Apuleius and Africa

Benjamin Todd Lee, Ellen Finkelpearl, Luca Graverini, Benjamin Todd Lee, Ellen Finkelpearl, Luca Graverini

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136254086
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Afrique

The Metamorphoses or Golden Ass of Apuleius (ca. 170 CE) is a Latin novel written by a native of Madauros in Roman North Africa, roughly equal to modern Tunisia together with parts of Libya and Algeria. Apuleius' novel is based on the model of a lost Greek novel; it narrates the adventures of a Greek character with a Roman name who spends the bulk of the novel transformed into an animal, traveling from Greece to Rome only to end his adventures in the capital city of the empire as a priest of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Apuleius' Florida and Apology deal more explicitly with the African provenance and character of their author while also demonstrating his complex interaction with Greek, Roman, and local cultures. Apuleius' philosophical works raise other questions about Greek vs. African and Roman cultural identity.

Apuleius in Africa addresses the problem of this intricate complex of different identities and its connection to Apuleius' literary production. It especially emphasizes Apuleius' African heritage, a heritage that has for the most part been either downplayed or even deplored by previous scholarship. The contributors include philologists, historians, and experts in material culture; among them are some of the most respected scholars in their fields. The chapters give due attention to all elements of Apuleius' oeuvre, and break new ground both on the interpretation of Apuleius' literary production and on the culture of the Roman Empire in the second century. The volume also includes a modern, sub-Saharan contribution in which "Africa" mainly means Mediterranean Africa.

Part I
Historical Contexts

1 Apuleius' Apology

Text and Context¹

Keith Bradley

This brief contribution outlines some of the historical circumstances that may be useful for or relevant to understanding Apuleius’ Apology. On one view the work is a fiction, a form of sophisticated, even playful, entertainment intended for an audience of elite littérateurs who recognized the literary learning the text displays, but who also understood that the trial it seems to presume never took place. This view cannot be refuted, but in what follows it is rejected and the assumption made that the Apology derives from a real event in 158/159 when Apuleius was tried on charges of magical practice at Tripolitanian Sabratha before the governor of Africa Proconsularis, Claudius Maximus. Its great length may mean that in its present form the Apology is an amplified version of the speech Apuleius actually gave at Sabratha, perhaps set down at Carthage in the 160s, but the second starting assumption is that it nevertheless reflects matters that were dealt with in the court of the provincial governor. A speech made at a trial by the younger Pliny half a century earlier had lasted for several hours (Epist. 2.11.14).

The literary learning the Apology displays (doctrina) is evident from an important collection of textual comparanda that allows sophistic influence to be inferred and emphasized. How Apuleius acquired his learning is a question that is not yet fully resolved, but the period of study he spent in Athens as a young man (cf. Flor. 20.4), probably in the mid-140s, is pertinent. There he can be expected to have encountered a number of those figures memorably recorded by category in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists. Other influences may simultaneously have been at work. Topographically then as now the Acropolis dominated Athens, and as Pausanias (1.1.2–1.30.3) was soon to see and relate there were striking monuments everywhere from the city’s glorious past. Such monuments were, however, as Pausanias’ record makes clear, items of ancient history, symbols of a power that had long since vanished; and equally if not more impressive to the visitor’s eye were the Roman monuments, particularly those associated with Hadrian—the great library and the temple to Hera and Zeus Panhellenios he had built, the agora he had enhanced, and the majestic Olympieion he had brought to completion. There was also the gate erected nearby with its bold inscriptions that advertised Hadrian’s personal appropriation of the city: “This is Athens, the former city of Theseus. This is the city of Hadrian and not of Theseus.” One statement looked to the Acropolis, the other to the Ilissus. Athens was a Roman city, and as such a lesson to any visitor in contemporary political reality.²

As a Romano-African provincial Apuleius may well have long been aware of the impact Hadrian had made as emperor. People in the African provinces remembered a multitude of benefits Hadrian had showered on them, once relieving a five-year drought by his very presence (Hist. Aug., Hadr. 13.4, 22.14). Just after Apuleius’ birth he had visited the troops stationed on Rome’s southern frontier, addressing them on the importance of military preparedness and vigilance, and at some point the city of Carthage, where Apuleius studied as a boy (cf. Flor. 18.15, 20.3), was renamed after him, or so it was said (Hist. Aug., Hadr. 20.4). To anyone traveling in the Mediterranean as Apuleius did, the signs of Hadrian’s power and magnificence were visible far and wide, both in the great builder’s monumental architecture and especially in the images of him, now a god, that were everywhere to be seen (cf. Paus. 1.18.6). At Athens alone almost a hundred dedications have been identified, including images in the old agora and, together with that of Zeus Olympios, in the Olympieion. It is not surprising that Apuleius knew his poems (Apol. 11.3–4), and not a coincidence that the Lucius of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses bears a certain resemblance to the figure whom Tertullian (Apol. 5.7) was to describe as omnium curiositatum explorator. Hadrian was a figure to linger in the imagination.³

From this perspective sophistry may emerge as an expression of Greek subjection to Roman power. No practitioner, after all, could challenge the master of thirty legions (Hist. Aug., Hadr. 15.13), and its exponents, “voluble expounders of the commonplace who paraded the world in vanity and splendour,” were not the most obvious models for a defendant in a criminal trial before a Roman provincial governor to emulate consciously. Other circumstantial factors may accordingly be of benefit for understanding both the knowledge that Apuleius displayed in his speech and the speech as a whole. A record of a trial is a document that requires a broad context. Evidence of socially deviant behavior might be anticipated, and the literary understood as one among a cluster of significant historical elements.⁴

Apuleius addressed his defense to a governor who after preliminary consideration heard the case with his consilium. The trial was not a trial by jury, therefore, but an example of the procedure historians commonly call cognitio extra ordinem, comparable to the procedure followed in the trials of Jesus before Pilate and of the apostle Paul before Felix and Festus as recorded in the Synoptic Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. (So also in the trial of Paul at Iconium before Castellius as recounted in the fictional Acts of Paul and Thecla.) It was characterized by three elements: “the free formulation of charges and penalties, summed up in the lawyer’s phrase arbitrium iudicantis ”; “the insistence on a proper formal act of accusation by the interested party”; and the hearing of a case “by the holder of imperium in person on his tribunal, and assisted by his advisory cabinet or consilium of friends and officials.” The early sections of the Apology indicating how the trial arose (Apol. 1–2) are consistent with these criteria. The charges against Apuleius were brought by Sicinius Aemilianus in the name of his nephew Sicinius Pudens, respectively the brother and the son of the deceased first husband of Apuleius’ wife Pudentilla.⁵

The most important feature of cognitio extra ordinem was its flexibility. Accusations of magical practice involved threats to public order, and charges were permissible without dependence on or reference to Roman statute law (the leges of the ordo). The formal basis of the trial is often taken to be the Sullan lex Cornelia de sicariis ac ueneficiis of 81 BCE, but procedurally the requirement of a lex was unnecessary. Whether indeed the lex Cornelia covered charges of magic in the late 150s is unknown: the legal texts that may suggest so are too late to be fully convincing. Notably, however, although he was familiar enough with other statutes (cf. Apol. 88.3; Met. 8.24), Apuleius makes no mention of the lex Cornelia. The Apology can accordingly be understood from one point of view to represent the exercise of customary jurisdiction on the part of a Roman proconsul when a potential threat to public well-being was at issue in which the capacity for discretion was all-important, and to be appropriate to a system of governance that was not in any modern sense bureaucratic. If required, and under Hadrian and Antoninus Pius it frequently was, guidance from the emperor could be sought.⁶

Claudius Maximus sat on a tribunal to hear Apuleius’ case (Apol. 85.2), on a raised platform, that is, of the type from which Roman justice was traditionally dispensed. There may have been eight or so assessors with him—a proconsul of Sardinia in 69 heard a case accompanied by his legate, his quaestor, and six other consiliars—and as everyone knew the parties involved in the hearing had to stand and to look up to the governor and his attendants (cf. Apul., Flor. 9.10: tribunal ascendit). The tribunal in this instance can be precisely located: it was situated in an apse on the southern side of a large rectangular basilica that lay off the forum of Sabratha opposite the basilica’s main entrance. The trial took place, that is to say, within an identifiably enclosed space that dated back to the Flavian era—its remains can still be seen—but it was a colonnaded not a walled space and may well therefore have admitted sounds, the sound of the sea, for instance, and smells such as that of fish that came from the garum manufactories close by. (Production of garum was one of Sabratha’s principal occupations). It also allowed the proceedings within to be heard outside, perhaps provided relief from an oppressively high temperature, if the trial were to be placed, as is possible, between April and September 158, and permitted passersby to drift through and to watch the trial if they were sufficiently curious. Altogether the archaeology of Sabratha contributes to recovery of the setting, and the texture of the setting, in which Apuleius’ trial took place.⁷

Who might those passersby have been? Apuleius addressed his remarks in large part to the principals of the hearing: his judge, the consilium, his accusers, and the various witnesses who were summoned. There were moments, however, when a broader appeal may have been made. Although possibly exaggerating he speaks once of a multitudo of listeners (Apol. 28.3).

In the cities of Roman North Africa it was a matter of pride for those who were well educated to be able to claim, or to have claimed on their behalf, full command of Latin and Greek and an accompanying devotion to intellectual pursuits (studia). Funerary inscriptions provide the evidence. Q. Julius Felix from Cirta and the equestrian Julius Rusticianus from Calama were men who according to epitaphs that identify them both died at young ages, but who had long been dedicated to learning nonetheless, just as Apuleius, in his early thirties at the time of his trial, could also claim: ab ineunte aeuo unis studiis litterarum ex summis uiribus deditus (Apol. 5.1). Another epitaph identifies the clarissimus uir P. Flavius Pudens Pomponianus, who was notable for having added a Roman shine to his Attic eloquence: Atticam facundiam adaequanti Romano nitori. One gifted individual from Thibilis, a man again comparable to Apuleius, was according to the inscription that commemorates him an accomplished dec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I Historical Contexts
• PART II Cultural Contexts
• PART III Theoretical Approaches
• Contributors
• Passages Cited
• Index