ οὐδὲν ἧττον τὰ τῶν ἐχθρῶν ἐγράφετε ἢ τὰ ὑμέτερα καὶ τὰ τῶν φίλων ὀνόματα; Οὐδὲν ἧττον. Ἦοὖν ἐπολυπραγμονεῖτε καὶ οὐκ ἐσωφρονεῖτε τοῦτο δρῶντες;] (Theaet. 184e) 'But perhaps it would be better if you stated the
82 Mention of Plutarch at Golden Ass 1.2 is not enough to establish how familiar Apuleius was with his philosophical works.
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answers yourself, rather than that I should busy myself on your behalf.' [ἴσως δὲ βέλτιον σὲ λέγειν αὐτὰ ἀποκρινόμενον μᾶλλον ἢ ἐμὲ ὑπὲρ σοῦ πολυπραγμονεῖν.] (Gorgias 526c) 'And once in a while he inspects another soul, one who has lived a pious life, one devoted to truth, the soul of a private citizen or someone else, especially...that of a philosopher who has minded his own affairs and hasn't been meddlesome in the course of his life'. [ἐνίοτε δ´ ἄλλην εἰσιδὼν ὁσίως βεβιωκυῖαν καὶ μετ´ ἀληθείας, ἀνδρὸς ἰδιώτου ἢ ἄλλου τινός, μάλιστα μέν, ἔγωγέ φημι, ὦ Καλλίκλεις φιλοσόφου τὰ αὑτοῦ πράξαντος καὶ οὐ πολυπραγμονήσαντος ἐν τῷ βίῳ] (Rep. 433a9) 'Moreover, we've heard many people say and have often said ourselves that justice is doing one's own work and not meddling with what isn't one's own.' [Καὶ μὴν ὅτι γε τὸ τὰ αὑτοῦ πράττειν καὶ μὴ πολυπραγμονεῖν δικαιοσύνη ἐστί, καὶ τοῦτο ἄλλων τε πολλῶν ἀκηκόαμεν καὶ αὐτοὶ πολλάκις εἰρήκαμεν.]
In these passages, πολυπραγμονεῖν is to show excessive interest in, or actively to meddle with someone else's affairs, to do the work that is proper to them. In the Republic, Plato extends the range of πολυπραγμονεῖν analogically to cover a certain type of behaviour of parts of the soul in that dialogue's tripartite psychology. By means of the soul-state analogy, Plato claims that just as in the state when the various classes do not do their proper work and interfere with one another, the result being an unjust state, in the unjust soul, the when the lower parts usurp the authority of the properly ruling part, they πολυπραγμονεῖν.
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(Rep. 443cd) 'And in truth justice is, it seems, something of this sort. However, it isn't concerned with someone's doing his own externally, but with what is inside him, with what is truly himself and his own. One who is just does not allow any part of himself to do the work of another part or allow the various classes within him to meddle with each other.' [Τὸ δέ γε ἀληθές, τοιοῦτόν τι ἦν, ὡς ἔοικεν, ἡ δικαιοσύνη ἀλλ´ οὐ περὶ τὴν ἔξω πρᾶξιν τῶν αὐτοῦ, ἀλλὰ περὶ ἑαυτὸν καὶ καὶ τὰ ἑαυτοῦ, μὴ ἐάσαντα τἀλλότρια πράττειν ἕκαστον ἐν αὑτῳ μηδὲ πολυπραγμονεῖν πρὸς ἄλληλα τὰ ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ γένη]
So, when Plato uses πολυπραγμονεῖν of persons, it is always in the general sense of doing work that is someone else's, or at least does not pertain to them. In the psychology of the Republic, the term is used in connection with a moral failing (the person whose soul is composed of disordered and insubordinate parts is unjust),83 but Plato nowhere says that such a person should himself be described as πολυπραγμονεῖν. This, I believe, is the crucial mistake that leads to the thesis that Lucius' curiositas is the result of psychic πολυπραγμοσύνη,84 and an important step in any argument that will make curiositas dependent on Platonic moral psychology.
Now, what does it mean in practice to say that a person's lower psychic faculties are not properly subordinated to the rational or properly element? Such a person is a slave either to his appetitive or spirited part, and lacks control of his physical desires or his emotions. This is unquestionably an inner state, but it refers only to the two lower faculties, and does not have anything to do with the intellect.
Thus, in Plato, when πολυπραγμονεῖν is used of persons, it refers to their doing work that is not
83 Taylor, C.C.W., 'Plato's Totalitarianism' in Plato (Fine, ed.) p. 769. '...justice is itself that inner condition of psychic harmony in which each of the principal elements of the personality performs its proper role.'
84 DiFilippo p. 482, 'the soul of the unjust man, the true polypragmôn.'
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properly their own, and when it is used in psychology, it only ever refers to the two lower parts of the soul themselves, and not to the person whose soul is in an unjust state. Thesis 1' appears not to stand, because curiositas and curiosus are used only of persons (Lucius, and the reader at 11.23), and they cannot be seen as doing work that is not their own. Perhaps, however, Thesis 1' can be saved by appealing to an extended sense of πολυπραγμονεῖν, namely that while the strict equation curiositas = πολυπραγμοσύνη is not possible, the psychic effects of πολυπραγμοσύνη are equivalent to Lucius' curiositas.
Even after this reworking, there are problems. In Plato, the effect on a person's behaviour of having one's soul-parts in a state of πολυπραγμοσύνη is determined by the essential nature of the part that is out of balance. An uncontrolled appetitive part will lead to one's judgements being coloured by the desire for pleasure, and an uncontrolled spirited part will result in a person's being irrascible or having his judgements coloured by emotion. Neither of these states describe Lucius particularly well, nor does either seem to be what Lucius--at least--means when he describes his curiositas. I think it makes sense to disregard πολυπραγμοσύνη of the spirited part, since I know of no interpretation of the Golden Ass that makes Lucius irrascible or a slave to his emotions. In the case of the appetitive part, there has been a long tradition of interpretations that see Lucius as subservient to his desire for pleasure, an idea that is apparently sanctioned by the text itself, when the priest in Book 11 traces Lucius' misfortunes back to his yielding to serviles voluptates along with his curiositas improspera. But a difficulty with this moralizing interpretation, an interpretation against which the arguments of many of those interested in reading the Golden Ass as a comic work have been a useful balancing-force, lies in the fact that very few readers could be expected, before reading the priest's words, to characterize Lucius as someone driven by a lust for pleasure. Granted, he seduces the slave-girl Photis, but in his presentation of the incident, it is a purely practical matter: he must seduce her in order to gain access to
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her mistress. He undoubtedly enjoys her company, but the pleasure he experiences with her is not the object of the seduction. He enjoys dainty foods as an ass, but he tells us this only to show us that he was still human inside. Lucius, ass or human, is not driven by any excessive lust for pleasure.
Πολυπραγμοσύνη in later Platonism
So the curiositas = πολυπραγμοσύνη equation does not work for the writings of Plato himself. Let us look at some uses of the Greek concept in later Platonists to see if it has evolved into something that will satisfy the equation. Before we turn to Plutarch's On Curiosity [Περὶ Πολυπραγμοσύνης], we will take a quick look at a passage from an earlier Platonizing writer, Philo of Alexandria. At On Abraham 20-21, Philo describes the person who restlessly attends every spectacle and every trial, taking in every bit of gossipy talk he can, and who reports it all to everyone who will listen. He concludes his description thus:
His ears he keeps alert in meddlesome curiosity, ever eager to learn his neighbour's affairs, whether good or bad, and ready with envy for the former and joy at the latter, for the worthless man is a creature naturally malicious, a hater of good and a lover of evil. [τὰ δὲ ὦτα ἐπουρίσας85 ἕνεκα πολυπράγμονος περιεργίας· τὰ γὰρ ἑτέρων εἴτε ἀγαθὰ εἴτ´ αὖ κακὰ γλίχεται μανθάνειν, ὡς αὐτίκα τοῖς μὲν φθονεῖν, ἐφ´ οἷς δὲ ἥδεσθαι· βάσκανον γὰρ καὶ μισόκαλον καὶ φιλοπόνηρον ὁ φαῦλος φύσει.]
Philo's πολυπράγμων resembles far more the πολυπράγμονες in Plato's more ordinary use of the
85 This word is uncertain.
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term than anything in the moral psychology of the Republic. These are people who take excessive interest in the affairs of others.
The πολυπράγμων of the Περὶ Πολυπραγμοσύνης suffers from a disease (νόσος), the desire for knowledge of other people's affairs (515D: ἡ πολυπραγμοσύνη φιλομάθειά τίς ἐστιν ἀλλοτρίων κακῶν). He loves, among other things, stories of adultery (518A: μοιχείαν γυναικός), and is a prisoner to every spectacle,
(521B) And you may observe how every kind of spectacle alike gets a strangle-hold on busybodies and twists their necks round when they once acquire a habit and practice of scattering their glances in all directions. [τοὺς δὲ πολυπράγμονας ἴδοις ἂν ὑπὸ παντὸς ὁμοίως θεάματος τραχηλιζομένους καὶ περιαγομένους ὅταν ἔθος καὶ μελέτη γένηται τῆς ὄψεως αὐτοῖς πανταχοῦ διαφορουμένης.]
He is interested not just in other people's business, but more specifically in other people's misfortune, (518C) Since, then, it is the searching out of troubles that
the busybody desires, he is possessed by the affliction called 'malignancy,' brother to envy and spite. For envy is pain at another's good, while malignancy is joy at another's evil; and both spring from a savage and bestial affliction, a vicious nature. [κακῶν οὖν ἱστορίας ὁ πολυπράγμων ὀρεγόμενος, ἐπιχαιρεκακίας συνέχεται πάθει, φθόνου καὶ βασκανίας ἀδελφῷ. φθόνος μὲν γὰρ ἐστι λύπη ἐπ´ ἀλλοτρίοις ἀγαθοῖς, ἐπιχαιρεκακία δ´ ἡδονὴ ἐπ´ ἀλλοτρίοις κακοῖς· ἀμφότερα δ´ ἐκ πάθους ἀνημέρου καὶ θηριώδους
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γεγένηται τῆς κακοηθείας.]
The πολυπράγμονες are also fond of sharing the results of their constant research (519C: ἃ γὰρ ἡδέως ἀκούουσιν ἡδέως λαλοῦσι, καὶ ἃ παρ´ ἄλλων σπουδῇ συλλέγουσι πρὸς ἑτέρους μετὰ χαρᾶς ἐκφέρουσιν). These two portraits are very similar, except that Plutarch's πολυπράγμων seems to be interested only in the misfortunes of others, i.e., πολυπραγμοσύνη does not necessarily entail a jealous character. Plutarch's language at the end of 521B, quoted above (τῆς ὄψεως διαφερουμένης) may suggest that the πολυπράγμων has a fragmented soul, since he scatters his attention all over the place, and this fragmented soul a reference to πολυπραγμοσύνη among its parts. However, the dominant impression this treatise leaves is that even among Platonists, the concept of πολυπραγμοσύνη has not undergone any kind of transformation towards being a specialized technical term. In Plutarch, it is put to much the same use as Plato put it to outside of certain parts of the Republic, and remains quite close to the 'ordinary' use of the 5th and 4th centuries. The term still has no Platonic connotations that would give us any reason to think that Apuleius had it specifically in mind when he was reshaping the story of Lucius, or that curiositas in the novel is meant to stand for it.
Lucius the Healthy-Minded I introduced William James' account of fundamentally contrasting religious temperaments at the
outset of this chapter not because I felt that they would have been of inherent interest to the classical scholar approaching the character of Lucius as a subject for psychological study, but as a framingdevise designed to bring into focus two divergent ways of approaching the novel, on the level of character, and of narrative structure. The Sick Soul reading, which I have examined to this point, contains the following elements: a character possesses a fundamental flaw that prevents him from standing in a healthy or harmonious relationship to the world he inhabits; this flaw leads to selfinflicted suffering accompanied by gradual development of the character until a point of real crisis is
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reached, to which the only response is repentence followed by a second birth. This model touches upon the psychology of the protagonist, and to the extent that the reader is
able to identify with him, imparts a moral lesson: beware of unwittingly being a Lucius yourself. It also touches upon the narrative fabric of the story, giving it direction from the beginning on: it is such that it requires resolution in a denouement, this case, salvation.
But the Sick Soul as I have presented it is an extreme type, and as I mentioned above, is to rigid to capture either the character of Lucius or of the narrative with any adequacy. In language and incident, the Golden Ass is far too complex a work for that. The question I will pursue in this final section is To what extent can the Golden Ass be read as the story of a Healthy-Minded individual in James' sense? The answer to this question will have an important impact on how the reader will be able to assess the significance of the whole, and especially of the narrative crisis of Books 10 and 11. It will turn out that on this reading, 'crisis' will have to be used in a more restricted sense, simply as a turningpoint in the narrative.
There are four ways in which I believe Lucius exhibits a healthy-minded strain in his character: First, he shows a consistent unwillingness to attribute evil essentially to the world, in spite of all the misery he endures. Rather, he prefers to attribute his constant suffering either to random maliciousness on the part of other characters, or to an inexplicably hostile Fortuna. Second, he takes an obvious joy in simple observation of both natural beauty and natural wonders, as well as those that are products of human invention. Third, he consistently displays a remarkably short attention-span; he seems curiously incapable of dwelling on any one subject for long, even if it threatens serious consequences for his physical well-being. Fourth, Lucius is from the beginning not an irreligious person in need of a conversion crisis to awaken him to the power of the divine. In this chapter, I will address the first of these points, reserving the others for treatment later.
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1. The world not essentially evil. On this point, I will begin by returning to the passage from the Varieties of Religious Experience that I quoted at the beginning of this chapter.
One can but recognize in such writers as these the
presence of a temperament organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatally forbidden to linger, as those of the opposite temperament linger, over the darker aspects of the universe. In some individuals optimism may become quasi-pathological. The capacity for even transient sadness or a momentary humility seems cut off from them by a kind of congenital anaesthesia.86
It is worth adding to this a quote from Spinoza, given by James as well,
One might perhaps expact gnawings of conscience and
repentance to help to bring them on the right path, and might thereupon conclude (as every one does conclude) that these affections are good things. Yet when we look at the matter closely, we shall find that not only are they not good, but on the contrary deleterious and evil passions. Harmful are these and evil, inasmuch as they form a particular kind of sadness...87
Lucius, especially after his transformation, is constantly subjected to senseless cruelty on the part of his various masters.88 Yet he never uses this series of torments as an opportunity to make generalizations about the character of mankind, or the world. He is senselessly tortured by a boy with whom he shares the task of carrying wood for their family.89 This boy, we are told, is the 'wickedest boy
86 pp. 95-96. 87 James p. 145, quoted from Spinoza's Tract on God, Man, and Happiness, 2.10. 88 It is worth noting that he suffers similar random acts of malice before his transformation as well, and thus
before his putative 'punishment' for his curiositas. For example, the fish-stomping incident of 1.25, and the Risus festival of Book 3. 89 7.17
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in the world' (omnibus ille quidem puer deterrimus), but is not the occasion for deeper reflection. Similarly, in Book 9, we are introduced to the baker's wife, a woman bristling with every possible vice
That vile woman lacked not a single fault. Her soul was like some muddy latrine into which every vice had flowed. She was cruil and perverse, crazy for men and wine, headstrong and obstinate, grasping in her mean thefts and a spendthrift in her extravagances, an enemy of fidelity and a foe to chastity.
[Nec enim vel unum vitium nequissimae illi feminae deerat, sed omnia prorsus ut in quandam caenosam latrinam in eius animum flagitia confluxerant: saeva scaeva, virosa ebriosa, pervicax pertinax, in rapinis turpibus avara, in suptibus foedis profusa, inimica fidei, hostis pudicitiae.]90
Yet once again, this woman does not lead Lucius to reflect on or condemn the condition of man or womankind in general, nor to lament the depravity of his world.
One wonders if she would have warranted such a lengthy comdemnation at all, had she not also been pointlessly cruel towards Lucius, through an unexplained 'hatred' of him in particular (Talis illa mulier mire me persequebatur odio). As Schlam remarks on this passage, 'The Ass describes the miller's wife as devoted to making him miserable, but the other animals at the mill are scarcely any better off.'91 So, there are moments when Lucius extends this view of cruelty even further than pure randomness, explaining a character's actions that happen to harm him as a deliberate attempt to do so, when such a picture of personal enmity towards Lucius would strike the reader as distinctly
90 9.14 91 On Making an Ass of Oneself p. 37 n.19.
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implausible. Shortly after his transformation, Book 4.3, Lucius is attacked by a farmer for trespassing on his garden. Lucius defends himself, and knocks the farmer to the ground with a kick. The farmer's wife sees this, and immediately raises an alarm. Lucius' account of her precise intention is worth noting; while the reader might expect that her shouting is a reaction to fear for her husband and a cry for those nearby to come to his aid, he ascribes to her something rather different,
She instantly sprang down toward him with shrieks of woe obviously intending my immediate destruction by arousing pity for her-self. (emphasis added) [ululabili cum plangore ad eum statim prosilit, ut sui videlicet mihi praesens crearet exitium.]92
Videlicet is a curious word for Lucius to include here, as though he expects his audience to agree to his implausibly skewed presentation of the event.
Psychologically, this strange self-centeredness takes Lucius as far as possible from seeing the world as an inherently evil place, because he sees such acts not as the sort humans regularly inflict on each other, but always only on him, and never for any reason other than a baseless dislike of him.
The upshot of this analysis is that while Lucius cannot--understandably--be described as happy, he seems to lack the Sick Soul's insistence on the world itself as something evil. The closest he comes to a general condemnation of mankind is his speech against corrupt judges provoked by his watching the pantomime of the Judgment of Paris at Book 10.33. But this degree of sustained seriousness seems somewhat out of character for Lucius-actor, and has been plausibly arged by Zimmerman to be an intrusion on the part of Lucius-auctor.93 Lucius-auctor is the post-conversion Lucius, whose attitudes towards the world may be significantly different from Lucius-actor, whose reactions to situations as they occur to him in the stream of the narrative Lucius-auctor is at pains to represent as they struck him
92 4.3 93 'Narrative Judgment and Reader-Response' pp. 154-155.
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at that particular time, usually without retrospective judgment. Conclusion
In part, the upshot of this chapter has been to return, by a new route, to ground familiar to many interpreters of the Golden Ass: the novel both invites reading in search of a 'final meaning', and defeats it. Platonic material may be present, but its significance is unclear, or at least different Platonic elements resist harmonization into a univocal final message, as I have shown with DiFilippo's argument. It is purely perspective and careful selection that permits reading Lucius as a Sick Soul, or a healthy-minded person. This ambiguity between these two styles of assessing Lucius' character and the direction of the narrative is founded on the status of curiositas, and in my subsequent chapters, I will extend my analysis of it in a new direction: the slippery line between being a passive and fully involved audience and being oneself either a spectacle--or finding oneself drawn into a spectacle--despite all initial confident feelings of security.
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Chapter 4: The Reader as Spectator 80

0. Introduction
In my previous chapter, I examined the pattern that emerges across the Golden Ass in its depiction of various audiences and the spectacles they witness, broadly dividing this relationship into two categories of audience, Type-A and Type-B. Roughly speaking, the former exercise power over their spectacle, most often embodied in a feeling of epistemic superiority and manifested in laughter, while the latter are powerless and find themselves undesirably sucked into what they watch, suffering either emotional or physical harm. In the present chapter, I will argue that the Golden Ass is a highly 'unsafe' text for the reader in a way relevant to the above distinction, using, for contrast, a reading of Herodotus as a paradigm 'safe' text. Employing some of the conceptual tools of contemporary narratology, in particular prolepsis and metalepsis, I will show that the Prologue to the novel sets the reader up to respond to the text as though he were a Type-A audience, while reflections of the Prologue at moments of dramatic tension in later parts of the novel undermine the reader's Type-A status, causing his descent into Type-B status.
1. Safe and Unsafe Texts
There is a continuum along which texts can be placed, designated at one end 'safe', and at the other, 'unsafe'. As I am using them, these are not political categories, meant to describe the actual author's relationship with his work, but narratological categories. As such, they are founded on the reader's relation to the author, whether the latter is considered as a real historical personality, or more abstractly as the entity responsible for the content at its various levels, from the most explicit to the derivable, or implicit. Because these categories rely on a relationship between two 'individuals', the key concept to be used in determining whether a text is safe or unsafe is knowledge. Put simply, the basic question to be asked is: To what extent does the reader know what the author is doing?
This question allows for different levels of complexity, depending on the nature of the text in question. It can receive a one-dimensional answer when the text is a fragment, where the wider context is missing, or when the author never intrudes qua author, as in Kafka's The Trial, which, while a deeply mysterious story, never introduces the author himself. In fact, this lack of authorial intrusion in The Trial contributes to its opacity and motivates the above question, because it shares with many postmodern novels a lack of adequate grounds for deciphering characters' actions on the basis of their
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motivations and intentions.94 A deeper layer of complexity is introduced when the author himself addresses the reader, because here the possibility of misdirection opens up. When the author addresses the reader, a new perspective on the work is brought into play--the author's--, but it has to be remembered that this is just another perspective on equal footing with others, that is, the perspectives the reader himself brings to the task of reading. The less the reader finds his perspective to match that offered by the author, the less safe the text.
1.1. Safe Texts and Prolepses
My contention is that the Golden Ass is in this, narratological respect a highly unsafe text, both because of its internal structure and because of the complications introduced by the several intrusions on the part of the author. Before turning to it, I will offer an example of a paradigm case of a safe narrative, Herodotus' Histories, with the help of a recent paper by Jonas Grethlein.95 Grethlein argues that the Histories are a 'safe' narrative for the reader because Herodotus sets up a consistent deep separation between the reader and the characters at the level of reception.96 This separation is maintained by keeping characters insensitive to signs that would point to the real nature of the action (e.g. oracles are unclear and foretell outcomes contrary to the desires of the consultants), while making it relatively easy for the attentive reader to forecast the future course of events. The reader of Herodotus is in a position of epistemic superiority over the characters, but not in the way that the Risus crowd is over Lucius, because in the latter case they know the precise details of a particular event, while in the
94 M.-L. Ryan, 'Toward a Definition of Narrative' p. 30, '...postmodern novels are often low in narrativity (sc. the extent to which a text satisfies the normally given criteria of narrative) because they do not allow readers to reconstruct the network of mental representations that motivates the actions of characters and binds the events into an intelligible and determinate sequence.' Although I mention The Trial here in contrast to the Golden Ass, because of its lack of authorial intrusion, I will later return to it precisely because the two novels share this unsettling opacity in character motivation. In both, characters sometimes act with no window at all on their motives or intentions, while sometimes such indications are given, but are so bizarre as to be entirely unsatisfactory as grounds for action in a 'normal' world, and thus are virtually on the same level as actions to which no discernible motivation can be attached.
95 'Philosophical and Structuralist Narratologies--Worlds Apart?' in Narratology and Interpretation, pp. 153-174 (2009). See, for instance, p. 164, 'The force of contingency that Herodotus deploys in his narrative is not only distanced from the readers through the "as-if" of the reception, but also contrasts with the safety of the reading experience.' (emphasis mine)
96 In the terminology of contemporary narratology, 'action' and 'reception' are frequently contrasted, the former meaning the events narrated, the latter the response to those events. It is important to note that 'reception' covers the response both of the characters within the story, and the readers themselves.
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former, the reader, who may not know every detail of the history Herodotus relates, can anticipate the general course of events through pattern recognition.
Herodotus achieves this effect through the use of prolepses, a concept which covers the broad territory between explicit authorial statements about the future course of events and the structuring of the narrative to yield patterns that allow the reader to anticipate outcomes.97 Examples of the latter include the status of oracles mentioned above, the fact that failure to listen to sober advisers leads to disaster, and that hybris and impiety are always punished. In Herodotus, both direct prolepsis and the vaguer sort are reliable, the difference between the two lying in the fact that in the former case, the narrator can simply be trusted to develop the narrative in the direction he has indicated, while in the latter some work on the part of the reader is necessary. However, this work, pattern recognition, is never too strenuous, and with minimal effort the reader will find vaguer prolepses as useful for mastering the text as the more direct kind. One of the functions of these indirect prolepses is to keep the experience of reading interesting; because of them the reader knows the general course events will take, but the details remain in the hands of the narrator.98
Thus, reading Herodotus is a 'safe' activity, because he consistently maintains a wide distance between the characters and the reader at the level of reception, primarily through the use of prolepses, both direct and indirect. In contrast, the Golden Ass is a highly 'unsafe' narrative, not only because the direct prolepses that do occur are misleading, but because the kind of distancing that the Histories maintain is consistently broken, and along more axes than just that between the reader and the characters: the novel breaks down the separation between the narrating-I and the experiencing-I as well as the separation between the narrator and the author. In addition, when the separation between the characters and the reader is closed at the level of reception, this is a function not only of epistemic distance with regard to the action, that is, when neither the characters nor the reader are able to anticipate the course events will take. As I will argue in this chapter, there are points at which the characters address the reader himself, commenting on his reading experience.
Clearly, the difference between these two texts can be partly explained by their different genres. History's primary aims, to establish what happened, to explain why it happened, and to help its readers
97 Grethlein p. 158, 'Particularly prolepses which can range from explicit statements to vague references and even implicit patterns instill in the readers expectations about the future development of the plot.'
98 Grethlein, p. 164, 'Such patterns {sc. hybristic action, failure to listen to advisers} are similar to prolepses in that they prepare the readers for the further development of the plot. Yet, the information is even vaguer here than in narratorial prolepses--how and when the disaster will occur is not specified--and thus leaves the process of reading its dynamics.'
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to use the lessons of the past to gain a clearer understanding of their contemporary world, require a transparency that would be detrimental to the success of a novel. The narrative peculiarities of the Golden Ass, however, cannot be wholly explained by the exigencies of its genre, i.e. the creation of intrigue and suspense. There is more at work in this narrative than simply keeping the reader interested in finding out what happens next. 1.2. Misleading Prolepses in the Golden Ass
Narratorial prolepses, moments when the narrator simply announces what is going to happen next (or later, after some delay) are uncommon in the Golden Ass, and when they do occur, are mostly bunched up in Books 7-10, the section of the novel that seems to correspond most closely to the form of Milesian Tales, promised in the Prologue (1.1: sermone isto Milesio varias fabulas conseram). A striking feature of these prolepses, noted by scholars, is that they are misleading. Let us briefly consider two examples, both introductions to adultery stories, one in which Lucius is himself a participant, the other, one that he overhears.
At 10.2, Lucius introduces a story that he hears about an 'outrageous and abominable crime' (dissignatum scelestum ac nefarium facinus)99 that was perpetrated in the town he has stopped at. Just after introducing the basic setup of the story--one in which a woman conceives a desire for her stepson--Lucius interrupts himself and addresses the reader, telling him what to expect from what will follow:
So now, excellent reader, know that you are reading a tragedy, and no light tale, and that you are rising from the lowly slipper to the lofty buskin. (Iam ergo, lector optime, scito te tragoediam, non fabulam, legere et a socco ad cothurnum ascendere.)
99 The extent to which Apuleius may have had Seneca's version of the tragedy in mind is uncertain, but note the similarity between the wording here and Phaedra's lines at 1176-1178: 'With this hand I shall make you amends, thrust the sword into my evil breast, and release Phaedra from life and crime at one moment' (hac manu poenas tibi / solvam et nefando pectori ferrum inseram, / animaque Phaeram pariter ac scelere exuam). Consider also that Lucius leaves open the question whether this woman was 'naturally unchaste or driven by fate' (naturaliter impudica seu fato...impulsa), alongside Phaedra 130 and 169, where the nutrix twice calls Phaedra chaste (casto pectore; mente castifica), and Phaedra's claim that a god is driving her into her lust (185: potensque tota mente dominatur deus). Fatum and deus are obviously not the same thing, but both imply an external force pushing their victim into her state of mind. Apuleius himself conflates the two, when just a few lines later he blames her condition on Amor, and says that the woman eventually 'surrendered to the savage god' (saevienti deo iam succubuit).
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This address marks the story as different from the others that are told in this section (7-10), by insisting that it is not a fabula,100 a flexible word in the Golden Ass, ranging in meaning from any kind of story to stories that appear to be drawn from the tradition of the Milesiaka. Here the distinction that is being made is most likely between source, rather than content, and this story is contrasted with fabulae in the latter, more restricted sense, because their source is mime and the work represented by Aristides and Sisenna, while it is drawn from tragedy. No reasonably sophisticated reader would miss, even before Lucius' direct address, that this story will owe something to the story of Phaedra and Hippolytus, a tragedy in the sense that it will end in misery for all those involved.
Thus, this non-fabula begins in terms reminiscent of the familiar Phaedra tragedy, although the stepson is no Hippolytus--he is just a relatively under-characterized young man. When the stepmother finally realizes that her stepson has no interest in her, she decides, with the help of a slave, that she must poison him. Their plan does not go as they intended, however, because when a poisoned cup had been prepared, her younger, biological son comes home one day and gulps it down, unaware of its contents. The stepmother quickly turns this death to her advantage, and contacts her husband, telling him that the younger boy was poisoned by her stepson in revenge for her refusing to yield to his sexual advances. At the funeral of the young boy, the gathered crowd, enraged at the 'crime' of the stepson, and whipped into a murderous frenzy by the pleas of the father, demand that normal judicial process be forgotten, and that the stepson be killed immediately.
(10.6) The grieving father inflamed the council and the people too with so much pity and such intense anger that they wanted to dispense with the nuisance of a trial, with its clear demonstrations by the prosecution and studied evasions by the defense. They shouted in unison that this curse on the people should be punished by the people, crushed under a rain of stones. Tanta denique miseratione tantaque indignatione curiam sed et plebem maerens inflammaverat ut, remoto iudicandi taedio et accusationis manifestis probationibus et responsionis meditatis ambagibus, cunti conclamarint lapidibus obrutum publicum malum publice vindicari.
100In contrast to 9.14, for example, where the story of Lucius' stay with the Baker and his adulterous wife is called a fabulam...suave comptam.
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The crowd's behaviour in this scene is reminiscent of the crowd in Theylophron's tale--both demand the suspension of ordinary judicial procedure because they have been inflamed (inflammaverat) by someone's words--but there is a difference between the two circumstances that is worth noting. The difference turns on the vague word malum, which Hanson translates with the more loaded term 'curse'. At first glance this may seem an overly or misleadingly interpretive translation, but the atmosphere of the story justifies it. The crowd calls the alleged crime of the stepson a publicum malum. Why? There is nothing inherently publicum about this case; the stepson has not endangered the public welfare by collusion with an enemy, hoarding, or anything else that might normally be considered an offense against the town itself. And yet the crowd treats his case just as though he had. Their reasoning must be that the unnaturalness of his 'crime', which includes both the murder of his stepbrother and his attempted seduction of his stepmother, will bring some sort of pollution over the whole community. This way of thinking takes us right back to the Greece of 600 years before this story takes place, and the fear of the real power of pollution so frequently represented on the tragic stage. The basic outline of the story to this point is clearly set in the realm of tragedy with its Phaedra/Hippolytus reminiscences, but the tragic atmosphere penetrates even deeper, infecting the crowd itself and causing Thessalians of the 2nd century to behave as though they were on the Athenian stage. Thus far, Lucius' announcement that his narrative will take a turn toward the cothurnus is borne out by both the details of the stepmother's intrigues, as well as the crowd's reaction to the scene that unfolds before them. The prolepsis seems accurate on two levels.
The crowd wants immediate retribution, but, again mirroring the Theylophron-tale, this is forestalled by the more sober-minded magistrates, who feel the matter should be put to a vote. This has been noted by scholars as the point at which the apparent initial promise that to the reader that what he will read is a tragedy becomes muddied.101 The magistrates' delay allows time for a doctor to come forward and announce that he gave the poison to the slave, but knowing that the slave must be up to no good, gave him in fact a soporific, and that if they open the boy's tomb, they will find him alive and well. This they do, and immediately the crowd turns on the slave and the stepmother,
101Schlam (1992) p. 79, says that the magistrates 'avert the tragedy'. Winkler p. 78 notes that the story 'changes from tragedy to comedy'. Whether Winkler is right to call the ending of the story a 'comedy' is a difficult question, given the shifting meaning of the term across literature. If we understand 'comedy' to mean that it has a happy ending, whatever may have transpired before the end, then the term is perfectly applicable. This is comedy in the sense of The Divine Comedy. However, it is not clear whether this is the key sense of comedy or the comic in the rest of the novel.
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(10.12) The stepmother was sentenced to perpetual exile, the slave was crucified.... As for the father himself, his famed and storied fortune received an ending worthy of divine providence: a short while--no, only an instant--after he had been in peril of childlessness, he suddenly became the father of two young men. et novercae quidem perpetuum indicitur exilium, servus vero patibulo suffigitur.... Et illius quidem senis famosa atque fabulosa fortuna providentiae divinae condignum accepit exitum, qui momento modico, immo puncto exiguo, post orbitatis periculum adulescentium duorum pater repente factus est.
Thus, a narratorial prolepsis that promised a turn from fabulae (associated with the soccus and the comic stage) to a tragedy for a time sustained the promised tone but eventually devolved into something else. To call this prolepsis false requires that the initial announcement of a 'tragic turn' be read as 'and now I am going to relate to you a tragedy from beginning to end', which is perhaps a not unreasonable reading of 10.2 (Iam ergo, lector optime, scito te tragoediam, non fabulam, legere et a socco ad cothurnum ascendere). Lucius, of course, is not this direct in his prolepsis, the key supplement made on the part of the reader being 'from beginning to end'. Lucius does fulfill his promise to an extent, by presenting a story drawn right from the tragic stage, and describing an audience that plays its role as though it were itself absorbed in the world of the tragic stage. The sympathetic reader could try to vindicate this prolepsis as fundamentally true, provided that its vagueness allows a reading that promises a tragic atmosphere and clear tragic allusions, but not a tragedy in the fullest sense.
Lucius himself, however, does not come to the aid of such a reader. Slipped into his rapid description of the father's sudden reversals of fortune (10.12, cited above) is a comment on his fortuna, that it was famosa atque fabulosa. To say that the father's experience was fabulosa, worthy of being told as a fabula, so directly contradicts the non fabulam legere of 10.2 that it demands an explanation. One option is to say that this merely confirms the 'sympathetic' reading outlined in the paragraph above, that Lucius is here acknowledging that the element of tragedy does not inform the whole course of events, but is a matter of tone and allusion. 10.12 deals with sudden reversals, which sweep up the narrator himself so that he indulges in a rhetorical self-correction 'a short while--no, only an instant' (momento modico, immo puncto exiguo). Fortuna has two faces in the Golden Ass, one the relentless persecutor of Lucius, and the other the agency responsible for sudden and unexpected changes in the
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direction of the action--to the characters at the level of reception, at least; the reader familiar with other novels from antiquity as well as the pattern of the fabulae of the Golden Ass will be far readier to anticipate these 'surprises'. Perhaps fortuna in this passage refers only to the unexpected change to the father's life at the end of the tale, and thus fabulosa is limited to the end of the story. This reading is undermined, however, by the rest of the sentence: 'As for the father himself, his famed and storied fortune received an ending worthy of divine providence' (et illius quidem senis famosa atque fabulosa fortuna providentiae divinae condignum accepit exitium). The ending of the story, the exitium, is also the ending of his fortuna, and thus fortuna must be understood to cover the whole of his experience with the wicked stepmother, and it is then this whole experience that is worthy of telling as a fabula, completely contrary to what was promised at 10.2.
A similar prolepsis occurs at 9.14, when Lucius introduces the story of the baker's wife, another of the adultery tales that occupy the later books. The character of the baker's wife has attracted some scholarly attention, because in addition to Lucius' characterization of her as manifestly vile in every respect, he appears to suggest that she was a Christian.102 The passage that has led scholars to this conclusion is the following:
(9.14) Furthermore she scorned and spurned all the gods in heaven, and, instead of holding a definite faith, she used the false sacrilegious presumption of a god, whom she would call 'one and only', to invent meaningless rites to cheat everyone and deceive her wretched husband, having sold her body to drink from dawn and to debauchery the whole day. Tunc spretis atque calcatis divinis numinibus in vicem certae religionis mentita sacrilega praesumptione dei, quem praedicaret unicum, confictis observationibus vacuis fallens omnes homines et miserum maritum decipiens matutino mero et continuo stupro corpus manciparat.
No definite answer to the question of whether this is the intended meaning of the passage is possible, and it is premature to claim that this is Apuleius' one and only swipe at the growing religion. What the passage tells us is that she declined participation in what Lucius considers more traditional and apparently 'true' religion--whether she actually actively despised (calcatis) the gods (divina numina), or this is just Lucius' emotionally charged way of saying that she neglected them in favour of
102Helm (1959) p. 10, 'für die Stimmung jener Zeit ist dabei bezeichnend, daß das vom Schriftsteller als Ausbund von Lasterhäftigkeit charakterisierte Weib, nach seinen Andeutungen zu schließen, als Christin gedacht ist.' Schlam (1992) p. 8, referring to this passage, 'Christianity apparently is referred to only once, and with hostile mockery.'
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her unicus deus is unclear, but it is worth noting that in addition to everything else he says against her, he adds that she was exceptionally cruel toward him: (9.15) 'Such being the kind of woman she was, she persecuted me with extraordinary hatred' (Talis illa mulier miro me persequebatur odio). Lucius as a character has a kind of persecution-complex; this is not the first occasion when he has described a character as inveterately hostile toward him for no reason beyond their vileness. He attributes to such characters no psychological depth at all, and shows no interest in representing them as anything but one-dimensional villains, explaining their behaviour in accordingly simple terms. This may be the case here as well. Lucius asks the reader to believe that the baker's wife engages in endless criminal debauchery under the cover of a religious practice that would make her stand out in the eyes of her fellow townspeople. Christianity, in this period, would not serve particularly well as such a cover, unless her neighbours were themselves in no way hostile to the new religion, and were thus prepared to see her as a kind of holy-woman, under which disguise she could get away with her lifestyle, much as the priests of the Syrian goddess succeed in doing. But this picture is rather unlikely.
Further, Lucius represents her as acting alone in her faith, implying that she was the sole inventor of her 'meaningless rites' (confictis observationibus vacuis), since their only purpose was to give cover to her wickedness.
In brief, the story of the baker's wife is as follows: she has a lover, but is unsatisfied by him, because he is rather unintrepid and jumpy. She laments at 9.22, 'Poor me, I happened on a boyfriend who is afraid even of the noise of the mill-stone and the face of that mangy ass you see over there.' (At ego misella molae etiam sonum et ecce illius scabiosi asini faciem timentem103 familiarem incidi.) At the advice of her companion, an old woman who was a partner in all her crimes (9.15: anus quaedam stuprorum sequestra et adulterorum internuntia) and an 'unrestrained gossip' (9.17: illa sermocinatrix immodica...anus)104 tells her the story of a successful local love-affair between a matrona and a virile young man. Encouraged by this tale of successful adultery, the baker's wife decided to accept the old woman's offer of a more suitable lover. When her husband is away on business, the appointed day for
103A little bit of irony on the part of Lucius-narrator, who includes this detail in her speech, knowing that in fact he, the miserable ass, will later be the cause of the downfall of the baker's wife and her more stout lover.
104This old woman, sarcastically referred to as illa timida anicula (9.16), and an anicula garriens (9.22) is yet another example of Lucius' apparent contempt for old women. Cf. The anus in the Phaedra-story and the anus/anicula who narrates the tale of Cupid and Psyche and offers interesting insights to Charite on the character of dreams. The story of Cupid and Psyche, with its rich literary texture, Platonic undertones, and significant connection to Lucius' own story, is nevertheless delivered--Lucius would have us believe--by a moribund, drunken old hag. Socrates' witch-lover Meroe is an anus (1.7), and she and her companion Panthia, a rather disgusting pair, are mulieres duas altioris aetatis (1.12).
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their meeting comes, and her new lover, Philesitherus enters the picture. Before continuing my summary of the story, I will take a moment to discuss the phenomenon
represented by Philesitherus and other characters with blatantly significant, or 'speaking' names. They raise the issue of narrative reliability or credibility in a way different from examples of narrative inconsistency, e.g. Lucius' vaporous slaves, who change in number, and seem to appear and disappear at random, something I discussed in Chapter 3. Names like Philesitherus and Pamphile105 offer the reader a refreshingly clear either/or: if Lucius-actor and Lucius-narrator are to be read as inhabiting something approximating the 'real world' of the reader considered as a historically defined individual, these names immediately undermine narrative credibility. In the reader's 'real world', people do not carry names that so perfectly describe their characters as is the case with Philesitherus and Pamphile, let alone names that manage to produce irony or comedy at some point in their lives, as is the case with Philesitherus, who will eventually be forced to submit to the sort of treatment that would humiliate any aspiring womanizer, and Thelyphron, whose name serves as a vehicle for a bit of verbal play.106 Another category are those names that cannot be expected to be significant for every reader, because they do not reflect anything about the character's personality or bear on the scenes in which they appear, but may be relevant to the larger scheme of the Golden Ass. An example of this type is the witch Meroe, introduced at (1.7). Scobie suggests that her name might be a reference to Meroe, an island in the Nile, where there was a famous temple of Isis.107 In short, such things are impossibilities in the real world, and if Lucius is meant to inhabit the same world as his reader, he must here be applying a creative hand and altering details of his story in order to amuse. If he is willing to make such changes in order to entertain his reader, where else might he be making such editorial decisions?
But of course such names are a relatively small detail, and the reader wishing to match his experience with the world of the Golden Ass will have much larger difficulties to contend with. If, on the other hand, the reader accepts that Lucius inhabits a 'strange world', these names only augment its
105'Mrs. All-Lover' is the witch-wife of Lucius' host Milo, and apparently enjoys a reputation for an insatiable sexual appetite known to all but Milo. According to Lucius' aunt Byrrhena, (2.5) 'No sooner does she catch sight of some young man of attractive appearance than she is consumed by his charm and immediately directs her eye and her desire at him. She sows her seductions, attacks his soul, and binds him with the everlasting shackles of passionate love.' (Nam simul quemque conspexerit speciosae formae iuvenem, venustate eius sumitur et ilico in eum et oculum et animum detorquet. Serit blanditias, invadit spiritum, amoris profundi pedicis aeternis alligat.)
106'Mr. Woman-Hearted', from θῆλυς (female, effeminate) and φρήν (heart), when he is about to undertake the task of guarding the corpse, (2.23) 'manfully screwed up my courage' (animum meum commasculo). Outside of providing an opportunity for this play, I can't find any further reason for Thelyphron's name.
107Scobie (1975) p. 95.
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strangeness. This second option gives the reader no reason to question Lucius' reliability or the veracity of his narrative, within the bounds of the world in which the story takes place.
To return to the story of the baker's wife, when she is about to enjoy her time with Philesitherus, her husband makes a surprise re-appearance, and she hastily hides her new lover under a vat. Although hidden from the husband's sight, his fingers stick out from under the vat, and Lucius, with great relish, steps out of the role of simple spectator and intervenes in the action, walking over Philesitherus' fingers and causing him to cry out and to give himself away. Lucius calls this his 'long desired chance for revenge/vengeance' (9.27: Quae res optatissimam mihi vindictae sumministravit occasionem), a statement whose ambiguity is consistent with Lucius' pattern of moralization. Does vindicta here mean that this is his chance to aid in the exposure and punishment of the baker's wife for her numerous crimes, or that this is his chance to get revenge on her for the way she has treated him? I will return to this question momentarily, when discussing the proleptic introduction to the whole story.
When the baker discovers Philesitherus, he immediately realizes what is going on, and first soothes him with promises that he is not angry, after which he takes him to his room for the night and rapes him.108 The baker, who is now certainly not a sympathetic character, then has his slaves beat Philesitherus before throwing both him and his wife out of the house. This is the last we hear of Philesitherus, but the baker's wife is not finished. She contracts a witch (9.29: veteratricem quandam feminam) first to try to bend her husband's will so that he will forgive her and accept her back into his household, and failing that, to kill him. The witch is unsuccessful in the first task, and angry at the 'spirits' (9.29: indignata numinibus109), turns to the second. The baker is found mysteriously hanged, his daughter arrives the next day, mourns him, and then liquidates his estate. Nothing further is heard of his wife.
This story is introduced at 9.14 with the following words:
And so here is a story, better than all the others and delightfully
108In his narration, Lucius does not explicitly say that the baker forced himself on the boy sexually, but rather circles around the subject, as he tends to do when talking about sexuality. The language of the scene, however, implies such violence, featuring the idea of vindicare once again: (9.28) The baker 'deducebat ad torum nolentem puerum...[et] solus ipse cum puero cubans gratissima corruptarum nuptiarum vindicata perfruebatur.'
109How do these numina balance against the numina that Lucius tells us the baker's wife scorned in her worship of her deus unicus? Was her rejection of divine agencies beyond the one god only for show, and she not at all serious in her religion? Did she accept the existence of other numina, holding only that her god was preeminent among the many? These two possibilities are compatible with her being a Christian, if she rejected all other gods as false insofar as they were actually demons in the sense used by early Christian writers. Or has she now turned to other divine agencies out of desperation?
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elegant, which I have decided to bring to your ears. Fabulam denique bonam prae ceteris, suave comptam ad aures vestras afferre decrevi.
Van der Paardt remarks on this passage that it 'in no way corresponds with the real situation as it happens'. I am agree with this response, and thus have offered this as an example of a second false or misleading prolepsis, but with two qualifications. First, unlike the prolepsis at 10.2, this one makes no promises as to the content or style of the story, unless we are to take fabula as carrying enough weight that it alone is meant to signal to the reader something about the content or style of the story. But, as I have remarked, fabula in the Golden Ass is a flexible and inclusive word, which normally refers to any kind of story at all. In the Prologue, the whole project of the novel is described as to 'weave together various stories' (varias fabulas...conseram),110 and a few lines later, the novel itself is a 'Greekish story' (fabulam Graecanicam); as well, Aristomenes' tale of his encounter with Socrates is called a fabula by Lucius (2.1). At 10.2, fabula is explicitly balanced against tragoedia, but this is subsequent to the passage currently under discussion, and there is no reason to read fabula here as suggesting anything more than that another story branching off of or floating near the main narrative of Lucius is about to follow.111
So, if fabula here does not provide much information about what is to come, what about the rest of the sentence? As far as prolepsis is concerned, there is not much that can be done with 'better than all the others' (bonam prae ceteris), for which I can see two possible interpretations.
110It is worth noting the word varias in this connection, since it does not mean something so colourless as 'several', but rather 'of different types', thus allowing that in the Golden Ass there is some variety in what is to be understood under the category of fabula.
111Fabula here does depart somewhat from the ordinary pattern of its usage in the novel, in that fabulae tend to be inset tales, rather than individual episodes or segments of the frame narrative, i.e. Lucius' time with the robbers is not a fabula, while Cupid and Psyche, overheard while in their custody, is. One possible reason why the fabula may break from the normal pattern here is that while Lucius is himself present for the story of the baker's wife, his involvement is minimal, amounting to the moment when he steps on Philesitherus' fingers. Otherwise, he is simply an observer, and the episode does include two inset tales: when the old woman tells of the successful affair of an acquaintance of the baker's wife, and the story of an unsuccessful affair, told by the baker when he returns home suddenly.
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