Previous Selves: Body and Narrative in Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses
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PREVIOUS SELVES: BODY AND NARRATIVE IN AELIUS ARISTIDES’ HIEROI LOGOI AND APULEIUS’ METAMORPHOSES A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ARTEMIS L BROD MAY 2016 © 2016 by Artemis Leah Brod. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/ks307yh0314 ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Susan Stephens, Primary Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Grant Parker, Co-Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Maud Gleason I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Andrea Nightingale Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost for Graduate Education This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives. iii Abstract Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses have historically achieved joint mention for their unique status as non-Christian accounts documenting a personal relationship to a god. I start with a different observation. These texts stage an encounter with the failure or refusal of one’s own body to function in its capacity as a vehicle for self-presentation – an especially important function to orators of the second century CE. Both texts explore the degree to which language can remake the narrator's fragmented world. Whereas Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi contribute to the orator’s healing process, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses uses the imagined animal body to demonstrate the elusive nature of constituting a whole self. Throughout his Hieroi Logoi, Aristides employs metaphors to solicit his audience’s participation in reconfiguring his relationship to his body and his god. Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, on the other hand, dramatizes a paradox: the protagonist, Lucius, achieves his goal of literary memorialization in the form of the book we hold, and yet the self that is on display is ultimately lost to the reader. iv Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Susan Stephens, without whose encouragement, support, and generous vision this dissertation would never have been undertaken, let alone completed. Professor Maud Gleason’s meticulous scholarship and vivid writing have been an inspiration. My heartfelt thanks to Professor Andrea Nightingale for her careful attention to every line of the dissertation. Thank you to Professor Grant Parker for first sparking my interest in Apuleius with a description of an incredible-sounding ancient witchcraft trial. Without Valerie Kiszka, Lori Lynn Taniguchi, and Lydia Hailu, I would be penniless and despondent. Thank you for your many feats of salvation. Thank you to my family for your love and humor to which I owe whatever imagination I have. Thank you to Molly, James, and Mae for providing a home away from home. Thank you to Federica for being my home inside our home. Also, you are my road map. v Table of Contents Introduction: The Poetics of Self-Presentation in the Second Century CE ............. 1 1. Narrating the Body .................................................................................................. 1 2. Recognition in the Hieroi Logoi and Metamorphoses .......................................... 10 4. The Body in Performance ..................................................................................... 17 5. Fragmentation in the Hieroi Logoi and Metamorphoses ..................................... 28 Part One: Illness and Divine Authority in Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi ............. 33 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................... 33 2. Approaches ............................................................................................................ 38 3. Establishing Divine Authority............................................................................... 43 4. The Sea .................................................................................................................. 52 5. Initiation ................................................................................................................ 55 6. Inscription ............................................................................................................. 62 Part Two: Bound to the Beyond. Magic and the Unreal in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses ............................................................................................................ 80 1. Introduction: The Framing Work of Magic in the Metamorphoses ...................... 80 2. Lucius in the Social World: Books 2-3 ................................................................113 3. Becoming Body .................................................................................................. 127 4. Slave Self ............................................................................................................ 138 5. Isis Book ............................................................................................................. 156 Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 162 Appendix: Outline of HL IV .................................................................................... 166 Bibliography .............................................................................................................. 169 vi Introduction: The Poetics of Self-Presentation in the Second Century CE 1. Narrating the Body Aelius Aristides and Apuleius were contemporaries.1 As orators of the second century CE, they lived at a time when the Emperor, Marcus Aurelius and his tutor, Fronto, were writing passionately to one another, not only about their mutual love, but also about their physical state and health. In one letter, for example, Fronto writes, “This is the third day that I have been troubled all night long with griping in the stomach and diarrhea. Last night, indeed, I suffered so much that I have not been able to go out, but am keeping my bed…”2 They lived at a time when Galen was treating patients publicly in more or less formal contests with other doctors, and performing dissections and vivisections on animals.3 As Judith Perkins explains, “Galen’s practice of his medical method was making visible the interior of the individual, opening space for an inner life—one that was not mental but physical…Galen’s method …allowed the body to be a signifier of internal depths.”4 In the previous century, as Catherine Edwards argues, the Stoic philosopher Seneca “[translated] the violent and spectacular into the internal world of 1 Apuleius was born in 125 CE and Aristides in 117 CE. Both died around 180 CE. The second century CE flourishing of Greek oratory is often referred to (via Flavius Philostratus) as the “second sophistic.” This oratory was a vibrant form of elite male self-fashioning under the Roman Empire and was marked by the strict usage of Attic Greek in epideictic speeches and the demonstration of paideia. On the second sophistic, see, Bowersock (1969), Anderson (1993), Schmitz (1997), Whitmarsh (2005). More recently Whitmarsh (2013) opts for “postclassical,” rather than “second sophistic,” in an effort to reorient scholarly attention to writers and texts that do not fit this paradigm of elite self-fashioning. On Apuleius as a figure of the second sophistic, see, Sandy (1997) and Harrison (2000). For an alternative perspective, see Bradley (2012), who suggests that the second sophistic is not real (13n.19). 2 Naber, 91. Trans., Haines. 3 Galen, On Anatomical Procedures. See Gleason (2009) on the performative aspects of Galen’s work. 4 Cf. Perkins (1994) “Galen’s practice of his medical method was making visible the interior of the individual, opening space for an inner life—one that was not mental, but physical” (154); “The entire structure of the Prognosis … functioned to offer the body as an object of knowledge” (155). 1 writer and reader.”5 According to Edwards, he did so by making “the body an arena in which bravery can be exercised, displayed, and observed.”6 They lived at a time, in other words, when the body was becoming an exposed and explored interiority.7 Bodily afflictions among the elite, moreover, were not merely suffered in this period, they were documented, communicated, and performed. Oratory provided the means for a different kind of bodily exposure. Whereas in the Stoicism of Seneca, the body was a staging ground for ethical struggle, in sophistic oratory, the body on stage was a presentation of the self as an integral whole: a real, Greek speaking