Magic and the man—Stylistic reasons for regarding the Metamorphoses as his first work—Biographical reasons—No mention of the Metamorphoses in the Apology.
II. Magic in the Metamorphoses
Powers claimed for magic—Its actual performances—Its limitations—The crimes of witches—Male magicians—Magic as an art and discipline—Materials employed—Incantations and rites—Quacks and charlatans—Various superstitions—Bits of science and religion—Magic in other Greek romances.
III. Magic in the Apology
Form of the Apologia—Philosophy and magic—Magic defined—Good and bad magic—Magic and religion—Magic and science—Medical and scientific knowledge of Apuleius—He repeats familiar errors—Apparent ignorance of magic and occult virtue—Despite an assumption of knowledge—Attitude toward astronomy—His theory of demons—Apuleius in the middle ages.
I. His Life and Works
Magic and the man as reflected in his works.
One of the fullest and most vivid pictures of magic in the ancient Mediterranean world which has reached us is provided by the writings of Apuleius. He lived in the second century of our era and was not merely a rhetorician of great note in his day and the writer of a romance which has ever since fascinated men, but also a Platonic philosopher, an initiate into many religious cults and mysteries, and a student of natural science and medicine. To him has been ascribed the Latin version of Asclepius, a supposititious dialogue of Hermes Trismegistus. No author perhaps ever more readily and complacently talked of himself than Apuleius, yet it is no easy task to make out the precise facts of his life, partly because in his romance, The Metamorphoses, or The Golden Ass, he has hopelessly confused himself with the hero Lucius and introduced an autobiographical element of uncertain extent into what is in the main a work of fiction; partly because his Apology, or defense when tried on the charge of magic at Oea in Africa, is more in the nature of special pleading intended to refute and confound his accusers than of a frank confession or accurate history of his career. However, he appears to have been born at Madaura in North Africa, to have studied first at Carthage and then at Athens, to have visited Rome and wandered rather widely about the Mediterranean world, but to have spent more time altogether at Carthage than at any other one place.
Stylistic reasons for regarding the Metamorphoses as his first work.
Besides the Metamorphoses and Apologia, with which we shall be chiefly concerned, four other works are extant which are regarded as genuine, The God of Socrates, The Dogma of Plato, Florida, and On the Universe. The order in which these works were written is uncertain, but it seems almost sure that the Metamorphoses was the first. In it Apuleius not only more or less identifies himself with the hero Lucius, who is represented as quite a young man, he also apologizes for his Latin and speaks of the difficulty with which he had acquired that language at Rome. But in the Florida[999] we find him repeating a hymn and a dialogue in both Latin and Greek, or, after delivering half an address in Greek, finishing it in Latin, or boasting that he writes poems, satires, riddles, histories, scientific treatises, orations, and philosophical dialogues with equal facility in either language.[1000] Instead now of craving pardon if he offends by his rude, exotic, and forensic speech, he feels that his reputation for literary refinement and elegance has become such that his audience will not pardon him a solitary solecism or a single syllable pronounced with a barbarous accent.[1001] It therefore looks as if the Metamorphoses was his first published effort in Latin and as if his peculiar style had proved so popular that he did not find it necessary to apologize for it again. In the Apology he seems supremely confident of his rhetorical powers in the Latin language, and even the accusers describe him as a philosopher of great eloquence both in Greek and Latin.[1002] Three years before in the same town his first public discourse had been greeted with shouts of “Insigniter,” and many in the audience at the time of his trial can still repeat a passage from it on the greatness of Aesculapius.[1003] In the Apology, too, he displays a more extensive learning than in the Metamorphoses and has written already poems and scientific treatises as well as orations. Indeed, practically all the doctrines set forth in his other philosophical works may be found in brief in the Apology.