Apuleius was born in Madaura, a Roman city in
North Africa. His father was a duumvir, or provincial
magistrate.Apuleius attended the University of
Carthage and then studied philosophy in Athens,
where he followed the teachings of PLATO. In 155 he
married Pudentilla, a wealthy widow, but was
brought to court and accused of seducing her by
magic to acquire her money. Apuleius freed himself
from the charge by giving a speech, known
today as Apologia, in his own defense. He then settled
in the African city of Carthage,where he wrote
and gave lectures, but nothing is known about his
later life.
Though Apuleius wrote a number of philosophical
works, he is best known as the author of
the Metamorphoses, or Transformations (also called
The Golden Ass), the only complete Roman novel
to survive from antiquity.
The novel relates the adventures of a young
man named Lucius, who engages in a love affair
with a slave girl to persuade her to show him the
forbidden magical practices by which her mistress
transforms herself into an owl. Lucius tries to
transform himself but turns into a donkey instead.
He then goes through a series of bizarre, dangerous,
and humiliating adventures under different
masters. Finally he prays to the Egyptian goddess
Isis, “the loftiest of deities, queen of departed spirits,
foremost of heavenly dwellers, the single embodiment
of all gods and goddesses.” Isis appears
to him and changes him back to his human form,
and he devotes himself to her as a priest.
For a long time, it was thought that the Metamorphoses
was autobiographical, but it is actually
based on an earlier novel by LUCIAN, Lucius, or the
Ass. Apuleius embedded some other stories within
the narrative and changed the ending to reflect the
hero’s salvation by Isis.Most of the embedded stories
are in the style of the “Milesian tales,” the
bawdy stories, written in extravagant language,
told by Egyptian street-corner storytellers.
Since Apuleius’s novel is largely comic, many
critics have believed it was intended as simple entertainment
without any moral message. Others
see it as a serious story of religious conversion. Carl
Schlamm describes the novel as “a work of narrative
entertainment . . . [A]mong the pleasures it
offers is the reinforcement of moral, philosophic
and religious values shared by the author and his
audience.” In this sense, the story is allegorical. It
also gives readers an excellent picture of the lives of
people in the second century, especially of the popularity
of the mystery religion of Isis.
One of the embedded stories in the Metamorphoses
has become much better known than the
novel itself—the myth of Cupid and Psyche, for
which Apuleius is the earliest source. The character
Lucius listens to the myth when he is in his donkey
form. Psyche is so beautiful that people worship
her instead of the goddess Venus, and the
jealous Venus arranges to have Psyche exposed on
a mountain as prey for a monster. But Venus’s son
Cupid (Love) falls in love with Psyche. He rescues
her and visits her by night as her husband, but forbids
her to see his face.Urged by her jealous sisters,
Psyche looks on her husband’s face one night with
a lamp, but he awakens, rebukes her for her lack of
faith, and deserts her. The grieving Psyche wanders
far and wide and must perform many labors assigned
her by Venus, but she finally wins back her
husband and becomes a goddess.
This story contains the themes of the entire
novel. Both Lucius and Psyche are led by curiosity
to try to see forbidden secrets of the gods, for
which they both pay dearly. Both stories illustrate
Plato’s conception of the striving of the soul (psyche
in Greek) for union with God.
Apuleius’s philosophical works The God of
Socrates, Plato and his Doctrines, and On the World,
helped transmit knowledge of the teaching of Plato
and his followers to the MIDDLE AGES. The Florida
is made up of excerpts from Apuleius’s lectures in
Carthage.
The Metamorphoses has had a great influence
on world literature since it was rediscovered in the
RENAISSANCE. Boccaccio and a host of successive
writers have analyzed, been influenced by, and retold
the tale of Cupid and Psyche, as can be seen
in William Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s
Dream and John Keats’s “Ode to Psyche.”
An English Version of a Work by Apuleius
Apuleius: The Golden Ass. Translated by P. G.Walsh.
Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1994.
A Work about Apuleius
Schlamm, Carl C. The Metamorphoses of Apuleius: On
Making an Ass of Oneself. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1992.