[1] Apuleius is accused of sorcery and magic. It seems, as he tells us, that he was originally accused of using magic to kill Pontianus, but that this charge was dropped; now he is standing trial accused of using magic to convince his wife, Pudentilla, to marry him. There are minor accusations, too, that he replies to, the gist of which being that he is a magician. The case is brought against him by the son of his wife, a boy named Pudens, and is argued by a man named Aemilianus.
The response Apuleius gives is comprehensive and devastating; in argument he resembles a hailstorm, mustering every technique – logic, rhetoric, satire, learned allusion, wisdom, scorn, flattery, honor – and throwing them all, one after another, into the fray with expert aim. To every charge he has a careful and lethal response. First, to slander his character, a number of accusations are brought forth: it is claimed that he owns a mirror for the purpose of staring at himself and admiring his image. What of it, he replies? Mirrors have other uses; perhaps, he suggests, his accusers might know of them if they had read some obscure Greek philosopher’s discussion of the subject.[2]
But still, his accusers reply, he is stricken by poverty! Again, Apuleius answers, let us assume this is so: why should this be a defect? Plenty of great Romans have been poor; furthermore, is it not suitable for a philosopher, a man devoted to the study of the higher things, who seeks knowledge beyond the mere material pleasures of the world, to have few possessions? What’s more, Apuleius is no mere impoverished fool; he is the scion of a prominent family: “my father left my brother and myself a little under 2,000,000 sesterces.”[3] And can the same be said of his accusers, who are so quick to slander his poverty? It would seem not: “you yourself used, after waiting for some seasonable shower to soften the ground, to expend three days in ploughing single-handed, with the aid of one wretched ass, that miserable farm at Zarath, which was all your father left you.”[4] Romans who live in glass villas shouldn’t throw stones. The replies he makes are not laden down with sententious intoning or careful dissection, but with levity and humor; he aims more to humiliate than to refute.
The magical evidence is mostly of a pathetic sort: Apuleius likes fish, ergo he is a magician. But in what magical formulae are fish used? His accusers have not read the books that he has read, and they do not know; as it happens, his interest is scientific. Homer and Vergil are thrown in (Homer in Greek, of course) for good measure.[5] Few of the other charges fare better: the trump cards presented by the prosecution – the letters of Prudentilla, in which she refers to Apuleius as a magician, and purportedly of Apuleius, wherein he is supposed to have “beguiled Prudentilla with flattery.”[6] Both letters are in Greek; in the first, an authentic document, the prosecutors have mishandled the Greek and have quoted it out of context (they “could not read the letter which Pudentilla wrote in Greek altogether too refined for his comprehension,”[7]); Apuleius has it read aloud in full, to definitive effect. The second letter, Apuleius shows, is a clear forgery, written in pathetically infelicitous Greek. And why would he seduce Prudentilla for her money? He has received none from the marriage.[8] His arguments being stated, Apuleius sums up, declares his own victory, and sits to wait for the verdict that will exonerate him.
One of the main themes of the speech is the erudition of the defendant; Apuleius is constantly showing off his own erudition. Rather than make a reply in his own words, he prefers to answer “in the words with which Homer makes Paris reply to Hector.”[9] His knowledge of Greek is flaunted endlessly; he rattles off the names of philosophers and poets (“among our own poets were Aedituus, Porcius, and Catulus”[10]) with careless ease; he does everything he can to demonstrate to his audience that he is a learned man. Indeed, the text is so packed with direct quotations from prominent Latin and Greek authors, and with minute philosophical discussions on the fine points of Platonic dialogues, that the reader begins to wonder how much of this was in the original speech, and how much was later added by the stenographer for increased effect.
In contrast to Apuleius’s immense learning, the rustic and backwards character of his accusers is emphasized again and again. They cannot pronounce verse properly, instead reading it in and “absurd and illiterate manner;”[11] “so vilely and coarsely did they read”[12] Apuleius’s light verse that the poems themselves were obscured and the impression of the reader was all that was left – the impression, that is, of disgust. Why is it that they do not understand the references? Because they have never studied them: “instead of devoting yourself to the study of your fields and their dull clods,” Apuleius suggests, perhaps they ought to have taken the time to become erudite and witty, as he is – and then, to prove the point, he tacks on another allusion-laden insult: “although your face is hideous enough for a tragic mask of Thyestes.”[13]
He presses further; not only are his accusers “so ignorant … of all literature,” but what’s worse, they appear to be so backward and bucolic that they have not even learned the normal stories any Roman could be expected to know; they are ignorant “even of popular tales.”[14] The message is clear: these men are so stupid that they cannot even be considered proper Romans; their ignorance is so vast, and their knowledge so constricted, that they are to be considered little better than Latin-speaking barbarians. Again, the message is clear; no argument can be taken from“this dull blockhead,”[15] “clumsy and inartistic in his very effeminacy,”[16] “stupid and uncivilized”[17] to the core.
It is no surprise, then, to find that the intended audience of the speech – the judge, Maximus – receives heaps upon heaps of praise and flattery. He is complimented for his “great acuteness,”[18] as well as for his his acquaintance with Plato,[19] for he is a scholar (Apuleius generously assumes) who has “read Aristotle’s numerous volumes”[20] (This point is made several times – “you have doubtless frequently read the like in the works of ancient philosophers,”[21] etc. – in order for Apuleius to create a bond between himself and Maximus; “the admiration with which Maximus and myself regard Aristotle.”[22]) In addition to his intellectual and academic pursuits, Apuleius attempts to put his thumb on the scale by flattering the station of the judge: he praises “the astuteness of [his] questions,”[23] posed by “so grave and perspicacious a judge.”[24] No appendage is left uncomplimented: even his hands – “hands as pure and pious as yours”[25] – present to Apuleius an opportunity to win his audience over to his side (it is interesting to recall that, at one point, Apuleius mentions that he has thus far refrained from complimenting Maximus. One wonders exactly how he would characterize all the effusive flattery that is uttered prior to that statement). Indeed, there are so many instances of flattery that I can scarcely list them all.[26] Suffice it to say that there is a lot, and that the point of it all is not difficult to guess.
Interestingly, Apuleius does not repudiate magic wholesale and even lists off the names of some magicians casually, as though he were not standing trial under the accusation that he is among their number. He carefully reminds his audience that it was one thing to know a great deal about magic, and it is quite another to actually practice the art;[27] still, the reader is left with the feeling that Apuleius – and, it is important to note, his aristocratic audience – are a fairly tolerant of their magically-inclined brethren. The impression might almost be one of enlightened elites forced to go through a superstitious charade at the insistence of their more credulous underlings, except for two things: Apuleius’s strict refusal to deny magic as a real thing – in fact, his treatment of it is just the opposite – and, what is perhaps more telling, the participation of Roman elites in what are patently superstitious practices (for instance, Tiberius was a fairly successful astrologer). The scorn for the country bumpkin is clear enough, but the divide is not over magic; both seem to believe in it readily.
Apuleius’s techniques throughout his apology, if they bear any resemblance to the text which comes down to us, are as effective as they are entertaining. The text reveals something about the social life of the second century in the Roman empire, too; we discover the immense importance of and interest in magic; we have a front-row seat in an exhibition of the prejudices of the upper class; we are shown exactly what sorts of education have become fashionable, and exactly how such education is put to use; and, more than anything else, we are given a good long look at the court proceedings of the high imperial period.
[1] Footnote numbers correspond to chapter numbers. [2] 16 [3] 23 [4] 23 [5] 30 [6] 87 [7] 87 [8] 102 [9] 4 [10] 9 [11] 5 [12] 9 [13] 16 [14] 30 [15] 66 [16] 74 [17] 91 [18] 2 [19] 11 [20] 36 [21] 38 [22] 41 [23] 48 [24] 53 [25] 63 [26] [26]“his careful study of the Phaedrus,” “a man of such lofty character,” “your learning … your perfect erudition,” “in enjoyment of great wealth and enormous opulence,” [27] 91
Present Concerns 