What, asks the prosecution, is the meaning of this curious interest Apuleius has in fish? It is zoological, says Apuleius; I have written books on fish, both in Greek and Latin,—and dissected them. That curious story, too, of the boy falling down in his presence? As to that, Apuleius knows all about divination by means of boys put under magical influence; he has read of it, of course, but he does not know whether to believe or not; "I do think with Plato," he owns to the court (or to his readers), "that between gods and men, in nature and in place intermediary, there are certain divine powers, and these preside over all divinations and the miracles of magicians. Nay, more, I have the fancy that the human soul, particularly the simple soul of a boy, might, whether by evocation of charm or by mollification of odour, be laid to sleep, and so brought out of itself into oblivion of things present, and for a brief space, all memory of the body put away, it might be restored and returned to its own nature, which is indeed immortal and divine, and thus, in a certain type of slumber, foretell the future."[[79]] As for the boy in question, however, he is so ricketty that it would take a magician to keep him standing.

Then those mysterious "somethings" which Apuleius keeps wrapped up in a napkin? "I have been initiated in many of the mysteries of Greece. Certain symbols and memorials of these, given to me by the priests, I sedulously preserve. I say nothing unusual, nothing unknown. To take one instance, those among you who are mystæ of Father Liber [Bacchus] know what it is you keep laid away at home, and worship in secret, far from all profane eyes. Now, I, as I said, from enthusiasm for truth and duty toward the gods, I have learnt many sacred mysteries, very many holy rites, and divers ceremonies"—the audience will remember he said as much three years ago in his now very famous speech about Æsculapius—"then could it seem strange to anyone, who has any thought of religion, that a man, admitted to so many divine mysteries, should keep certain emblems of those holy things at home, and wrap them in linen, the purest covering for things divine?" Some men—the prosecutor among them—count it mirth to mock things divine; no, he goes to no temple, has never prayed, will not even put his hand to his lips when he passes a shrine,—why! he has not so much as an anointed stone or a garlanded bough on his farm.[[80]]

One last flourish may deserve quotation. If you can prove, says Apuleius, any material advantage accruing to me from my marriage, "then write me down the great Carmendas or Damigeron or his ... Moses or Jannes or Apollobeches or Dardanus himself, or anyone else from Zoroaster and Ostanes downwards who has been famous among magicians."[[81]] Several of these names occur in other authors,[[82]] but the corruption is more interesting. Has some comparative fallen out, or does his conceal another name? Is it ihs, in fact,—a reference to Jesus analogous to the suggestion of Celsus that he too was a magician?

The philosophical works of Apuleius need not detain us, but a little space may be spared to his book On the God of Socrates, where he sets forth in a clear and vivid way that doctrine of dæmonic beings, which lies at the heart of ancient religion, pre-eminently in this period, from Plutarch onwards. His presentment is substantially the same as Plutarch's, but crisper altogether, and set forth in the brilliant rhetoric, to which the Greek did not aspire, and from which the African could not escape, nor indeed wished to escape.

Plato, he says, classifies the gods in three groups, distinguished by their place in the universe.[[83]] Of the celestial gods some we can see—sun, moon and stars[[84]] (on which, like a true rhetorician, he digresses into some fine language, which can be omitted). Others the mind alone can grasp (intellectu eos rimabundi contemplamur)—incorporeal natures, animate, with neither beginning nor end, eternal before and after, exempt from contagion of body; in perfect intellect possessing supreme beatitude; good, but not by participation of any extraneous good, but from themselves. Their father, lord and author of all things, free from every nexus of suffering or doing—him Plato, with celestial eloquence and language commensurate with the immortal gods, has declared to be, in virtue of the ineffable immensity of his incredible majesty, beyond the poverty of human speech or definition—while even to the sages themselves, when by force of soul they have removed themselves from the body, the conception of God comes, like a flash of light in thick darkness—a flash only, and it is gone.[[85]]

At the other extremity of creation are men—"proud in reason, loud in speech, immortal of soul, mortal of member, in mind light and anxious, in body brute and feeble, divers in character, in error the same, in daring pervicacious, in hope, pertinacious, of vain toil, of frail fortune, severally mortal, generally continuous, mutable in the succession of offspring, time fleeting, wisdom lingering, death swift and life querulous, so they live."[[86]] Between such beings and the gods, contact cannot be. "To whom then shall I recite prayers? to whom tender vows? to whom slay victim? on whom shall I call, to help the wretched, to favour the good, to counter the evil? .... What thinkest thou? Shall I swear 'by Jove the stone' (per Iovem lapidem) after the most ancient manner of Rome? Yet if Plato's thought be true, that never god and man can meet, the stone will hear me more easily than Jupiter."[[87]]

"Nay, not so far—(for Plato shall answer, the thought is his, if mine the voice) not so far, he saith, do I pronounce the gods to be sejunct and alienate from us, as to think that not even our prayers can reach them. Not from the care of human affairs, but from contact, have I removed them. But there are certain mediary divine powers, between æther above and earth beneath, situate in that mid space of air, by whom our desires and our deserts reach the gods. These the Greeks call dæmons, carriers between human and heavenly, hence of prayers, thence of gifts; back and forth they fare, hence with petition, thence with sufficiency, interpreters and bringers of salvation."[[88]] To cut short this flow of words, the dæmons are, as is familiar to us by now, authors of divination of all kinds, each in its province. It would ill fit the majesty of the gods to send a dream to Hannibal or to soften the whetstone for Attius Navius—these are the functions of the intermediate spirits.[[89]] Justin's explanation of the theophanies of the Old Testament may recur to the reader's mind, and not unjustly.[[90]]

The dæmons are framed of a purer and rarer matter than we, "of that purest liquid of air, of that serene element," invisible therefore to us unless of their divine will they choose to be seen.[[91]] From their ranks come those "haters and lovers" of men, whom the poets describe as gods—they feel pity and indignation, pain and joy and "every feature of the human mind"; while the gods above "are lords ever of one state in eternal equability," and know no passions of any kind. The dæmons share their immortality and our passion. Hence we may accept the local diversities of religious cult, rites nocturnal or diurnal, victims, ceremonies and ritual sad or gay, Egyptian or Greek,—neglect of these things the dæmons resent, as we learn in dream and oracle.

The human soul, too, is "a dæmon in a body"—the Genius of the Latins. From this we may believe that after death souls good and bad become good and bad ghosts—Lares and Lemures—and even gods, such as "Osiris in Egypt and Æsculapius everywhere."[[92]] Higher still are such dæmons as Sleep and Love, and of this higher kind Plato supposes our guardian spirits to be—"spectators and guardians of individual men, never seen, ever present, arbiters not merely of all acts, but of all thoughts," and after death witnesses for or against us. Of such was Socrates' familiar dæmon. Why should not we too live after the model of Socrates, studying philosophy and obeying our dæmon?

The Golden Ass