The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass: A Study in Transmission and Reception
408
The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass: A Study in Transmission and Reception
408eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
This book traces the transmission and reception of one of the most influential novels in Western literature. The Golden Ass, the only ancient Roman novel to survive in its entirety, tells of a young man changed into an ass by magic and his bawdy adventures and narrow escapes before the goddess Isis changes him back again. Its centerpiece is the famous story of Cupid and Psyche. Julia Gaisser follows Apuleius' racy tale from antiquity through the sixteenth century, tracing its journey from roll to codex in fourth-century Rome, into the medieval library of Monte Cassino, into the hands of Italian humanists, into print, and, finally, over the Alps and into translation in Spanish, French, German, and English. She demonstrates that the novel's reception was linked with Apuleius' reputation as a philosopher and the persona he projected in his works. She relates Apuleius and the Golden Ass to a diverse cast of important literary and historical figures--including Augustine, Fulgentius, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bessarion, Boiardo, and Beroaldo. Paying equal attention to the novel's transmission (how it survived) and its reception (how it was interpreted), she places the work in its many different historical contexts, examining its representation in art, literary imitation, allegory, scholarly commentary, and translation. The volume contains several appendixes, including an annotated list of the manuscripts of the Golden Ass.
This book is based on the author's Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin College in 2000.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400849833 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/08/2021 |
| Series: | Martin Classical Lectures , #18 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 408 |
| File size: | 21 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass A Study in Transmission and Reception
By Julia Haig Gaisser Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2008 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13136-8
Chapter One Apuleius: A Celebrity and His Image
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 nectarlikecup 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 blurring the identities he has placed before us.
This chapter is concerned with Apuleius and his fortunes in antiquity, especially with the creation and development of his "image"-a term that I will be using in all of its possible senses, including the one we have in mind when we talk about the carefully constructed image of a public figure or a commercial product. We will consider how Apuleius professes to see himself, the image or persona he presents to his public, and the images (both literary and artistic) made of him by others.
Creating an Image
Like his fellow sophists, Apuleius presented his image chiefly through his orations. We see his constructed self most extensively in the Apology and Florida, but it also peeks out tantalizingly from time to time in the Golden Ass.
The Apology presents itself as the speech that Apuleius actually delivered before the court, but it seems likely that he revised and perhaps even rewrote it after the fact. This point is controversial, but the speech in its present form would be a risky defense: it shows too much detailed knowledge of magic and magical terminology, is too arrogant, and treats the charges too lightly. It has been argued that the presiding judge, Claudius Maximus, was highly educated and philosophically minded, and thus could be relied on to be sympathetic to a fellow intellectual facing a trumped-up charge. Nonetheless, there was still a chance that Apuleius' cleverness could backfire, and that even a sympathetic judge could find the levity he displays in the Apology offensive and impertinent enough to convict him. Matters would have been quite different, however, after the trial and its successful conclusion. Then the triumphant Apuleius would have been free to indulge himself, rewriting his speech as a brilliant and wickedly funny pseudodefense. If this assessment is correct, the persona that Apuleius presents in the Apology is one step removed from the one he revealed at his trial-a fiction of a fiction. At the same time, however, it is consistent with the persona he presents in the various excerpts from epideictic orations preserved in the Florida: self-absorbed, confident, intellectual, and constantly on display.
In both the Florida and the Apology we see Apuleius as a man who likes to talk about himself but does not do so carelessly or merely to impart autobiographical detail. Almost every word is designed to present him to his hearers (or perhaps readers, in the case of the Apology) in a particular, and highly flattering, light. Like a spotlight in a modern theater, the beam he directs on himself changes its color and intensity and direction, but it always shows the persona of Apuleius center stage-and from his best side. That does not mean, however, that it always shows him clearly, for Apuleius manipulates light and shadow so adroitly that sometimes we cannot be sure of what we have seen, or even of what we were supposed to see. These doubtful or ambiguous aspects of Apuleius' identity are important, for they are precisely the ones that posterity would find most intriguing. We shall consider them presently, but first let us look at the parts of his image that are clearly revealed.
The figure onstage is above all a philosopher, specifically "Apuleius the Platonic philosopher of Madauros," as he was known both in antiquity and to posterity. But it is important to note that Apuleius uses the word philosopher with a special meaning, one he has given it himself. Like an artist making a self-portrait by looking into a mirror, he has redrawn the image of the philosopher to match his own features and activities. In this new usage it is not so much that Apuleius is described by the word philosopher as that the word philosopher is defined as "Apuleius."
This new philosopher is a celebrity. Crowds flock to his performances-in greater numbers than have ever assembled to hear a philosopher, as we learn in Florida 9. "Indeed, even my talent, however small," he says in Florida 17, "has long been so well known to the public for what it is that it requires no new commendation." In Florida 9 he asserts that his extraordinary fame has created almost impossibly high expectations in his audience: "Who among you would forgive me a single solecism? Who would grant me one syllable barbarously pronounced? ... And yet you pardon these things in others easily and very justly." Naturally his works are equally famous. In the Apology he reminds the court of his celebrated speech praising the god Aesculapius and calls on his hearers to recite its opening lines. "Do you hear all the people supplying them?" he asks the judge. Someone in the audience even has a copy of the book, which Apuleius asks to have read out in evidence. But fame is not all he has to offer. Our philosopher claims other merits, which appear to their best advantage in comparison with the qualities of others-whether beasts, men, other philosophers, or even gods. Birdsong, for example, as he tells his audience in Florida 13, is limited in both time and repertoire, for each species sings a particular strain and only at a single time of day. "Philosophy did not bestow utterance like that on me.... Rather, the thought and utterance of the philosopher are continual-august to hear, useful to understand, and tuneful in every key." In Florida 9 Apuleius compares himself in versatility to the old Athenian sophist Hippias. Hippias, he says, was famous for having made every item of his apparel-including not only his clothes and sandals but even his ring, oil bottle, and strigil. Apuleius, by contrast, boasts of versatility not as a craftsman but as a writer, claiming to have composed not only poetry of every kind but also riddles, histories, orations, and dialogues-and all in both Greek and Latin (Fl. 9.15-29). In Florida 20 he claims to have surpassed even the great philosophers of the past in the variety if not in the quality of his compositions. In appearance, too, he compares himself with others, aligning physical beauty and philosophic sophistication on one side against ugliness and boorish ignorance on the other. In such matching of outer and inner qualities Apuleius is very much a man of his age, for although even Homer practiced the art of physiognomy (which we might define as believing that one can tell a book by its cover), the association of physical features with qualities of character reached its height as a full-blown pseudoscience under the Second Sophistic. In the Apology Apuleius uses the argument from physiognomy to overturn the prevailing picture of the philosopher and reshape it in his own image. He claims that his adversaries opened their case by describing him pejoratively as "'a handsome philosopher' (and horror of horrors!) 'eloquent in both Greek and Latin.'" A strange criticism, we might think. Their argument, however, was that his speaking ability and appearance identified him as a sophist and belied his claim to be a philosopher. Philosophy and oratory were traditionally deemed incompatible; and although the distinction between them in practice had largely broken down by this time, the "rhetoric of rivalry" between the two callings remained. Sophists could and did profess philosophy, and philosophers orated; but they cultivated separate images-the philosopher as a bearded sage, the sophist as a smartly dressed dandy. Apuleius' accusers had the traditional distinctions firmly in mind, evidently claiming that as a sophist (for that is the point of the word eloquent) Apuleius was ipso facto not a philosopher. Their argument about appearance is more interesting. The epithet "handsome philosopher" is intended as a contradiction in terms exposing Apuleius as a hypocrite. For in this period, as Zanker observes, "if a man wanted to be acknowledged publicly as a philosopher, ... the one thing he could not appear was handsome." Contemporary busts and statues of philosophers show them as men well past their first youth, wrinkled in thought, with careless or disordered hair and the distinguishing feature of the so-called philosopher's beard. Literary accounts present the same picture.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass by Julia Haig Gaisser
Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ixPreface xi
Chapter 1: Apuleius: A Celebrity and His Image 1
Chapter 2: Exemplary Behavior: The Golden Ass from Late Antiquity to the Prehumanists 40
Chapter 3: A Mixed Reception: Interpreting and Illuminating the Golden Ass in the Fourteenth Century 76
Chapter 4: Making an Impression: From Florence to Rome and from Manuscript to Print 129
Chapter 5: Telling Tales: The Golden Ass in Ferrara and Mantua 173
Chapter 6: Apuleius Redux: Filippo Beroaldo Comments on the Golden Ass 197
Chapter 7: Speaking in Tongues: Translations of the Golden Ass 243
Conclusion: The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass 296
Appendix 1: Ancient Readers of Apuleius (ca. 350 to ca. 550 AD) 300
Appendix 2: Manuscripts of Apuleius' Metamorphoses 302
Appendix 3: Extant Manuscripts of the Metamorphoses Written before 1400 309
Appendix 4: The Florentine Connection 311
Appendix 5: Adlington and His Sources for Met. 11.1 315
Bibliography 319
Index of Manuscripts 355
General Index 357
What People are Saying About This
"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, the Golden 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 the Golden 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 the Golden Ass by providing a rich and accurate source for reception theory and intertextual studies."—Benjamin Lee, Oberlin College