Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Julia Haig Gaisser is Eugenia Chase Guild Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Catullus, Catullus in English, Pierio Valeriano on the Ill Fortune of Learned Men, and Catullus and His Renaissance Readers.

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"Donkeys get little enough respect, and to have been made the subject of a comic novel has done little for their reputation or for that of the author, Apuleius. Julia Haig Gaisser follows Apuleius and his donkey through a journey of many centuries--a journey as remarkable as the one recounted in the novel. She is wise, witty, learned, and sharp-eyed: the perfect guide."--James J. O'Donnell, Georgetown University

"This is a terrific book. Julia Gaisser follows the fortunes of the Roman sophist Apuleius and his masterpiece, theGolden Ass, in the centuries after the author's death. Through a richly learned and imaginative inquiry, she shows us how the text itself survived, first in manuscript and then in print, how scholars tried to understand it, and how it sparked the curiosity and creativity of philosophers, imaginative writers, and artists working in radically different times and contexts. Meticulous in its scholarship, interdisciplinary in its method, and encyclopedic in its erudition, this study can serve as a model for anyone tracing the afterlife of an ancient or modern author."--Anthony T. Grafton, Princeton University

"Gaisser undertakes a comprehensive review of the fortunes of Apuleius' famous Latin novel about a man who is transformed into a donkey. She deploys with elegance and wit her research on the reception of this work from antiquity to the renaissance. Her attention to visual representations of Apuleian episodes is particularly welcome."--Glen W. Bowersock, professor emeritus, Institute for Advanced Study

"This is a superb piece of scholarship that will energize the readership of theGolden Ass. It gathers and analyzes information that has been hidden for decades in a labyrinth of German, French, and Italian manuscripts, libraries, and journals. It will transform what kind of readings we can perform on theGolden Ass by providing a rich and accurate source for reception theory and intertextual studies."--Benjamin Lee, Oberlin College

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The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass

Princeton University Press

Chapter One

Don't you know that there is nothing a man would rather look at than his own form? -Apuleius, Apology

Apuleius is best known today for his racy novel, the Golden Ass (Asinus Aureus), or Metamorphoses (both titles were current in antiquity); but he also gained celebrity and fortune in his own time as a Platonic philosopher and skillful rhetorician. He claimed to cultivate both philosophy and the nine Muses (Fl. 20.6), and the diversity of his writings is so great that one can almost believe him. Most of what we know about his life comes from Apuleius himself, particularly from comments in the Florida (excerpts from his epideictic orations) and the Apology, or De Magia (On Magic), in which he defends himself against a charge of practicing magic. He was born in North Africa, probably in Madauros (modern Mdaourouch in Algeria), in the mid-120s AD. After his early education in Carthage, he spent several years studying in Athens, drinking deeply, as he says, of the cups of the Muses: "the cup of poetry, made with artifice, the clear cup of geometry, the sweet cup of music, the dry one of dialectic, and the one of which a person can never have enough-the nectarlike cup of all philosophy." In this period he probably traveled elsewhere in the Greek east, almost surely to Samos and perhaps to Phrygia as well. He then moved on to Rome. We find him back in North Africa in the mid-150s, and well into the best-known and most notorious event in his life: the marriage and subsequent charge of magic documented in the Apology.

According to the Apology, around 155 or 156 Apuleius came to the town of Oea (modern Tripoli) and married a wealthy widow named Pudentilla, the mother of Sicinius Pontianus, an old friend from his student days in Athens. He did so at his friend's request, to save her estate from the relatives of her late husband. The marriage did not sit well with Pudentilla's former in-laws, and in late 158 or early 159 Apuleius was brought to trial on a charge of magic. Specifically, it seems, he was accused of using magic to induce Pudentilla to fall in love with him. The charge was serious, since sorcery was potentially a capital offense. Apuleius spoke in his own defense and with evident success, for a few years later he was giving orations in Carthage, where-by his own account, at least-he was a prominent and popular figure. We hear nothing of him after the late 160s.

Apuleius was a quintessential product of his time, for both were bicultural, prosperous, nostalgic for the classical past, and enamored of display. The predominant cultural phenomenon of the age was the movement called the Second Sophistic, whose distinguishing feature was what we might describe as oratory for entertainment. Its practitioners, the sophists, were-or aspired to be-celebrities. The more successful ones were highly paid, achieved fame well beyond their native cities, and attracted large numbers of followers. Sometimes they attained public office or positions of high status and influence. Their activities included displaying and purveying classical (but primarily Greek) culture, self-promotion, and playing to the local pride of the cities and regions they spoke in. Above all, however, they professed an attachment to philosophy-or rather to their own brand of philosophy, which Apuleius defines as "a royal science devised to promote the art of speaking as much as the art of living." The sophistic movement grew out of the ancient educational system, which was largely based on rhetorical training. Many of the sophists were teachers of the rhetorical art, and many in their audiences had been brought up in it. Listeners who had spent their school days practicing rhetorical exercises enjoyed and savored virtuoso oratorical performances. They could recognize a speaker's techniques and tricks and many of his themes, and they could criticize the fine points of his strategy and delivery. But the sophists' orations were also entertaining and accessible enough to appeal to those with little education, who would have been in the vast majority in every audience. The extent and success of the movement were fostered by the relative ease of travel throughout the Greco-Roman world and by the bilingualism-or at least biculturism-of its educated inhabitants. Sophists practiced their ostentatious art all over the empire; and although the cultural basis of the movement was Greek, it also had room for Hellenized Romans like Apuleius.

The chief subject of every sophist was himself-or rather his ostensible self, the self that he wished his public to see. (I say "he" advisedly, for the sophists were all male.) The sophist's self-presentation extended to every aspect of his appearance: both on- and offstage he suited his clothes, coiffure, gestures, mannerisms, voice, and possessions to his role. He created the role, however, with words, in the first-person utterance of his orations.

This verbal image of the sophist is best seen as a special case of what happens when any writer uses the first person. By using the word I the author creates a persona, a mask or character whose identity, emotions, and experiences are presented as autobiographical, whether they are real or imaginary. Whatever its degree of reality, the first person invites us to elide the persona with the writer, to identify the mask with the man or woman behind it, or-to put it another way-to conflate the puppet with the person pulling the strings. The effect is necessarily increased when authors read or perform their own works before an audience, as they did so often in antiquity. When orators spoke in law courts or declaimed in theaters or poets gave readings to audiences large or small, they brought to life the characters of their own creation, making the "I," or "ego," of their scripts into credible likenesses of themselves.

Ancient writers fully exploited the persona-sometimes hiding behind it completely, sometimes lifting it for a moment to create a play between their real and fictional selves. Orators and politicians tended to stay in character, holding up to the world the self they had so carefully fashioned. Poets were more willing both to acknowledge the existence of the mask and to advertise its distance from reality, as Catullus does in the notorious lines from poem 16. Nam castum esse decet pium poetam ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est, ... vos, quod milia multa basiorum legistis, male me marem putastis? (Cat. 16.5-6, 12-13) It's fitting for the upright poet himself to be free of filth, but there's no need for his verses to be so. ... Because you read about many thousands of kisses, Did you think I wasn't much of a man?

The sophists, like the poets, liked to play with the mask. They did so ostentatiously, in full view of their audience, for their personae were-quite literally-their stock in trade, the material of their celebrity. Apuleius, sophist par excellence, teases his public with two principal personae: the "I" of his orations and philosophical works and the "I" of his novel the Golden Ass. Like Catullus and other poets, he sometimes takes off his mask (or pretends to), hinting that the persona he has displayed might not be his "real" self; but he can also replace one mask with another, confusing and...