[In the following essay, Hadas surveys Latin literature during the reign of Hadrian.]

Hadrian was the first of the Roman emperors to wear a beard, and the neatly trimmed archaism is a sign manifest of the first full-blown classicizing renascence in European literature, which Hadrian introduced. The sculptors of his age produced the pretty copies of Greek classics which fill our museums, and the pretty productions of the littérateurs are their exact counterpart. Silver Latin was enslaved to rhetorical embellishment and point, as we have seen, but the ornate dress was still a dress, calculated to make the most of its wearers' good features. Now it becomes an end in itself, with the idea that the dress might have contents almost obscene. In Greek the so-called Second Sophistic was in full flower. Most exquisite care was taken of assonance, alliteration, balance, and similar niceties, certain “classics” of the fourth century b.c. serving as a canon; not only was the how more important than the what, but the devotees of Second Sophistic studied to eliminate the what entirely. This was a classicism of imitation, not emulation, and it is significant that Roman writers not only copied the Greek but themselves wrote in Greek, some in part (Suetonius, Hadrian, Fronto, Apuleius, Papinian), and some exclusively (Favorinus, Appian, Marcus Aurelius, Julian). In Latin as in Greek there was a cult of archaism; authors of the early Republic whom cultivated taste had long disdained were scrutinized, not for their substance, but for archaic words that might be borrowed from them. Hadrian himself preferred Cato, Ennius, and Caelius Antipater to Cicero, Vergil, and Sallust; even in Tacitus' day there had been those who preferred Lucilius to Horace, Lucretius to Vergil, Sisenna and Varro to contemporary historians. But from euphuism and archaism of such a sort not much of abiding worth can be expected; yet an Apuleius or a Claudian can rise to utterances of real and timeless validity, as can a Dio Chrysostom or a Philostratus. There is as much feeling as an artistic emperor in a classicizing age can summon in Hadrian's own familiar lines:

Animula vagula blandula
hospes comesque corporis,
quae nunc abibis in loca
pallidula rigida nudula?
nec ut soles dabis iocos!
O blithe little soul, thou, flitting away,
Guest and comrade of this my clay,
Whither now goest thou, to what place
Bare and ghostly and without grace?
Nor, as thy wont was, joke and play.

—Ainsworth O'Brien-Moore

A somewhat similar elegiac strain characterizes the Pervigilium Veneris, which is surely one of the loveliest pieces in all Latin literature. Of its authorship nothing is known. On the basis of affinity in style and spirit with the Eclogues of Nemesianus (ca. 285) and the fragments of Tiberianus (ca. 350), and of possible traces of accentual prosody, many scholars would date the poem between the end of the third and the middle of the fourth centuries. On the other hand, it was Hadrian who revived the worship of Venus on a scale of great magnificence. The amalgamation of the nationalist Roman factor and the cult aspects of Venus in the poem is exactly reflected in Hadrian's magnificent temple across from the Colosseum, in which the apses of Venus and of Rome stand back to back in the center of the one structure. With so little left to show what Hadrianic poetry was like we may therefore well accept Hadrianic dating for the Pervigilium. The poem consists of some ninety-two trochaic tetrameter lines, exquisite and melodious, punctuated by the refrain Cras amet qui numquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet—“Tomorrow shall be love for the loveless, and for the lover tomorrow shall be love.” The refrain is not the formal beat of an official ode but sounds like a spontaneous and subjective interjection, uttered as the mood strikes the singer's fancy. As little is the Pervigilium a folk song. The trinoctium of Venus, which is the occasion for the piece, became, under the empire, an organized observance in the state cult. Both aspects of the festival are perfectly blended, and the sentiment expressed by the devotee is as genuine as Sappho's invocation to Aphrodite. In Latin literature it is almost unique in its release of imaginative fancy, in its evocations and blendings of nature and love and life and patriotism. What is depicted is the spring tide of the goddess of love in Sicily, with the Graces and nymphs, Ceres, Bacchus, and Apollo, and Cupid sans bow and arrows, participating in the festival. Everywhere nature awakens from winter's torpor, flowers bloom, birds chatter, and garlanded choirs chant through the glades. By the power of the benign goddess all creatures mate and ensure increase. Rome in particular is grateful to the foam-born goddess for her manifold blessings. But the note of personal elegy emerges at the close: Illa cantat, nos tacemus: quando ver venit meum? “The nightingale sings, but we are mute: when is my spring coming?”

L. Annaeus Florus (if that was his name; one manuscript calls him Julius) wrote an epitome of Roman history in two books, from the beginnings to the deification of Augustus. From Augustus to his own day, he says (1.8), almost two centuries had elapsed. If, as is more likely, the two centuries are reckoned to Augustus' floruit or his assumption of the title of Augustus in 27 b.c., Florus would have written in the Principate of Marcus Aurelius. But if we begin the two centuries with the birth of Augustus in 63 b.c., then our book would be written in the second half of the principate of Hadrian, and Florus would be identified as Hadrian's literary friend of that name. From a Florus of the age of Hadrian we have the fragment of the proem of a dialogue entitled Vergilius orator an poeta, reminiscent of the poems to Tacitus' Dialogue On Orators and to the Octavius of Minucius Felix. The proem seems adult and competent, and it is a pity that the bulk of the composition has gone. To an Annius Florus of the Hadrianic period too are attributed a number of short dactylic and trochaic poems in the Anthologia Latina. The subjects are literary commonplaces, mostly love and wine. One motif familiar from Ovid (and Shakespeare) is that of a lover inscribing the name of his beloved on the bark of trees. There are five charming hexameters on the rose which blooms and fades. There is nothing to prove, and nothing to disprove, the identity of the three men. The most considerable remains are of course the epitomes of the history, and these enjoyed great vogue as a textbook as late as the end of the eighteenth century. Their popularity is easy to understand. The books present all the memorable stories of Roman history, and yet are very short, because everything else which pertains to history is eliminated. The style is rhetorical and elegant, but not too turgid or difficult. And most of all, the approach to history was sympathetic to readers whose only other experience of history was the early books of the Bible. The tendency to make Roman history a hagiographa, which first comes to plain view in Livy, is here the main object of the book. Rome is the special object and agent of destiny in operating through history, and “those who read of Roman exploits are learning the history not of a single people but of the human race” (1.1). It is axiomatic that Roman policy and Roman arms must always be successful; even their failures are part of a divine plan, either as rods of chastisement, or means of discipline, or as a trial: “I can only think that the Gallic invasion was inflicted on the Roman people by heaven as a test, because the immortal gods wished to know whether Roman valor deserved the empire of the world.”

Dramatic demonstration of the thinness of second-century Latin literature is afforded by the correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto (ca.100-ca.167). Until 1815 Fronto was known only by reputation (Dio 69.8; Lucian, On Writing History 21; Aulus Gellius 2.26, 13.23, 19.8, 10, 13), and it was supposed that his merits were sufficient to lend distinction to the whole age. But the body of his writings discovered in that and the following years in Vatican and Ambrosian palimpsests show how vacuous form devoid of content can be. Most of what we know of Fronto's life derives from these remains. He was born in the Roman colony of Cirta, now Constantine, in Numidia. He probably studied at Alexandria, for he later had many friends there, and he tells us that he came late to the study of Latin literature. As teachers he mentions the philosopher Athenodotus, from whom he learned the generous use of similes (eikones), and the rhetor Dionysius, whose fable on the Vine and the Holm Oak he quotes. In 143 he was raised to consular rank by Antoninus Pius, the consul ordinarius for that year being the eminent Herodes Atticus. With Herodes he was made tutor to the heirs apparent, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. He remained on terms of intimacy with these two princes for the rest of his life, and his correspondence with them forms the bulk of his literary remains. The correspondence covers some two hundred printed pages and contains letters of Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus, and others as well as Fronto's own, and in Greek as well as Latin. The best thing we know about Fronto, indeed, is that so pure a character as Marcus esteemed him so highly, and it is clear that Fronto on his part did not abuse the friendship. There is a certain amount of flattery on either side—Fronto makes Marcus the peer of Julius Caesar and gives Lucius the military genius of a Marius or a Vespasian, and Marcus sets Fronto beside Cato and Gracchus, Sallust, and Cicero. The warmth of the greetings on either side seems effusive, and the jejune contents of the letters makes it difficult to surmise what significant common interests could have held the correspondents together. As his proconsular province, probably ten years after the consulship, the lot gave Fronto Asia, but the gout, of which he frequently complains, supervened, and put a period to his political career. He continued his professions as orator, advocate, and teacher and led a happy family life, though five of his six daughters and the son of the surviving daughter died in infancy. Nothing in the extant correspondence can be dated later than a.d. 166, and it is probable that Fronto died in that or the following year. Marcus set his statue up in the senate and kept his bust among his household gods.

Fronto's reputation as an orator was enormous, but the few sentences and titles we have hardly suffice to show how far his reputation was merited, or how far his practice corresponded to his theory. His theory is plain from the evidence, explicit and implicit, in his letters. Only on the question of placing the appropriate word in the appropriate position does Fronto show any deep conviction. The art of words not only mattered deeply to him, but it was the only thing in the universe that mattered at all. With his peers of the Second Sophistic Fronto sinned not so much in the deification of rhetoric but in studied Philistinism to all other intellectual pursuits. Nothing distressed him more deeply than Marcus Aurelius' decision to prefer philosophy to rhetoric. Fronto did deliver in the senate the attack on Christianity, the only such of which we have record, which evoked Minucius Felix' defense in the Octavius. The oration is lost, but from Fronto's general point of view and from the defense of paganism by later humanists like Symmachus we can surmise that Fronto's objections to Christianity were based upon the injury it might work to the traditional forms of classical life and letters.

By his own design and definition, therefore, Fronto's claim is solely as an expert in Latin. In his hands the language is indeed a supple and exact instrument, much easier to follow as it is much less individualized than the language of Apuleius. But an instrument is not an end. Distaste for philosophy may be excusable, but neither has history or any other serious discipline any meaning for Fronto except as a source for ornamental anecdotes and figures. Frivolities like the Praise of Smoke and Dust (211 Naber) or the Praise of Negligence (214 Naber) may be acceptable as the pastime of a man who has serious interests elsewhere; but to Fronto such things seem to be central. From the craftsman in words who is impatient of intellectual problems we might expect at least skillful composition, but here Fronto fails us. His Arion (237 Naber) is an utterly flattened-out transcript from Herodotus, without Herodotus' freshness and sense of wonder. Equally flat is Fronto's other borrowing from Herodotus, the story of the Ring of Polycrates (217 Naber), which he recounts in a letter consoling Marcus for a military disaster in Parthia. Plato is challenged in the Eroticus (in Greek; 255 Naber), which resumes the arguments of Socrates and Lysias in the Phaedrus on whether it is more expedient for a beautiful youth to bestow his favors on a lover or a non-lover. There is nothing at all of the lofty moral implications of the Phaedrus, nor, on the other hand, is there any unphilosophical erotic heartiness. There are only phrases.

These pieces illustrate the impotence of rhetoric made paramount and the intellectual abnegation involved in the cult of archaism. Scarcely fifty years before, Quintilian had been no less concerned for correct literary usage, but with Quintilian the instrument is still an instrument. He assumes that the writers he recommends will serve his pupils not only as patterns of form but as points of departure for new intellectual achievement. But to prefer remote to immediate predecessors on principle is willfully to ignore progress in thought, indeed, to deny the validity of thought. So far from justifying his period in literature, Fronto condemns it. Latin prose was lifeless and had to await the passionate conviction of Christian writers for vitality to be breathed into it. But the second century still had one vigorous spirit and consummate artist to show.

In Apuleius we encounter the pulsing life, the wit and fantasy and prying curiosity, even a more than amateur interest in philosophy and religion, which we miss in Fronto. His Metamorphoses, and especially the story of Cupid and Psyche embedded in it like a jewel, assure Apuleius' position as one of the handful of Latin authors with a legitimate and perennial claim on the attention of lovers of literature. Apuleius' writing, even in fiction, reveals his personality to a special degree, and to a special degree, therefore, the background of his life clarifies his letters. For the life our main sources are the Apology, the Florida, and the eleventh book of the Metamorphoses; the first book of the Metamorphoses, which professes to be autobiographical, can scarcely be regarded as such. Apuleius was born in the African colony of Madaura, about eighty miles east of Fronto's Cirta. Madaura was rich, populous, and highly Romanized. Tagaste, about twenty miles north of Madaura, was St. Augustine's native place, and Augustine went to Madaura for his secondary education. Apuleius' father was an important local official and left his sons the considerable fortune of two million sesterces. The date of Apuleius' birth is fixed by allusions to datable officials in his works as a.d. 124 or 125. The praenomen Lucius commonly given him is probably due to identification with the hero of the Metamorphoses. From Madaura Apuleius went to Carthage for more advanced education, and thence, probably in 143, to Athens, where he studied philosophy, rhetoric, geometry, music, and poetry. From Athens he traveled widely; he speaks (Apology 23) of the expenses of his long study and distant travels and alludes casually to visits in Samos and in Hieropolis in Phrygia. At Athens he became intimate with a younger fellow student named Pontianus, son of the rich widow Pudentilla, of Oea (modern Tripoli), whom Apuleius eventually married. At the end of his student period in Greece he was initiated into the mysteries of Isis at Cenchreae and then went to Rome, probably in 150. There he was initiated into the mysteries of Osiris also and was so diligent in his religious duties that he attained an important position in the cult of Isis and Osiris in Rome. At the same time he prospered as a rhetor and perhaps also as a pleader in Roman courts. Possibly he wrote the Metamorphoses in Rome (though this is disputed) and published the book anonymously.

After four or five years Apuleius returned to Africa, apparently with the purpose of taking up the profession of rhetor, which was at the time very rich in profit and prestige, but he was soon seized by wanderlust and decided to go to Alexandria. He fell ill at Oea en route and was there detained; by the manoeuvres of Pontianus, who was afraid his mother would marry a fortune-hunter and he and his brother be cut off, Apuleius went to live in Pudentilla's house, and after a year or so, during which time he gave a number of public lectures with brilliant success, he agreed to marry the opulent widow, who was his senior by some ten years. But Pontianus, who had himself been married in the interval, was instigated by his uncle and his wife's family to prevent his mother's remarriage. Apuleius behaved very handsomely in securing their rights to Pontianus and his brother; Pontianus repented his conduct but died shortly after his mother was married. Pudentilla's relatives continued bitter, and when Apuleius was at the assizes in Sabrata, some forty miles west of Oea, in connection with a suit involving his wife, he was suddenly accused not only of using magic to win Pudentilla but also of having murdered his stepson Pontianus to obtain his fortune. The charge of murder was dropped, but within a few days Apuleius was indicted for the practice of magic and was incidentally accused of being a fop and a debauchee who had married his elderly wife solely for the sake of her money. Of the Apology, the remarkable and able defense which Apuleius offered and which is the only forensic speech surviving from imperial times, we shall say more presently. There can be no doubt that Apuleius was acquitted, but he could no longer be comfortable in Oea, and the remainder of his career was spent, as far as we can tell, at Carthage. There he delivered many of the fancy declamations of which fragments are preserved in the Florida, and he became the most honored and popular literary figure in the whole province. Carthage decreed a statue in his honor, and the proconsul Aemilianus Strabo promised to erect another. He was appointed to the chief priesthood in the province, the highest honor it could bestow. Sidonius Apollinaris tells us that Pudentilla proved a model wife and took a passionate interest in his work; it is even possible that she bore him a son, if the Faustine fili to whom the second book of De dogmate Platonis is dedicated refers to a son of the body. The portrait of Apuleius on a contorniate in Paris (reproduced in L. C. Purser's learned and witty Cupid and Psyche) is probably imaginary. His opponents called him a philosophum formosum (Apology 4), and we should expect as much of a successful declaimer, but he retorts that his body is emaciated with study and his hair matted like a lump of tow. There is no evidence for the date of his death, which must have occurred between 170 and 180.

It is from the Apology that the details sketched above (except for the Roman interlude, which comes from Metamorphoses 11, and the last phase, from the Florida) derive, and since that work is a practical pleading rather than a display piece, the Apology (it is called Pro se de magia liber in the manuscripts) is our best introduction to second-century Latinity as well as very valuable for the abundant light it throws on the private life and intellectual atmosphere of the time. The speech as we have it is too long to have been delivered, but it was probably enlarged for publication, like Cicero's Pro Milone or the Younger Pliny's Panegyric to Trajan. But the main part of the speech was surely delivered; it is not a wholly fictive speech like Cicero's Against Verres or Second Philippic. The first portion of the speech (1-65) disposes of the charge of wizardry. With a flamboyant display of learning Apuleius overwhelms his puny adversaries and makes them ludicrous. The second portion (66-end) defends his marriage with Pudentilla and justifies his dealings with his stepsons. The only parallel to the detailed and merciless portraiture of the villainous turpitude of his accusers and the base ingratitude of his stepsons and their unlovely domestic life is Cicero's Pro Cluentio. Nor, despite its extravagant Asianism, is the style of the Apology as different as we should expect, on the basis of the Metamorphoses and the Florida, from the classic norm. Here is genuine indignation and the practical necessity of securing acquittal from a serious charge. In prose employed as an instrument for practical ends, then, divagations from the classical norm were only such as might be expected from the natural course of development, remembering the dominant influence of rhetorical education. The display pieces would then fall into a distinct and separate category, where virtuosity in language was an end in itself.

Renascence scholars regarded the peculiarities of Apuleius' style as being due to his African origin and spoke of his tumor Africus. Modern scholarship has shown that there is nothing distinctly African either in Apuleius or in other African writers, though each province may have retained words which had fallen into disuse in the capital. Apuleius' style is the style of the second century. Unlike Fronto, who was a conscious archaizer, Apuleius used all available resources, ancient and contemporary, to make his style effective. The noticeable characteristics of that style are balance and symmetry, attained by devices of structure and sound; diffuseness and redundancy, by the use of synonyms, periphrases, and rhetorical repetitions; variety, by conscious syntactical alternations; alliteration and assonance, in many forms; diminutives, Grecisms, neologisms. Walter Pater (Marius the Epicurean, Chapter 5) aptly describes Apuleius' style as “full of archaisms and curious felicities in which that generation delighted, quaint terms and images picked from the early dramatists, the lifelike phrases of some lost poet preserved by an old grammarian, racy morsels of the vernacular and studied prettinesses.”

But it is rather to the Florida that “his rococo, very African, and, as it were, perfumed personality” (Pater, Chapter 20) applies. These are excerpts from his epideictic declamations, which Apuleius himself had probably published in four books under some such title as Orationes. At a later period some admirer selected an anthology (which is the meaning of florida) of choice bits, retaining the book division of the original, which is very unsystematic, for the selected pieces. The excerpts are elaborately polished and have an ornate kind of stateliness, though all are essentially trivial and some grotesque. Some are from speeches on public occasions, some contain moralizations, legends, or picturesque stories. There are, for example, a detailed description of the flight of an eagle (2); the contest of Apollo and Marsyas (3); a note on the flautist Antigenidas (4); remarks on India and the gymnosophists (6); the artistic taste of Alexander the Great (7); a comparison of his own versatility with that of the sophist Hippias (9, cf. 20); on the parrot (12); on the Cynic Crates (14, 22); on Samos, Polycrates, and Pythagoras (15); on the comic poet Philemon (16); on the familiar dispute of the sophist Protagoras and his disciple Euathlos concerning tuition charges (18). The inordinate care lavished on the artistic structure of these pieces and the mesmerizing effect their chanting must have had on their auditors may be apprehended from a passage taken from the first selection:

ara floribus redimita
aut spelunca frondibus inumbrata
aut quercus cornibus onerata
aut fagus pellibus coronata
vel enim colliculus sepimine consecratus
vel truncus dolamine effigiatus
vel caespes libamine umigatus
vel lapis unguine delibutus.

The piece on Philemon is quite attractive for its descriptive power and its artful simplicity; it may be presented here for its own sake, and because Dr. Purser's version succeeds to a degree in reproducing its alliterations, assonances, and other artificialities:

Philemon was a poet of the Middle Comedy, and composed plays for the stage at the same time as Menander. He competed with him, possibly as an inferior, but certainly as a rival, for he often defeated him—one is ashamed to say. You may find in him many sallies of wit, clever complications in his plots, admirably contrived recognitions, characters suited to the subject, maxims applicable to real life, the gay portions not sinking below comedy, the grave portions not soaring into tragedy. We rarely find seductions in his plays: the failings of his human characters are venial, their loves congenial. In him, too, as in the other playwrights, we have the lying procurer, the sighing lover, the sly slave-boy; the cajoling mistress, the coercing wife, the indulging mother; the uncle to scold, the friend to uphold, the soldier bold; gorging parasites, grasping parents, saucy street-girls. By these merits he had long held an eminent position in comedy.

On one occasion he had given a reading of part of a play which he had recently composed; and it happened that he had already come to the third act, wherein, as is usual in comedies, he had delightfully quickened the interest of his hearers, when a sudden shower of rain, just as occurred lately in my case with you, compelled an adjournment of the collected audience and the projected reading. However, he promised, at the request of many present, that without making any break he would finish the recitation on the ensuing day. Accordingly, next day an immense crowd gathers with the greatest eagerness: each one tries to get as near the front as possible: the late comer signs to his friends to keep a seat for him: those at the extremity complain that they are pushed out of the sitting accommodation altogether: the whole theatre is packed and there is a great crush. When quiet was attained, the people begin, those who had not been present to ask about the previous portion of the play, those that had been present to go over what they had heard, and all, when they had the beginning in mind, to wait the sequel. Meanwhile the day went on, and Philemon did not come as had been arranged; some grumbled at the poet for being late, the greater number made excuses for him. But when the delay became unreasonable, and there was no sign of Philemon, some of the more energetic members of the audience were sent to summon him; and they found him lying dead on his couch. He had ceased to breathe and had just become stiff. There he was reposing on his reading-couch in the attitude of thought: he had his fingers still in the fold of the manuscript, his face down on the book he had been reading; but he had no breath of life in him; he was forgetful of his book, and thought not of his audience. Those who had come in stood still for a space, moved by the marvel of such an unexpected event and such a beautiful death. Then they returned to the people, and announced that Philemon, the poet, who was being expected to finish in the theatre an unreal narrative, had at his house completed the real drama of life: his words to the world were, “be happy” and “your hands,” to his friends, “be sorry” and “your tears”: yesterday's shower was a premonition of their weeping: his play had reached the funeral knell before it reached the marriage bell: and thus, as a most excellent poet had ceased to tread the stage of life, they should go straight from the theatre to his burying, and lay now his ashes in the grave, thereafter his poems in their hearts.

—L. C. Purser

Of the same class as the declamations of which we have excerpts in the Florida is On the God of Socrates. The daimonion of which Socrates speaks as directing his conduct in Plato's Apology, Apuleius says, was one of the spirits intermediary between God and man who are “in nature animal, in intellect rational, in mind subject to emotion, in material airy, in duration eternal. The first three characteristics they have in common with men; the fourth is peculiar to themselves; the fifth they share with the immortal gods; but they differ from them in being subject to emotion.” They are intermediaries in both directions: they execute divine behests for mankind, and they convey to the gods the prayers and offerings of men. The doctrine is ancient; it is found in Hesiod, and in the account of the birth of Eros in Plato's Symposium. Plutarch found it extremely useful in reconciling a perfect deity with an imperfectly administered universe, and his writings on the subject, especially On the Obsolescence of Oracles and On the Face in the Moon, were very influential. Apuleius' treatise certainly follows, if it does not translate, a Greek original. Because it was the first work in Latin on a subject important equally to pagans and Christians, Apuleius' treatise enjoyed a vogue out of all proportion to its merit.

Apuleius has been praised as a Platonicus (St. Augustine, City of God 8.12), but his De Platone et eius dogmate is such a summary as an undergraduate might write. The book begins with a brief biography of Plato and continues with an account of the Platonic theories of the world and the soul, based mostly on the Timaeus. The second book, addressed to Faustine fili, summarizes Plato's views on ethics and politics, drawing largely on Gorgias, Republic, and Laws. These books show no real knowledge of Plato, but are the heaped-up learning of the rhetorician, with no judgment or critical faculty. It has been suggested that Apuleius' immediate authority for his Platonic writings was his contemporary Albinus. The Peri hermeneias on formal logic which used to be regarded as the third book of De Platone is Aristotelian and Stoic rather than Platonic, and is a separate work, if indeed it is Apuleius' If the fili in the dedication of the second book is literal, the work must derive from Apuleius' last years; if it is metaphorical, the book may have been written at any period in Apuleius' career. De mundo (“On the Universe”) is a free and often inaccurate translation of an extant Greek treatise entitled Peri kosmou, falsely ascribed to Aristotle and dedicated to one Alexander, probably the apostate nephew of Philo Judaeus. This dedication Apuleius alters to Faustine fili, leaving the impression that the work was his own. Efforts to save Apuleius' honor by making him author of both the Greek and Latin are misguided. The treatise strikes a note of lofty monotheism almost Christian in character. Other philosophical translations by Apuleius will be listed among his lost works at the end of the present section.

We come now to the Metamorphoses, upon which Apuleius' reputation in literature rests, for without the Metamorphoses he would have been forgotten by all but professional scholars. Apuleius himself does not speak of the book, and it is difficult to know at what point in his career he wrote it. His accusers at Oea did not mention the work, as they might well have done, if they had known of it, to prove Apuleius' interest in magic, nor does Apuleius himself allude to it in the passages in the Florida (9 and 20) in which he lists the categories of his numerous writings. Furthermore, the nephew of Plutarch named Sextus, with whom Lucius claims kinship in the opening chapter of the Metamorphoses, was still alive in 160, and it is thought unlikely that he would be mentioned in such a connection if he were. These considerations point to a date late in Apuleius' life. On the other hand, it is held that the ebullience of the writing implies youth and that the accounts of the initiations and other biographical details in the eleventh book reflect recent experience, and hence that the Metamorphoses must have been written in Apuleius' Roman period. It would then have been published anonymously, and even if the authorship were known in Rome it would not be known in Africa for Apuleius' detractors to make use of the argument; nor would Apuleius himself, in view of his position of dignity in Africa, have subsequently cared to advertise his authorship of such an undignified work. On neither side are the arguments completely cogent. The genius of the work is timeless, and perhaps it is not essential that we date it to a definite year in its author's life.

More tantalizing is the question of the relationship of our Metamorphoses to the lost Metamorphoses which Photius attributes to Lucius of Patras, and to the brief Lucius; or Ass extant in the corpus of Lucian. This Lucius; or Ass is held to be an epitome, by another hand, of the Metamorphoses of which Lucian was the author. As in his True History, Lucian's aim was satire, the objects here being magicians, corrupt priests, frail women. Lucian's basis was doubtless a folk tale, but his Lucius represents the credulity, gullibility, and bestiality of all mankind. The main outline of Apuleius' plot is identical with that of the Greek Lucius; or Ass, but Apuleius' story is clearly the later because of the additions in matter and tone which can only be Apuleius' own. In matter there are the Milesian tales, the story of Cupid and Psyche, and the great eleventh book portraying the worship of Isis who redeemed Lucius from ass to human. And though Apuleius retains some of the earthiness of the original and reveals glimpses of Lucian's wit and satire, the tone of the whole is very different. Apuleius' Metamorphoses is neither a comic romance nor a satire, as Lucian's clearly was, but a serious novel. It is, as Miss Haight has written,

a sort of Pilgrim's Progress of the Ass-Man in quest for knowledge of marvels. … Apuleius exalted the tale by making the journeyings of Lucius a search for the spiritual meaning of life. His hero walks alone. The love romance in his story, the Cupid and Psyche tale, starts with the Platonic conception of the relation of Eros and Psyche, Love and the Soul, and therefrom is lifted to the realm of the Olympian gods. And finally the transformation of Lucius is no chance event, but a salvation wrought out by his mystic worship of Isis.

Apuleius' story is told in the first person by its hero Lucius. Riding over the mountains in Thessaly, Lucius encounters two other travelers and is told the story of a horrible murder by a witch in Hypata, the town to which Lucius is going. There he is entertained by Milo, whose wife Pamphile turns out to be a witch. At a party given by his kinswoman Byrrhaena he hears another horrible story of mutilation by a witch, and on his way home he kills three robbers who prove to have been animated wineskins. He makes love to the maid Fotis, who permits him to see Pamphile transform herself into an owl. He too wishes to transform himself but by a mistake in the unguent is turned into an ass (retaining his human faculties, except for voice). He need only eat roses to regain his human shape, but before Fotis can bring any, robbers attack the house and carry him off. At the robbers' hideout he hears three fine stories of robber chiefs and sees the robbers bring in the beautiful Charite, who was kidnaped for ransom on her wedding night. To console the girl, the old woman who cooked for the robbers tells her the story of Cupid and Psyche (4.28-6.24), which is a brilliant masterpiece of narrative. The beautiful maiden and her invisible lover and jealous sisters recur in fairy stories the world over, and the domesticated Venus and her unruly son bear unmistakable affinities to the middle-class Olympians in Apollonius of Rhodes; surely the story is not forced to make allegory obvious, and most scholars have denied it any such implication. But with Apuleius' interest in initiations and mysteries and with the whole of the Metamorphoses having the character of a quest, it seems impossible that the fortunes of a Psyche (= “Soul”) who finally attains peace and gives birth to Voluptas (= “Delight”) can have had no allegorical meaning for Apuleius, though it may be difficult to spell the meaning out consistently. Charite is rescued by her lover, disguised as a robber, but he is subsequently murdered by a rival and avenged by Charite. In his asinine form Lucius then witnesses the obscene orgies of lewd Syrian priests and hears four naughty Milesian tales—“The Tale of the Tub,” “The Baker's Wife,” “The Lost Slippers,” “The Fuller's Wife.” These are of the type that the Parthian Surena was shocked at finding (doubtless in the Latin translation of Cornelius Sisenna) in the baggage of a Roman officer at Carrhae in 53 b.c. Next is a story of the oppression of a poor family by an arrogant nobleman and the death of three brothers who came to the family's aid. There follows the story of an amorous stepmother who tries to poison her unresponsive stepson, and then the story of five murders committed by a sadistic woman. As part of her punishment it is proposed to display her publicly in sexual union with Lucius, who finds the prospect so abhorrent that he runs away from Corinth to Cenchreae, and there exhausted falls asleep on the seashore.

This brings us to Book ii, which is a moving religious document and affords us a glimpse of the beauty of holiness in a cult elsewhere described as compounded of superstition and chicanery. As Lucius sleeps, Isis in her refulgent beauty appears to him and promises her aid. Amidst the brilliant pageantry of the spring festival for the launching of her sacred vessel the priest of Isis offers Lucius a garland of roses, and he resumes his human shape. Determined to devote himself to the service of his savior, he undergoes the arduous preparations for initiation, receiving new visions, and finally, alone in her temple at night, being vouchsafed the experience of death, rebirth, and revelation which only the elect may attain (11.23):

I approached the borderland of death, trod the threshold of Proserpina, was borne through all the elements and returned; at midnight I saw the sun shining with a brilliant light; I approached the gods of the nether and upper world and adored them in person near at hand.

—Elizabeth H. Haight

Lucius then went to Rome for the service of Isis, was by her direction twice initiated into the mysteries of Osiris, and finally attained the dignity of becoming a pastophorus of the cult. So far from being an ill-assorted appendage to a series of picaresque and scabrous stories, Book ii gives unity and direction to the whole and makes of it a spiritual quest. It is only northerly latitudes that find ribaldry in church or a flash of spirit in the smoking room incongruous.

It remains to say a word of the works of Apuleius no longer extant, which were probably greater in volume than those we have preserved. He himself claims to have written in virtually all forms and on virtually all subjects (Florida 20): “Empedocles composed [scientific] poems, Plato dialogues, Socrates hymns, Epicharmus mimes [reading mimos for modos], Xenophon researches, Xenocrates satires. Your Apuleius has cultivated all of these and all nine of the Muses.” A number of lost works are mentioned by Apuleius himself or attributed to him by other writers. At Apology 6 Apuleius cites an eight-line poem to Calpurnianus from his Ludicra, which was a volume of miscellaneous light verse. At Florida 17 he speaks of a carmen de virtutibus Orfiti, and at 18, of hymns to Aesculapius written in both Greek and Latin. There is also extant a verse translation of an obscene passage from the Anekhomenos of Menander. His prose works are more numerous. Short fragments from a second novel, called Hermagoras, are quoted by Priscian and Fulgentius. Priscian also mentions an Epitome historiarum, and John Lydus an Eroticus, presumably a collection of love adventures. Many of his speeches must have been lost: he mentions one (Apology 55) on the majesty of Aesculapius delivered at Oea, and in Florida 16 he promises to write an oration of thanks to Aemilianus Strabo. St. Augustine refers to a speech against citizens of Oea who objected to the erection of a statue in his honor. He appears to have written much on natural history. He himself mentions his Quaestiones naturales, written in both Greek and Latin, and speaks particularly of a treatise De piscibus (Apology 36, 38, 40). Various later writers also mention De arboribus, De re rustica, Medicinalia, Astronomica, De musica, and a translation of the Arithmetica of Nicomachus. There is also mention of a De republica, a translation of Plato's Phaedo, a work De proverbiis, and Quaestiones conviviales. On the other hand, a number of works not Apuleius' have come down under his name: a number of fragments on medicines and the Asclepius, a dialogue between Hermes Trismegistus and Asclepius conducted in an Egyptian temple and dealing solemnly with questions of the gods, the universe, and fate. Though of no original value, this dialogue has importance as one of the latest documents of a paganism aware of its imminent dissolution.

Apuleius is a more characteristic phenomenon in Latin literature than might at first glance seem likely. Latin literature was from its beginnings consciously “literary,” and Apuleius succeeds in making his very “literary” Latin to the highest degree effective. Latin literature from the beginning set itself the task of harvesting, broadcasting, and perpetuating the artistic achievements of its predecessors; Apuleius' harvest was rich and varied, and he did broadcast and perpetuate it, with his special cachet. And from the beginning Latin literature at its best endowed its borrowings with a gravity and seriousness of purpose. Such gravity and seriousness are not wanting in Apuleius.

In earlier pages we have encountered retailers of anecdotes—the Elder Seneca in rhetoric, the Elder Pliny in natural science, Frontinus in stratagems—but these were men with a mature interest in a scholarly specialty, which their anecdotes were calculated to illustrate. It is significant of the literary temper of the second and third centuries that littérateurs now made collections of piquant anecdotes for their own sake. Among the Greeks we have Athenaeus' Doctors at Dinner and Aelian's Various Stories; even respectable thinkers like Plutarch and Clement of Alexandria were attracted by the habit. Among the Romans we have Aulus Gellius (ca. a.d. 123-ca. 165), whose Attic Nights is a well-stuffed rag bag. Of his life little is known; he practiced law and held a minor judgeship, he knew Fronto and was entertained in Athens, where he studied philosophy, by Herodes Atticus, and he made extracts from a large number of Greek and Latin writers which he published in twenty books. Of his procedure in the latter enterprises he tells us in his preface:

In the arrangement of my material I have adopted the same haphazard order that I had previously followed in collecting it. For whenever I had taken in hand any Greek or Latin book, or had heard anything worth remembering, I used to jot down whatever took my fancy, of any and every kind, without any definite plan or order; and such notes I would lay away as an aid to my memory, like a kind of literary storehouse, so that when the need arose of a word or a subject which I chanced for the moment to have forgotten, and the books from which I had taken it were not at hand, I could readily find and produce it. It therefore follows, that in these notes there is the same variety of subject that there was in those former brief jottings which I had made without order or arrangement, as the fruit of instruction of reading in various lines. And since, as I have said, I began to amuse myself by assembling these notes during the long winter nights which I spent on a country-place in the land of Attica, I have therefore given them the title of Attic Nights.

—J. C. Rolfe

It is hence as difficult to characterize the literary structure of the Attic Nights as it is to find a plot in the telephone directory or dramatic interest in a mail-order catalogue. But in much the same way as a mail-order catalogue may be, the Attic Nights are instructive and entertaining. No fewer than 275 authors are mentioned by name, and Gellius is on the whole accurate and conscientious. If he borrowed from predecessors like himself instead of drawing exclusively from original sources, so have all anthologizers before Gellius and after him done. His range is wide, but his chief concern is with literature—criticism, textual matters, grammar, biographical notes—yet his antiquarian interests include law, religion, history, and many other matters. Scholars complain that he had no professional competence in any of these fields, but a modern whose interest in classical antiquity is humanistic rather than scientific will find in Gellius a kindred spirit who had the advantage of being the immediate heir of the full tradition. His eye is caught by the right things, and his extracts and comments answer many questions that rise to the mind of modern readers of ancient books; without him our picture of the background to our ancient books would have many gaps now filled. He is interested, it is true, in the foliage rather than the fruit of ancient literature and philosophy; but the foliage is essential to the fruit and in itself a pleasing thing, as Boswell well remarked at the outset of his Johnson.