The eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon famously designated the Roman empire of the second century AD as ‘the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous’. Without uncritically accepting Gibbon’s judgement, it was certainly into a peaceful, prosperous North Africa under Roman rule that Apuleius was born, sometime in the 120s. In that cosmopolitan empire, he carved out a career for himself as a celebrated writer, orator, Platonic philosopher and professional intellectual.
What information we have of his life comes from his own works, and from comments by St Augustine of Hippo, a fellow North African writer clearly familiar with the writings of Apuleius several centuries later. He was born into a wealthy provincial family in a city (colonia) called Madauros in the province of Africa Proconsularis (now M’daurouch in modern-day Algeria), several hundred kilometres inland of Carthage (modern Tunis); his father achieved the highest political office in the colonia and left Apuleius and his brother a sizeable fortune at his death.
Although there had been Roman influence in this part of North Africa since the days of Massinissa, ally of the great Roman general Scipio in the Second Punic War (late third century BC), Punic culture and language (that is, the language and culture of Carthage) remained strong, and it is not unlikely that the first language Apuleius spoke was Punic, rather than Latin, as was the case with Apuleius’ own stepson Pudens (Apol. 98), and, a generation later, the North African-born emperor, Septimius Severus.
It is Apuleius’ facility with and mastery of the language of Rome which made his career, however, and his Latin literary education would have begun in Madauros, where the empire had made its language the standard for the literary and legal worlds. For more serious education he was sent to Carthage, learning grammar and rhetoric, and probably also developing a grounding in Platonic philosophy. From there his studies took him further afield, to Athens, where his studies in Greek (started in Carthage) were perfected, and then later to Rome, and there is some likelihood that he also travelled to other centres of imperial intellectual life such as Smyrna, Pergamum and Ephesus; he undoubtedly had contact with the major intellectuals and writers of his time at these hubs of culture and learning. This kind of wide educational travelling among the literary elite was not uncommon in the empire – his contemporary Aulus Gellius studied and lived in Athens, and similar educational journeys are recorded by the Greek sophist Lucian and the second-century Alexandrian Christian author Clement.
On his way back to North Africa, at Oea (modern Tripoli), Apuleius met and married a wealthy and much older widow, Prudentilla, mother of Pontianus, a fellow student he had met on his travels. The match was not as pleasing to other members of her family as it was to his friend Pontianus, and he was taken to court in 158–9, with the accusation that Prudentilla had been induced to marry him by witchcraft. His defence, which still survives, is a rhetorical tour de force, a speech called Pro se de magia (‘In self-defence on a charge of magic’; more commonly called his Apologia); it laid the grounds for a triumphant return to Carthage, where he seems to have had a prosperous career as a speaker and writer, was elected to a priesthood, and voted a public statue. A collection of extracts from his speeches survives under the title of the Florida, and a number of other works of disputed authenticity (De deo Socratis, De Platone and De Mundo) suggest his development as a philosophical expositor of Greek ideas to a Roman audience.
Where in this career does the Metamorphoses fit, his most famous work? Nothing in the text itself gives conclusive evidence, although some scholars have seen in the exuberant fiction the creation of a young and frivolous Apuleius writing for a more cosmopolitan Roman audience. On the other hand, the themes in the Metamorphoses of magic and sorcery do not seem to have been brought up in accusation against him at his trial in 158–9, and further, the allusions in the work to trumped-up charges, defended by brilliant rhetoric, after which the speaker is awarded an honorific statue, and particularly apposite remarks by Venus about the suspicions aroused by a country wedding (which had formed part of the concern around Apuleius’ marriage to Prudentilla), seem too similar to biographical fact to be coincidental. So sometime after his return to Carthage in the 160s or later seems the most plausible date.
Although Apuleius’ education and (extant) literary output was in Latin, his educational and literary outlook was fundamentally shaped by the major intellectual currents in the Greco-Roman world, in which Greek was regarded as the premier language for cultural production. More particularly, rhetorical performance in Greek by orators harking back in content, style and literary allusion to the glory days of fifth-century Greece, shaped the intellectual atmosphere of the Roman empire at this period. This efflorescence of Greek rhetoric and writing is referred to as the Second Sophistic, a term coined by Philostratus (c. 170–250), named after the self-conscious revival of the cultural melting-pot of classical Athens with its influx of sophists, teachers of rhetoric and philosophy. Apuleius is a contemporary of these (second) sophists – Lucian, Aelius Aristides, Dio of Prusa and those in their circles.
In broad terms, the key themes and features of this kind of literature are a concern for linguistic purity, usually in the form of almost hyper-Atticized Greek and a focus on rhetorical performance, particularly extempore epideictic rhetoric (off-the-cuff show speeches). Culturally, this literature pivots around the negotiation between Greek and Roman identity and power, with the concept of paideia, culture or education, as the hinge. This immensely important property was wielded like a weapon or spent like currency by the elite sophists, and traded in, on a smaller scale, by the penumbra of the pepaideumenoi (cultured elite) surrounding them. So, although his medium is Greek, not Latin, Apuleius has been referred to as a ‘Latin Sophist’ and we see reflections of the Second Sophistic throughout the extracts of the Metamorphoses here: deep concern for literary tradition, with complex and subtle allusions and intertextual play, a showy, performance-like use of language with a taste for archaisms, and rhetorical flourishes like ecphrases (see pp. 24–27 below, on V.22).
The Metamorphoses, also known as The Golden Ass, is the most well-known of Apuleius’ works. It tells the story of a wealthy, educated young man (in many respects remarkably similar to the author) called Lucius, who is introduced after an anonymous prologue promising a series of entertaining Greek tales. The novel is divided into eleven books – an unusual number for ancient literature – but the main narrative of Lucius’ transformation and adventures often plays second fiddle to a series of embedded tales: some comic, some bawdy, some violent, but all entertaining.
Book I: Lucius (the narrator) tells of his journey to Thessaly; along the way he is told a tale of a man called Socrates who was murdered by magic after an affair with a witch. Lucius arrives at Hypata, his destination, and meets his host Milo.
Book II: The next day, Lucius meets and visits the house of Byrrhaena, a family friend; an ecphrasis (a literary description of an artwork; see pp. 24–27 for discussion of this feature) of a statue of Diana and Actaeon foreshadows his own bestial metamorphosis. He is warned about the magical practices of Pamphile, Milo’s wife, which only arouses Lucius’ curiosity (his characteristic vice). Back at Milo’s house, Lucius begins to embark upon a love affair with Photis, Milo’s slave-girl. At a dinner party he hears another tale of witchcraft, this time about a man called Thelyphron, who has been humiliated and maimed by the action of witches. On his way back home, the drunken Lucius is set upon by thieves, but he kills them all at Milo’s door.
Book III: The following morning Lucius is arrested and charged with the murder of the three thieves; despite a passionate rhetorical defence, he is convicted and made to uncover his victims’ corpses: to his astonishment, they turn out to be merely wine-skins. In his embarrassment, it is explained that the practical joke is part of the town’s celebrations of the festival of laughter, and a statue is erected in his honour. (This section is usually read as based on Apuleius’ own experience of the sham charge regarding his wife and his successful defence, although modulated to a comic key.) Photis confesses that she aided Pamphile in magically animating the wine-skins, and several nights later, she allows Lucius to see Pamphile turn herself into a bird; Lucius attempts to undergo the same magical transformation, but Photis, using the wrong ointment, accidentally turns him into an ass instead. She promises to cure him at dawn, but during the night, Lucius the ass is stolen by robbers.
Book IV: Lucius is taken to the robbers’ cave, and we are treated to three tales of their exploits, all ending in comic failure, which they tell over dinner. The robbers go out the same night and return with a prisoner, a beautiful young girl, Charite. The robbers’ housekeeper tells the tale of Cupid and Psyche to try to calm the distraught girl. This tale, from which our selection is taken, is the longest embedded tale in the Metamorphoses, and continues through to the middle of the sixth book: the following section of this introduction will cover it in more detail.
Book VI: At the conclusion of the tale, Lucius attempts to escape, carrying the girl with him on his back, but they are caught and the robbers plan a grim fate for the escapees.
Book VII: A stranger arrives at the robbers’ cave, claiming to be the infamous bandit Haemus. He tells several tales of derring-do, and offers to become their leader; they accept, and take his advice to sell the girl rather than kill her. Lucius realizes (eventually) that Haemus is, in fact, the girl’s fiancé, Tlepolemus, in disguise. Tlepolemus drugs the robbers and effects an escape with Charite carried out on Lucius’ back. After the happy marriage, as a reward, Lucius is sent to their country estate – but there he is mistreated by a woman and a cruel boy. The boy is eaten by a bear, and Lucius, blamed for the misfortune, is attacked by the boy’s mother, but he successfully wards her off with a stream of liquid dung.
Book VIII: A messenger brings the news that Tlepolemus has been murdered, and Charite has killed herself. The slaves, panicked at the news, run off, taking Lucius with them. Their journey is beset with disasters: they risk an attack by wolves, are chased by dogs, and have to escape a devouring serpent disguised as an old man. They sell Lucius on to a group of travelling charlatans, disreputable priests of the Syrian goddess, who make their money duping credulous and superstitious peasants. At the close of the book it looks as though the priests might slaughter Lucius to make up for a stolen joint of venison.
Book IX: Lucius escapes his fate by pretending to be rabid, and, as he travels on, hears an extremely lewd tale of a cheating wife. The priests are arrested for theft from a temple, and Lucius is again sold and put to work in a mill. Lucius hears another two bawdy tales of adultery, and then assists in revealing the adultery of the miller’s wife. The miller punishes her lover in a surprising way; but the miller’s wife, thrown out of the house, takes her revenge, killing the miller by witchcraft. Lucius is sold to a gardener, and then commandeered by a soldier.
Book X: Lucius is left temporarily by the soldier at a house where he hears another tale, this one of murder and medicine. Lucius is sold by the soldier to a pair of cooks, who discover him eating their food; his strange eating habits are turned into a public spectacle, and he is taught more tricks and taken to Corinth. An aristocratic lady takes her pleasure with Lucius, which encourages his owner to contemplate using him for display in the arena: to have sexual intercourse with a woman condemned for poisoning. Lucius, not enthused at this plan for a career on stage, escapes and falls asleep on a beach at Cenchreae, just outside of Corinth.
Book XI: Lucius, awaking at night on the beach, prays to the moon, who appears in the form of the goddess Isis. She instructs him that he can be cured by participating in her festival. The cure is successful; Lucius finally regains human form, and becomes an initiate and devotee of the goddess, and after a trip home, he goes to Rome to be further initiated into the mysteries of Osiris, where he ends the tale as a minor priest of the cult, financing his devotion to the Egyptian deities by his career as a lawyer.
The Metamorphoses is the only ‘novel’ to survive by Apuleius, and one of the very few exemplars of this genre in Latin to survive from antiquity. I use inverted commas because the connotations that the term conveys in the present day are quite different to what we see in the ancient form which goes under the name; one of the reasons for the interpretative disagreements which mark scholarship on the Metamorphoses is that there are so few works which might help us as comparisons or contrasts.
While there are a small number of Greek prose works, known as the Greek novels, their swashbuckling romantic tales of lovers separated by pirates, adventures and other various trials, before inevitably they find each other and live happily ever after, read quite differently to the (very few) Roman novels. Indeed, along with the Satyrica of Petronius, the Metamorphoses is the only pre-Christian Latin prose fiction which is not a direct translation of a Greek text; in both, the setting is a realist backdrop of the Roman empire, with a mostly first-person narration containing extensive inserted tales. Despite a low-life realism, the novels are highly literary, with extensive allusion to other literary genres, and notable parody of the romantic themes of the Greek novels.
The form and content of the Metamorphoses was undoubtedly also influenced by a genre of stories called ‘Milesian tales’; the first sentence of the work begins: at ego tibi sermone isto Milesio varias fabulas conseram (‘but I will stitch together for you various tales in that Milesian style’). Here again we have the problem that almost none of this genre actually survives from the ancient world, although the references to it suggest that the content was ribald and comic: Ovid (Tristia II.413, 443–4) makes reference to the famous Greek writer of Milesian tales, Aristides of Miletus, and his Latin translator, Sisenna, in these terms. The idea of a framing narrative, into which self-contained ribald stories were stitched, and possibly the use of a first-person narrator, are elements which Apuleius took from the Milesian tales.
The framing narrative of the man turned into an ass also has a more direct literary antecedent: at the close of the prologue, we are promised a fabulam Graecanicam (‘a Grecian tale’), and it seems that Apuleius has borrowed the key points of the narrative wholesale from a Greek original, known as the Onos (the Greek for ass). Whilst the Greek original doesn’t survive, an epitome of the tale has come down to us falsely attributed to the sophistic author Lucian, and there is a comparison drawn up by the Byzantine patriarch Photius comparing this version to a longer version of the ass-tale, called (like Apuleius’) the Metamorphoses, attributed to Lucius of Patrae. The character of Lucius, the framing story of the transformation into an ass, and many of the inserted tales are likely to have come from this Greek original, although scholars generally agree that the Cupid and Psyche episode (amongst other features) is an original Apuleian addition.
Apuleius’ eleventh book, however, strikes quite a different note to the Onos; the Greek finishes with a ribald episode absent from our text, in which the human lover of Lucius-ass expresses her disappointment with his transformation back into human form, because of his now human-sized body parts. Apuleius’ account of the Isiac initiation, references to mystery cults, and closure on a note of seeming joy and lasting fidelity are elements unique to his version.
Appropriately for a work titled for fluidity of form, the Metamorphoses has always confused and divided critics. It has been misread as autobiography (by no less an autobiographer than St. Augustine, at De civitate dei 18.18), lauded as an edifying spiritual work by its first English translator, derided as a derivative patchwork of earlier sources, and praised as a rich example of deeply ironic comedy. For the first half of the twentieth century, the literary quality of the work went underappreciated, judged as possessing no unity and little artistic value. More recent scholarship has been more positive in its assessment, emphasizing the cleverness and complexity of its literary techniques, and in particular its sophisticated narrative strategies; and secondly, the work’s engagement with religious and philosophical content and symbolism has been reassessed. Many of the issues in its interpretation hinge on the relationship between book XI and the rest of the work, but also key to many of the overall interpretations has been the Cupid and Psyche episode, with its possibilities of its religious and/or philosophical interpretation.
In terms of the narrative structure, the application of seemingly complex narratological theory, at first rather overwhelming in its complexity, makes sense when the text’s own concern for narrative complexity, reliability, and the role of the narrator is noted. The hugely influential work of Jack Winkler (1985) and the exhaustive commentaries of the Groningen group both use narratological theory extensively in their interpretations. This kind of theory is, in simple terms, the recognition that the framing and method of telling of stories influences how readers approach them – how the narrator (Lucius, or any of the other embedded narrators, like the old woman in the Cupid and Psyche episode) is involved in the action, whether they are trustworthy, or influenced by their later experiences in the re-telling of the story, and so on. The question becomes more complex when we consider the process of reading and the reader’s partial knowledge: does our perspective on the narrative change retrospectively as we discover more about the narrator – does our realization that Lucius the narrator is now an Isiac devotee (after we have finished reading book XI) change how we re-read his retelling of his earlier adventures? Does our interpretation of the Cupid and Psyche story change when we see its themes mirrored in Lucius’ own fall and redemption?
In particular, the distance between the perspective of the narrator, Lucius, and the author, Apuleius, has been often debated. Two passages have been at the heart of this debate: the prologue, and the infamous ‘man from Madauros’ passage in book XI. Both passages pivot around the relationship between Lucius, the narrator, and the author: thus, the unnamed speaker in the prologue has been variously identified as Lucius, Apuleius, a combination of the two, an anonymous prologue-voice, or the voice of the book itself. At XI.27, the priest Arsinius Marcellus relates to Lucius that he was expected, as a dream had warned him that ‘the man from Madauros’ (the home town of Apuleius, but not of Lucius) would come to him for initiation. Various solutions for the puzzling slippage have been to emend the word out of the text; as a clever sphragis (‘seal’), or in-built acknowledgment of authorship; as a mark of the autobiographical seriousness of the Isiac initiation; or as a deliberately playful complication of the convention of the fictive first-person narrator, balancing the ambiguity of the prologue.
This is linked to the vexing question of the relationship between the eleventh book and the first ten. From the very outset, an eleventh book is unexpected: an ancient audience was used to the division of longer works into books, but generally in balanced and symmetrical ways. Epic tended to favour multiples of three (the Iliad and the Odyssey with 24, and the Aeneid with 12), and the Augustan poets, schemes in multiples of five (Ovid’s Metamorphoses has fifteen, for instance); even those Greek novels favouring a different schema are at least divided into an even number of books. Thus, from the outset, Apuleius seems to have meant his eleventh book to be a surprise.
What kind of surprise is it, though? Scholars have noted the similarity between Lucius’ waking on the beach at Cenchreae and praying to the rising moon and other accounts of serious personal conversion. The first fifteen chapters of book XI present the longest stretch of consistently elevated prose in the work, but this could be argued to either rule out or conversely, to highlight, irony.
The history of interpretation of the Metamorphoses as a serious allegorical moral tale is a surprisingly long one: starting with Fulgentius in the fifth or sixth century, and continuing into the Renaissance and even to modern readers, the whole novel has been interpreted as a cautionary moral tale. In this reading, Lucius’ initiation into Isis worship provides the serious key for deeper meanings of the seeming bawdiness of the preceding eleven books. Although this might seem far-fetched, the allegorical interpretation of apparently profane subject-matter was a common tool of the Middle Platonists from whom Apuleius developed his philosophical outlook; the suggestion of hidden, secret meaning is embedded in the narrative by Lucius’ own initiation into the hidden mysteries of the cult of Isis.
Several issues make this kind of reading problematic, however: while the embedded stories in the first three books, and the tale of Cupid and Psyche, can be read as part of an overall moralizing drive, it is more difficult to fit in the more loosely connected and generally more ribald tales of the last third of the novel into such a schema.
Rather than seeing his initiation into the mysteries as delivery from the disasters into which his curiosity has pitched him, it is possible to read his enthusiasm for his new cults as yet another trap which his credulity has led him into – we might question his uncritical acceptance of the new rites, his surprise when he has to undergo (and pay for) further initiations, the figure he cuts as a shaven-headed advocate in the forum (as a buffoon, in Winkler’s reading). Photius, writing about the original Greek Onos, Apuleius’ source-text, describes it as a satire on superstition and credulity: is this Apuleius’ new take on the original theme? Lucius’ stylistically elevated and rhetorically impassioned account of his Isiac conversion might, instead of sincere, be read as epideictic: a showing off of obscure religious knowledge in a sophistic manner, designed to entertain rather than to convert.
Lastly, increasing attention has been paid to the philosophical underpinnings of the novel; Apuleius presented himself (in his Apologia), and was known to both contemporaries and posterity, as a Platonic philosopher (as attested by a statue of him erected in Madauros, and the witness of St Augustine). The Cupid and Psyche tale shows clear dependence on Plato’s account of the soul in the Phaedrus (Metamorphoses V.24 and Phaedrus 248c), and the centrality of curiositas connects with Platonic themes, particularly as developed by the Platonist Plutarch (with whom Lucius claims kinship at I.2) in his work De curiositate. Platonic texture and allusions, however, do not mean that the work is necessarily philosophical. Again, the focus might be on the entertainment of literary games, with playful readings showing off erudition, rather than serious philosophy hidden in narrative form.
The last words on the interpretation of the Metamorphoses, however, can be given over to Jack Winkler, universally acknowledged as the most significant and influential interpreter of the text to date: in his words (Winkler 1985: 187), the Metamorphoses:
was originally written not to be a hermetically sealed monument, to be admired only from a respectful distance, but as an open text, one that encourages participation – real embarrassment, puzzlement, disgust, laughter, tentative closures of meaning and surprising entrapments, mental rewriting (‘Oh, he must mean …’), and physical rewriting.
The tale of Cupid and Psyche is the longest of the embedded narratives in the Metamorphoses, and is almost certainly an Apuleian addition. It is the only tale which takes place outside the recognizable everyday world of the Roman empire, and we are taken instead to a mythical, idealized Greek world. It sits within the overarching narrative as a story told by the robbers’ housekeeper, attempting to calm the grief of the kidnapped Charite, stolen away at the very point of her marriage. The whole tale can be summarized as follows.
Psyche (Greek for ‘soul’) is a princess so beautiful she is worshipped by the people as an earthly Venus (IV.28); jealous, the goddess herself orders her son Cupid (‘Desire’) to punish Psyche (IV.30–1). Despite her beauty, therefore, she is admired but never loved, and her parents, in despair, send to an oracle, where they are given the answer that she must be exposed on a mountain top, where she will be taken in marriage by a monster (IV.33–4). She is duly left on the mountain, but rather than the expected awful fate, she is conveyed by Zephyr (the personified god of the west wind) to a magnificent palace where she is waited on by invisible attendants (IV.35–5.3). An equally invisible bridegroom comes to her at night (V.3–4). Against the advice of her unseen lover, she invites her sisters to visit her, where their jealousy is excited by her good fortune (V.5–11). They attempt to convince her that her husband is actually a serpent, who intends to devour her, and urge her to kill him to protect herself (V.12–20).
Psyche, gullible (but also culpably curious), is convinced, and dagger and lamp in hand discovers her husband is not a serpent, but the incomparably handsome Cupid (V.21–2). A drop of oil from the lamp awakens (and wounds) him, and he flees, despite the fact that Psyche is now pregnant with his child. Psyche unsuccessfully tries to kill herself (V.24–5); she takes her vengeance on her sisters, who die by throwing themselves from a cliff, convinced that Cupid is going to take them on as his lover (V.26–7). Venus, taking the role of a scorned mother-in-law, now persecutes Psyche (V.28–6.10), setting her impossible tasks, which Psyche manages to complete with the help of other creatures (VI.10–15), and the final task, a descent to the underworld, she accomplishes with supernatural aid (VI.16–20). At the final moment, however, carrying back a casket from Proserpina to Venus, she again succumbs to her vice of curiosity and opens its lid (VI.21). By this time, Cupid has recovered from his wound and escaped the watch of his mother; he finds Psyche, restores the casket to Proserpina, and pleads for his love at the throne of Jupiter (VI.22). Venus is reconciled with Psyche, and the tale ends with a happy wedding feast amongst the gods, capped by the birth of a daughter to Cupid and Psyche, Voluptas (‘Pleasure’, VI.23–4).
Several attempts have been made to identify the internal structure of the tale; the fact that no one system has gained general acceptance suggests that there is no clear and obvious way of understanding its design. Given that the book divisions are Apuleius’ own, the tripartite structure based around them suggested by Zimmerman et al. (2004) is perhaps the most plausible:
A (IV.28–35): Introduction of the main characters, and the problems which lead to the drama of the tale.
B (V) Rise and fall of Psyche: her awakening as Cupid’s lover, and her fall due to over-curiosity.
C (VI.1–24) Trials of Psyche, leading to her reunion with Cupid.
Within this broader understanding, there are clear structural features within the tale; a key feature is the inclusion of ecphrases (artistic descriptive scenes; see pp. 24–27 below) at four pivotal points in the tale. The first, at IV.31, describes Venus’ departure to the sea: the splendour of her retinue contrast with the loneliness of Psyche. The second occurs at the opening of book V, where Cupid’s palace is explored by Psyche. The ecphrasis dramatizes the fact that Psyche has entered an entirely new world, and the gloomy end of book IV is reversed by the discovery of this wonderland. The third ecphrasis is Psyche’s discovery of the beauty of Cupid at V.22, the pivotal point of Psyche’s fall. Lastly, a fourth ecphrasis (VI.6) returns us to Venus, describing her ascent to Olympus. The overall structure is chiastic: Venus’ two different retinues, one of the sea and one of the sky, bookend two descriptions of wonder, seen through Psyche’s eyes. There are two more, minor ecphrases in the trials of Psyche which parallel each other: at VI.13, Venus gives an ecphrasis of the location of Psyche’s third task, and then at VI.14 we see it focalized through Psyche’s eyes. These descriptive scenes serve to give colour and charm to the tale, as well as provide it with structural balance and coherence.
Although the tale stands up perfectly well when removed from its surrounds, and has often been edited or translated as a stand-alone story, it has been carefully embedded within the larger narrative, and in many interpretations provides the key, or at least a significant piece of the puzzle, for an overarching interpretation of the novel as a whole. Walsh, in a much-quoted observation, notes that Apuleius ‘has here adopted the Alexandrian technique exploited by Callimachus in his Hecale and taken over by Catullus in his sixty-fourth poem; Cupid and Psyche is a story within a story, and designed to illuminate the larger whole’ (Walsh 1970: 190).
Embedding the tale across three books (a technique characteristic of Ovid in his Metamorphoses) secures and embeds it integrally within the work as a whole; moreover, the introduction of the tale by the old woman, sed ego te narrationibus lepidis anilibusque fabulis protinus avocabo (‘But come, now let me take your mind off your troubles: here’s a pretty fairy tale, an old woman’s story’), clearly echoes the prologue of the Metamorphoses: At ego tibi sermone isto Milesio varias fabulas conseram auresque tuas benivolas lepido susurro permulceam (‘Now what I propose in this Milesian discourse is to string together for you a series of different stories and to charm your ears, kind reader, with amusing gossip’; Kenney’s translation).
The analogy between the two stories is complex: Lucius, as a hearer of the Cupid and Psyche tale, does not realize its relevance and parallelism to his own situation until his salvation by Isis; equally, the reader of the Metamorphoses will not realize that there might be instruction beneath the ‘amusing gossip’ until that same point in Lucius’ retelling, his narration of his Isiac conversion.
The fable recapitulates the core elements of the story of Lucius: his transformation into an ass is the result, like Psyche’s troubles, of inordinate curiosity, and his transformation back into human form takes place after a series of misfortunes which echo Psyche’s trials. Resolution comes as a result of divine intervention, and Psyche’s journey to the Underworld and opening of a secret casket echo elements of the Eleusinian mysteries and thus prefigure Lucius’ mystic initiations into the Isis and Osiris cults in book XI. The central positioning of the tale within the Metamorphoses is significant: the tale itself sits in the middle of the first ten books, but Psyche’s katabasis, her descent to the underworld, is the centre of the whole work. This is partly a reference to the centrality of similar katabaseis in Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, it also points forwards to Lucius’ own katabasis in book XI, after which he is united to Isis, as Psyche is joined to Cupid.
On another level, the tale fits into a carefully interwoven complex of narratives and themes which binds together the disparate elements and characters of IV.23–VIII.14. The so-called ‘Charite-complex’, identified by Carl Schlam (see further reading), integrates three strands of the narrative in a delicate counterpoint: Charite and Tlepolemus, Cupid and Psyche, and the story of Lucius himself. The Cupid and Psyche tale echoes Charite’s own interrupted wedding, and prefigures her eventual liberation and successful marriage (though without the subsequent reversal of fortune that befalls both Lucius and Charite). Narratologically, the balance between the Charite’s back-story (told by Charite herself to the old woman) and the tale of Cupid and Psyche (told by the old woman to Charite), rests on a series of opposites: narrator and audience swap places, from opposite perspectives; young/old, rich/poor, real-life tragedy/mythic happily-ever-after fairytale. As a binding recurrent theme, a series of clever deceits tie the stories together: Psyche is deceived by her sisters, but in turn causes their deaths by a clever deceit of her own; Tlepolemus deceives the robbers by an Odyssean trick (getting them drunk), but is himself later undone, deceived by a rival, who himself, tricked by drugged wine, is exposed by Charite before her death.
While the tale is an Apuleian insertion into the Greek Onos, it is clearly not just an imaginative tour-de-force of the author’s creative powers; elements of the story clearly have predecessors, models and sources in earlier variants. Accounts of the tale (especially in the first half of the twentieth century) have attempted to find an exclusive source in folktale, myth or literature.
Certainly, the overall narrative seems to have connections with folklore: at the very beginning of modern research into folk traditions, the brothers Grimm noted the folkloric elements of Apuleius’ tale, and with the technical development of what is called the Finnish historical-geographical method, hundreds of parallel folk-stories could be found for Cupid and Psyche. Core motifs are the search for a lost husband, who initially appears as an animal or monster, and whose loss follows the violation of a taboo, and the fulfillment of impossible tasks set by a witch.
What is lacking from this account, however, is the importance of the figures of Cupid and Psyche themselves: the folklore parallels give us tales of anonymous or at least generic husbands and wives, rather than the Soul and Love personified, and while many motifs and elements are shared, the narrative as a whole is largely unparalleled. More serious criticisms have been levelled at the attempted scientific nature of folklore research in general, critiquing the attempts to look for origins for particular tale-types in some pure, non-elite, non-literary, historically unbroken oral tradition. In the most strident objection, folklore is itself a literary genre created in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, developed by writers drawing on written material of the Middle Ages and antiquity: in this view, traces of Cupid and Psyche in fairytales are just as likely to be dependent on the Apuleian tale as they are evidence for a pre-existing oral source.
Looking towards myth rather than folklore, suggestions that Apuleius was drawing on an earlier source are supported by the iconographic tradition of Cupid-and-Psyche as a pair, a representation which was popular from the sixth century BC onwards. When the oracle warns Psyche’s parents of her monstrous lover as ‘a creature of no mortal stock, but a cruel, wild, and fiery evil, who, flying above the sky, wearies all things, and cripples each with flame and iron, before whom Jupiter himself trembles’ (Met. IV.33; trans. in Schlam 1992), the mystery of her lover is only conventional: this imagery of Eros/Cupid is familiar both from literature and from art, and even expected after the introduction of our heroine as Psyche (at IV.30).
The iconography with which the audience would have been familiar depicted both Cupid and Psyche as winged creatures, part of a tradition which saw the soul figured as a butterfly, suggestive of the life of the soul after death. Often the relationship between the two characters represented Eros as a daemon who draws the soul towards the divine, and the embracing pair became ‘an enduring expression of the goal of reunion with the divine within man with God’ (Schlam 1992: 91). These representations were particularly common as funereal motifs on sarcophagi at the time of the Metamorphoses’ composition, as an emblem of the survival or salvation of the soul after death, and this theme clearly links into Isiac interpretations of the tale. But while this iconography is certainly part of what Apuleius is playing with, these images do not seem to have been attached to a particular narrative, certainly not one as complex as the tale we have here.
Over the top of whatever elements Apuleius has taken from myth or folklore are much more literary elements: foremost, the Platonic tradition of philosophical myth-making, but more playfully, borrowing elements from genres as diverse as epic, satire, and in particular, Alexandrian poetry. The literary texture is just as much part of Apuleius’ tale as any of the putative sources for it: thus Venus’ opening speech (IV.30) is reminiscent of Lucretian style, but is deliberately playing on Virgil’s Juno, particularly her first speech at Aeneid I.34–49, already parodied by Ovid in his Metamorphoses (III.262–72). The sisters’ description of the snake is another Virgilian pastiche (see notes on V.26, and below); the most extended play with the Aeneid is in Psyche’s katabasis, which is ‘virtually a mosaic of Virgilian phrases’ (Walsh 1970: 57). This kind of intellectual game-playing is part of the competitive literary culture which formed Apuleius’ cultural backdrop, and while an audience does not need to recognize an intertextual allusion to understand the story, often it adds an extra level of characterization, emotion or wit to the narrative.
There have been readings of the tale which see in it quite specific Isiac resonances, and incorporate the tale into an overall interpretation of the work as serious Isiac propaganda: a 1953 article by a German scholar, Reinhold Merkelbach, stands at the head of this tradition (‘Eros und Psyche’, Philologus 102 (1953): 103–16). Although his reading is not the mainstream one, it still has adherents in more recent scholarship. Merkelbach notes that Isis has both transcendent and narrative mythic forms: the former as the personified hand of fortune, and the latter as the itinerant goddess, searching for the dismembered parts of Osiris; thus, the heavenly Venus represents the first aspect, and the wandering Psyche the second.
More influential and convincing a reading, however, is based on the known philosophical leanings of Apuleius. It is the tale of Cupid and Psyche more than any other part of the Metamorphoses which has given rise to Platonic readings of the work. Kenney (1990) has noted the influence of the discussion of love in Plato’s Symposium: in this work, Venus and Eros (i.e. Cupid) are discussed as each having a heavenly and an earthly form (Venus Urania and Venus Pandemos, with Erotes to match): one for the love of souls, the other for love of bodies (180d–181b). Apuleius himself paraphrased the work in his Apologia (12), and the argument runs that the fable dramatizes the conflict between earthly Venus and heavenly Eros, and thus is an allegory of the competition between, and the victory of, spiritual love (the love of virtue) over physical lust. Mark Edwards (‘The Tale of Cupid and Psyche’, ZPE 94 (1992): 77–94) gives a detailed account of parallels to Apuleius’ story in Neo-Platonist, Gnostic and eastern mythic traditions, and shows how such complex allegorical story-telling was part and parcel of the spiritual and intellectual milieu of the second century. Even if we do not read the tale as straightforward, serious, philosophical mythic allegory, therefore, it seems more than likely that Apuleius deliberately plays with features of this kind of writing. As so often in the Metamorphoses, whether Apuleius is sermonizing or jesting is difficult to tell.
It can never be far from the reader’s mind that Apuleius was trained and practised as an orator and professional rhetorician. His writing is constructed with an ear for its effect when read aloud, for the delight in the sounds and the images created by them: it strikes the reader as exuberant, over-the-top, showy, and intricate. It used to be common to refer to Latin of the first century BC as ‘golden’ and that of the first century AD as ‘silver’ (being inferior); and, following this pattern, it was a common literary judgment to see both Latin and Greek literature of the later empire as degenerate, derivative and second-rate. More recently, however, critical scholarship has been more positive in its assessment, underscoring the creativity, playfulness, and complexity of imperial literature; Apuleius has benefitted from a serious reconsideration of his literary value during the last few decades.
The key features of Apuleius’ language are ‘exuberance and richness’ (Kenney 1990a: 29): you will notice that reading and translating Apuleius is quite a different experience to reading and translating Caesar, Cicero, Tacitus, or the other prose authors you may have studied up to this point. With Apuleius, it is worthwhile, once you have got over the initial hurdle of unpicking the syntax and vocabulary, to go back over the sentence, paragraph or passage (whether it be a speech, narrative description, or other set-piece) and read it out aloud. The characteristic features of Apuleius you might be able to spot occur on a number of levels within the text:
•Vocabulary: hugely varied, with frequent poetic usages, archaisms, neologisms (often formed from poetic or archaic forms), or words used in unfamiliar or unusual senses, and diminutives.
•Sentence structure: tends to be paratactic rather than hypotactic; that is, independent clauses (often balanced in contrast or parallelism) rather than strings of subordinate clauses. Apuleius is also much given to different kinds of repetition: pleonasm, variation and amplification. In both of these habits, Apuleius should be more reader- and translator-friendly than many classical authors (like Cicero, Livy or Tacitus, all of whom tend to more complex periodic construction).
•Attention to sound: Apuleius frequently uses alliteration and assonance to adorn his sentences. Importantly, he is also one of most attentive authors to prose rhythm – the use of metrical formulae (like you may be familiar with in poetry), particularly to mark the conclusion of sentences (called clausulae).
•Topoi (literary commonplaces): you will find a large number of set rhetorical pieces; often these are straightforwardly in the form of formal speeches, but also, for example, in ornate descriptive passages (ecphrases).
•Allusion and intertextuality: Apuleius is often consciously and deliberately playing with a rich literary tradition. An audience does not need to be highly-educated and intimately familiar with the Latin literary tradition to appreciate the Metamorphoses, but without such knowledge they will miss a large number of jokes, ironies, wry comparisons, and general literary play.
From at least the classical period, Roman authors were clearly conscious of the aural effect created by patterns of heavy and light syllables in formal spoken prose. Cicero records that a particularly apt rhythm could bring about spontaneous applause (Or. 214), and his use of different rhythmical patterns set the standard for later authors. Part of this tradition is based on Greek models and theories of prose-rhythm, but Latin developed its distinctive tradition and style. In particular, the ends of sentences, called clausulae, were the focus for judicious use of sonorous patterns; partly for purely aesthetic reasons, but undoubtedly also for practical purposes: in a tradition where literature was still fundamentally meant to be read aloud, but in which scribal convention did not often show sense divisions in sentences, or even divisions between words, rhythmical markers for the ends of periods or cola (natural sense breaks within sentences) were useful in complex sentences.
It is important to note that the patterns are quantitative, rather than (as is common in English poetry or prose) stress-based – i.e. they are based on length of syllables (heavy or light, marked – and ∪ respectively, or x where a syllable can be long or short), rather than emphasized syllables within words; so neither word-accent nor word-division make a difference to the use of these rhythms. As in verse, elision is taken into account: a vowel ending a word, if followed by one starting with a vowel, is not pronounced – so totisque illis in the first section from the set text would have been pronounced totisqu~illis with four syllables.
The basic clausula patterns preferred by Cicero are the ditrochee (– ∪ – x), especially with a preceding cretic (– ∪ – | – ∪ – x), the double cretic (– ∪ – | – ∪ x), and the cretic followed by either a trochee or a spondee (– ∪ – | – x). These patterns can also be varied by resolution – the replacement of a long syllable by two short syllables. The pattern of ēssĕ vĭdĕātūr (a resolved version of the third form above) even became such a trademark of Cicero’s that later writers avoided it unless deliberately trying to evoke Cicero.
Apuleius, as a rhetorician, and as an author distinctly conscious of his literary heritage, is remarkably consistent in his usage of these clausulae: depending on the method of counting used, up to 92.5 per cent of Apuleius’ sentences end in a recognized rhythm; another analysis suggests that Apuleius follows Ciceronian principles just under 70 per cent of the time (Kenney 1990a: 31). A sense of prose-rhythm is clearly also present in the careful manipulation of the lengths of clauses (in terms of number of syllables); clauses can build to a climax with ascending numbers of syllables, or be balanced in equal lengths; the best example in the current selection is in V.21: festinat, differt; audet, trepidat; diffidit, irascitur (see note in commentary). Whilst prose-rhythm analysis doesn’t often tend to make for the same examination-ready commentary notes as other rhetorical features, it is important nonetheless to keep in mind that throughout the composition of the Metamorphoses, the aural effect of the prose was consistently one of Apuleius’ fundamental considerations.
Particular instances of the stylistic elements already discussed are picked out in the commentary, but it is worth examining in detail a few passages from the selection which are particularly indicative of the concerns of the sophistic style in which Apuleius writes, and which exemplify his own mastery of these techniques.
Ecphrasis (sometimes written ekphrasis) is the vivid literary depiction of a work of art, developed as a set-piece designed to show off rhetorical skill. At the root of the tradition is the lengthy, detailed description of Achilles’ shield in Iliad XVIII, famously echoed by Virgil in his description of Aeneas’ shield in Aeneid VIII. The technique reached the peak of its popularity amongst the authors of the Second Sophistic, when whole works were comprised solely of ecphrases of fictional artworks.
As we noted above on the structure of the tale of Cupid and Psyche, four key ecphrases mark out significant turning points in the tale, including one in the selection covered by this commentary, the description of the sleeping Cupid at V.22: ‘the living god is treated as a work of art’ (Kenney 1990 ad loc.). The ecphrasis is introduced by the illumination of Psyche’s lamp:
Sed cum primum luminis oblatione tori secreta claruerunt, videt omnium ferarum mitissimam dulcissimamque bestiam, ipsum illum Cupidinem formonsum deum formonse cubantem, cuius aspectu lucernae quoque lumen hilaratum increbruit et acuminis sacrilegi novaculam paenitebat.
But as soon as the lamp was raised on high, the mysteries of her bed shone forth: she saw the gentlest and sweetest of all wild creatures, that very Cupid himself, a beautiful god beautifully lying. At his appearance the cheerful light of the lamp burned higher [or the lamp’s eyes lit up cheerfully] and the dagger repented its sacrilegious edge.
(Trans. Tatum 1979: 152, lightly adapted)
The use of vocabulary is typically Apuleian; oblatio is a technical legal term for presenting evidence or offering bail, and is introduced into literary prose by Apuleius. The adjective formo(n)sus is very rare: attested only before the Metamorphoses in a poem by Propertius (II.3.17) and in the technical writer Quintilian (Inst. Or. VIII.3.10). It is possible that Apuleius is deliberately playing with this reference to Propertius, who uses the word in describing the beauty of Cynthia, a passage which bears other similarities to this one. The clever use of lumen in both its literal sense of ‘light’ but also in the poetic sense to stand for ‘eye’ underscores the personification of the lamp. This personification looks forward to the apostrophe of V.23, and adds vividness to the scene, in which light, colour and the visual are central.
Most notable in reading the passage, however, is the overwhelming alliteration of liquid consonants (l, m, n, r) at the beginning, shifting to c and t sounds in the second half of the sentence, along with the assonance of i and u. The sounds echo and draw attention to the object in the middle of the sentence, ipsum illum Cupidinem, the first time Psyche’s lover is explicitly identified in the text (although the astute reader should already have guessed). Further considering the effect on the ear, the sentence finishes on one of the most recognizably Cicerion clausulae, a ditrochee (– ∪ – x) with a preceding cretic (– ∪ –): novācŭlūm pnĭtēbāt.
The oxymoronic juxtaposition of omnium ferarum mitissimam dulcissimamque bestiam, underscored by the double superlatives, emphasizes her surprise, but also plays with the literary tradition of Cupid and the epithets which he was often given in poetry. The polyptoton of formonsum deum formonse cubantem is striking, particularly as formo(n)sus is a very rare word before Apuleius. This kind of repetition is common in Latin poetry, especially Virgil and Lucretius, but also owes something to Greek literary background, especially over-the-top ‘Gorgianic’ rhetoric (named after Gorgias of Leontini, famous for privileging style over substance). The literary allusions go further, however, and there is likely a Homeric play here: the echo of a recurring phrase, κεῖτο μέγας μεγαλωστί (‘he lay great in his greatness’, Il. 16.776, 18.26–7, Od. 24.39–40) lends epic awe to the scene.
The ecphrasis proper which follows is marked out (as also the one at V.1) with the leading verb videt, and accords with typical rhetorical practice by starting at Cupid’s head and working downwards:
Videt capitis aurei genialem caesariem ambrosia temulentam, cervices lacteas genasque purpureas pererrantes crinium globos decoriter impeditos, alios antependulos, alios retropendulos, quorum splendore nimio fulgurante iam et ipsum lumen lucernae vacillabat; per umeros volatilis dei pinnae roscidae micanti flore candicant et quamvis alis quiescentibus extimae plumulae tenellae ac delicatae tremule resultantes inquieta lasciviunt.
She saw a rich head of golden hair dripping with ambrosia, a milk-white neck, and rosy cheeks over which there strayed coils of hair becomingly arranged, some hanging in front, some behind, shining with such extreme brilliance that the lamplight itself flickered uncertainly. On the shoulders of the flying god there sparkled wings, dewy-white with glistening sheen, and though they were at rest the soft delicate down at their edges quivered and rippled in incessant play.
(Trans. Kenney 2004)
The emphasis on words of light and colour is clear; with decoriter impeditos we get a sense of artful disorder; the vocabulary is full of Apuleian coinages: both antependulos and retropendulos, for instance. The last sentence quoted here (the ecphrasis continues for a few lines more) is replete with sensuous alliteration of l, especially in the diminutives plumulae tenellae. The overall effect of the ecphrasis is the representation of a luminous image into equally luminous prose: the visual is echoed and translated into the aural.
The complexity of Apuleius’ relationship with the Latin literary canon can be illustrated by the way Psyche’s relationship with her sisters is woven throughout with literary allusions. When Psyche is hesitating whether to attack her lover (V.21), she recalls heroines from Ovid; the military language of the sisters reminds us of Caesar; the sisters’ threats about being buried in a beast seem Lucretian. But it is the subtle and recurring connections between Psyche’s sisters and Virgil’s Aeneid, especially its account of the fall of Troy in Book II, which contribute the most to the overall characterization of the relationship. The different layers of intertextuality are overlapping, sometimes crystal clear, sometimes speculative; some resonances might be accidental, or deliberate only insofar as they show off how well-read Apuleius is, but many are clearly meant to recall the source-text and add extra depth to the scene or the character.
When the sisters first try to convince Psyche that her husband is in fact a monster, their speech is introduced with an indication of their falsehood: lacrimisque pressura palpebrum coactis (‘with tears forced by rubbing their eyelids’). These ‘forced tears’ recall Aeneid II.195–6: talibus insidiis periurique arte Sinonis | credita res, captique dolis lacrimisque coactis (‘with such a snare and the oath-breaking art of Sinon the thing was believed, and we were captured by his trickery and forced tears’), where Sinon, the Greek liar, tricks the Trojans into accepting the famous Trojan horse and thus bringing about their own downfall. This is the only other place in Latin literature where the phrase lacrimis coactis carries the same meaning; Apuleius has tricked out the phrase more fulsomely with the typically alliterative pressura palpebrum, but the underlying themes of deceptiveness gives a sense of epic scale to Psyche’s foreshadowed disaster.
The (fictional) serpent which the sisters go on to describe is almost a Virgilian pastiche (e.g. Aeneid II.381, Georgics III.421 and 430–1, and IV.458) but echoes most closely the description of the snake which kill Laocoön and his two sons in Aeneid II (ll. 206ff). These snakes and the death of Laocoön are interpreted as an omen that the Trojan horse should be received into the city; Laocoön had warned against it and even struck the horse – but of course, it is a deliberate false omen, designed to trap the Trojans. In the same way, the sister’s advice is deliberately deceptive.
Lastly, when the sisters overcome Psyche’s resistance to their scheme, their victory is figured in language reminiscent of the Greeks taking Troy:
tunc nanctae iam portis patentibus nudatum sororis animum facinerosae mulieres, omissis tectae machinae latibulis, destrictis gladiis fraudium simplicis puellae paventes cogitationes invadunt.
(Met. V.19)
At the moment when these wicked women have occupied their sister’s mind, defenceless, its gates thrown open, with their covered siege engine left behind, swords of treachery unsheathed, they invade the fearful thoughts of the guileless girl.
invadunt urbem somno vinoque sepultam;
caeduntur vigiles, portisque patentibus omnis
accipiunt socios atque agmina conscia iungunt.
(Aeneid II.265–7)
They invade the city buried in sleep and wine, and the guards are cut down, and with the gates thrown open they let in all their comrades and join together their ranks as accomplices.
In addition to the verbal resonances picked out here, the phrase tectae machinae latibulis picks up the Trojan horse, referred to as a machina several times in the Aeneid (II.46, 151 and 237), and as latebrae twice, at II.38, 55. (The seriousness of the situation is possibly picked up by the heavily spondaic clausula, a cretic + dispondee: cogitātĭōn|ēs īnvādūnt. This kind of interpretation of clausulae is notoriously fickle, however!)
Thus we see, over several chapters of the Metamorphoses, a careful parallel built up, encouraging the audience through specific verbal references to equate the sisters with the treacherous Greeks of Virgil’s Aeneid; the intertext serves to foreshadow the action as well as characterize the sisters as underhanded, deceptive, and ultimately desctructive.
alliteration: repetition of consonant sounds.
anaphora: repetition of a word, especially at the beginning of successive clauses.
apostrophe: breaking out from narration to make a direct address.
asyndeton: lack of connective particles between clauses.
assonance: repetition of vowel sounds.
bathos: an effect of anticlimax, by dropping from elevated speech to colloquial or ridiculous.
chiasmus: inverted parallelism – i.e. any arrangement of words in a pattern of A-B-B-A (e.g. by part of speech, by case, by sound).
diminutive: a form of a noun denoting that it is a small or immature version; like the English ‘booklet’ or ‘piglet’ for small forms of book and pig.
homoioteleuton: similar endings, giving the effect of rhyme.
hypallage: transferring an element from what it agrees with in sense to another part of the sentence; also referred to as a transferred epithet. E.g the final verse of Adeste fideles reads: ‘Yea, Lord, we greet thee, born this happy morning’ – in sense, we are happy, rather than the morning.
hyperbaton: an inversion of the normal order of words, usually for emphasis.
hypotaxis: construction of periodic sentences using subordinate clauses.
isocolon: a succession of sentences or phrases of equal length.
juxtaposition: the placing of contrasting words or ideas next to each other.
makarismos: a topos, common in ancient religious contexts, of declaring someone or something blessed: the most well-known example being the ‘beatitudes’ from the Sermon on the Mount, with its list of ‘blessed are …’
neologism: a newly-invented word.
onomatopoeia: words which make the sound they describe, like ‘whirr’ or ‘buzz’.
oxymoron: a seeming contradiction in terms; literally ‘sharp-dull’ in Greek. E.g. festina lente, ‘hasten slowly’.
parataxis: constructing sentences by parallel clauses, rather than by subordination.
paronomasia: play on words, punning.
pleonasm: the use of more words than are necessary, usually for emphasis.
polyptoton: repetition of a word in multiple grammatical forms.
tetracolon: a series of four parallel clauses.
topos: a traditional or formulaic theme or element in literature.
tricolon: a combination of three parallel clauses, often building up to a significant, emphasized third element.
zeugma: Also known as syllepsis; where a single word or phrase is used with two other parts of a sentence, but must be understood differently in relation to each. The Flanders and Swan music-hall song ‘Have Some Madeira, M’Dear’ is an education in zeugma; for example, ‘by raising her glass, her courage, her eyes, and his hopes’.
The text of the Metamorphoses depends on a single source, an eleventh-century manuscript held at Florence, catalogued as Laurentianus 68.2, known as F; all other extant copies derive from this single survival, although some copies were clearly made when F when was in a better condition than it is now, and where wear and tear have defaced the reading, we can often supply the deficiency from these copies. Emendations to the text have therefore been made by editors on the basis of difficulties with the Latin rather than conflicting witnesses. I have not provided an apparatus criticus with this text, as being unnecessary for the purposes of a school text, but I have generally followed the text printed by Purser (1913; easily available at www.thelatinlibrary.com), with some adaptations on the basis of comment either in Kenney (1990a) or Zimmerman et al. (2004).
I will attempt to give here a (necessarily rather subjective) selection of the texts which would be most useful for a teacher preparing the text to consult, and which a particularly interested and capable student might be directed towards for extension. Full bibliographical references are given at the end. The most important further reading is to read the rest of the tale of Cupid and Psyche in translation, and ideally the whole of the Metamorphoses. There are several readily available good translations: the Penguin Classics version, Kenney (2004), is lively and readable, with an excellent brief introduction. The Loeb edition, with facing English and Latin, Hanson (1989), in two volumes, and the Oxford World Classics edition, Walsh (1994), are both also eminently accessible without sacrificing accuracy.
There are two excellent modern commentaries on Cupid and Psyche: the Cambridge ‘green and yellow’ commentary (although oddly not actually green and yellow, in this case) Kenney (1990a), has an extensive introduction (a fuller version than that in his Penguin translation), and brief but very useful notes. The magisterial volume on the tale of Cupid and Psyche in the Groningen Commentaries on Apuleius, by Zimmerman et al. (2004) is exhaustive in its treatment, including an English translation. Its cost, however, is prohibitive, unless you have access to a university library, and its depth is well beyond that needed even at undergraduate level. Surprisingly useful still is Purser’s 1910 commentary, available in reprint, which gives more help than Kenney at the appropriate level for sixth-form students.
For more general reading on Apuleius, Harrison (2000) provides an excellent overview and sets the Metamorphoses within the context of Apuleius’ wider oeuvre and his intellectual context. A broader outlook on Antonine literature, including a chapter by Kenney on Cupid and Psyche, is given by Russell (1990). The best single-volume studies on the Metamorphoses are Tatum (1979), Schlam (1992), both highly readable and accessible texts, and most influentially (though a more challenging read), Winkler (1985). For those interested in the literary allusiveness of Apuleius, Finkelpearl (1998) is outstanding. Walsh (1970) is useful for placing the Metamorphoses, and its genre as a novel, in the context of Roman literature more broadly.
Lastly, one area left untouched by this introduction has been the rich afterlife of the Metamorphoses, and the Cupid and Psyche episode in particular, in later literature and art. The field of classical reception is one growing in importance and visibility in the world of academic Classics, but quite apart from that, the story of later receptions of Apuleius is a fascinating one, with some particular interesting by-ways to tread, especially for those interested in Renaissance literature or art. There are two books from the last decade or so which provide excellent coverage of the field, Carver (2007) and Gaisser (2008); the overview of Cupid and Psyche in renaissance art in De Jong (1998) is also well worth perusing.
Carver, R.H.F. 2007. The Protean Ass: The Metamorphoses of Apuleius from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Oxford Classical Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Jong, J.L. 1998. ‘“Il Pittore a le Volte è pure Poeta”: Cupid and Psyche in Italian Renaissance Painting’, in M. Zimmerman, V. Hunink, et al. (eds.), Aspects of Apuleius’ Golden Ass. Volume II: Cupid and Psyche. Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 189–216.
Finkelpearl, E.D. 1998. Metamorphosis of Language in Apuleius: A Study of Allusion in the Novel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Gaisser, J.H. 2008. The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass: A Study in Transmission and Reception. Martin Classical Lectures. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hanson, J.A. (ed. and trans.) 1989. Apuleius: Metamorphoses. 2 Vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press.
Harrison, S.J. 2000. Apuleius: A Latin Sophist. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kenney, E.J. 1990. Cupid and Psyche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kenney, E.J. 2004. Apuleius: The Golden Ass. Introduction and translation. Revised ed.; first published 1998. London: Penguin.
Purser, L.C. 1910. The Story of Cupid and Psyche: as related by Apuleius. Edited, with introduction and notes. London: George Bell.
Purser, L.C. 1913. Apulei Psyche et Cupido. Scriptorum classicorum bibliotheca Riccardiana. London: Lee Warner.
Russell, D.A. (ed.) 1990. Antonine Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schlam, C.C. 1992. The Metamorphoses of Apuleius: On Making an Ass of Oneself. London: Duckworth.
Tatum, J. 1979. Apuleius and The Golden Ass. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Walsh, P.G. 1970. The Roman Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Walsh, P.G. 1994. The Golden Ass. Translation and introduction. Oxford: Clarendon.
Winkler, J.J. 1985. Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’s Golden Ass. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press.
Zimmerman, M., S. Panayotakis et al. 2004. Apuleius Madaurensis. Metamorphoses, Book IV 28–35, V and VI 1–24. The Tale of Cupid and Psyche. Text, Introduction and Commentary. Groningen Commentaries on Apuleius. Groningen: Egbert Forsten.