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Fifth International Conference on the Ancient Novel Houston, Texas September 30–October 4, 2015

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Fifth International Conference on the Ancient Novel Houston, Texas September 30–October 4, 2015 1 Fifth International Conference on the Ancient Novel Houston, Texas September 30–October 4, 2015 Abstracts Adkins, Evelyn Discourse and Power: Lucius and Milo in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses Speech, gesture, and other types of discourse such as silence and written text are tools of self- presentation as well as media for negotiating social relationships of status and power. In this paper, I examine the mechanisms of these negotiations in the fictional world of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, focusing on the protagonist Lucius’ discursive self-fashioning in Books 1–3. Recent work on the ancient novel has examined the importance of speech, especially rhetorical speech, as one mode of characterization (Van Mal-Maeder 2001, De Temmerman 2014a & b; see also Harrison, forthcoming), while studies of the Second Sophistic have emphasized the importance of public performance and social networks in the self-definition of individuals and groups (Gleason 1995, Whitmarsh 2011, Eshleman 2012). Yet negotiations of power and identity may occur not only in public, rhetorical contexts, but also in private exchanges between individuals. Drawing on Laird’s discussions of the representation of speech and power in Latin literature (1990, 1999), I investigate Lucius’ fluid negotiations of identity and status during his private interactions with others in the opening books of the Metamorphoses. In his conversations with the strangers on the road to Hypata and his host Milo, Lucius seeks to present himself verbally as a member of the elite and an aspiring intellectual. Yet he undermines this image through his own words and actions, revealing an excessive curiosity about magic and a verbal and physical passivity that belie his claims to elite status and prefigure his metamorphosis into a speechless, enslaved animal. From the beginning of the novel, Lucius attempts to fashion his identity as a philosopher through speech. On the road to Hypata, he delivers a monologue to two travelers on why one should believe the unbelievable. He gives as a didactic example his own experiences choking on a bite of food during an eating contest, but seeing a street performer swallow a sword and spear near the Stoa Poikile (1.3–4). Though he couches his tale in pseudo-philosophical language, it paints him not as an intellectual, but as possessing a low curiosity for spectacles and the gluttonous tendencies of a parasite. This dissonance between Lucius’ attempts at elevated self-fashioning and their ultimate failure is even more apparent in Milo’s house. The characterization of Lucius and Milo draws on the traditions of Roman comedy, with Milo as the miserly host and Lucius as the frustrated parasite (May 2006, Keulen 2007). The implications of this, however, are social as well as literary. Lucius and Milo’s interactions are battles more than social exchanges, as Milo dominates Lucius physically and verbally. Milo greets Lucius as a high status guest, but seats him in his wife’s place at the foot of his couch, putting him in a socially inferior position. When Lucius hesitates, Milo pulls him down (1.23). Three more times, Milo physically moves Lucius, each time described by the phrase iniecta manu or iniecta dextera (1.26, 3.10, 3.12). This technical, legal term went out 2 of use long before Apuleius’ time (legis actio per manus iniectionem, Summers 1967). Apuleius uses it throughout the novel as an element of his own educated self-fashioning, but here it highlights Milo’s assertions of physical control. Milo also dominates Lucius verbally: during their first conversation, his overwhelming garrulity leaves Lucius stuttering, deprived of supper and sleep (1.26). Their second encounter leaves Lucius completely silent, now lacking dinner and sex as Milo delays his rendezvous with Photis, whom he plans to seduce to gain access to the world of magic (2.15). Milo and Lucius’ interactions are a negotiation of their social identities and positions relative to one another. Each encounter is a battle for social control, all of which Milo wins in ways inappropriate to both of their elite statuses. Lucius’ silent acceptance of Milo’s physical and verbal dominance reveals a passivity and lack of agency that clashes with his supposedly high status. His inability to control his voice, body, and appetites for food, sex, and magic point to the even greater loss of status and agency he will experience with his transformation into an ass. Bibliography: De Temmerman, K. 2014a. “Characterization in the Ancient Novel.” In E. Cueva & S. Byrne (eds.), A Companion to the Ancient Novel. Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World. Malden, MA, & Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 231–243. De Temmerman, K. 2014b. Crafting Characters: Heroes and Heroines in the Ancient Greek Novel. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Eshleman, K. 2012. The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire: Sophists, Philosophers, and Christians. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Gleason, M. 1995. Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Harrison, S. (ed.). Forthcoming. Characterisation in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Keulen, W. 2007. Apuleius Madaurensis: Metamorphoses Book I. Text, Introduction, and Commentary. Groningen Commentaries on Apuleius. Groningen, Egbert Forsten. Laird, A. 1990. “Person, ‘Persona,’ and Representation in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses.” MD 25, 129–164. Laird, A. 1999. Powers of Expression, Expressions of Power: Speech Presentation and Latin Literature. Oxford, Oxford University Press. May, R. 2006. Apuleius and Drama: The Ass on Stage. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Summers, R. G. 1967. A Legal Commentary on the Metamorphoses of Apuleius. Diss., Princeton University. Van Mal-Maeder, D. 2007. La fiction des déclamations. Mnemosyne Supplementa 290. Leiden & Boston, Brill. Whitmarsh, T. 2011. Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Andreadakis, Zacharias The Concept of Anxiety in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way, has learned the ultimate. 3 (Kierkegaard 2014, 187) Among the families of terms in Apuleius’ vocabulary that have come to have a prominent position in the study of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, one which has escaped notice of contemporary scholarship is that of angor, “anxiety”, together with its various cognates. Although this group of words is quite prominent in Apuleius’ novel, in which the words angor, anxius, anxia and anxie occur no less than sixteen times,1 the cluster does not—on the surface—present any particular grounds for digging any deeper with a philological or exegetical shovel. The interpretation of anxiety both in this text and many others throughout the classical tradition has been rather conclusively standardized in lexical entries as a word that denotes either physical or mental distress. A passing reading of the Metamorphosis reveals that nearly all of Apuleius’ uses of the term appear to comply perfectly with the standard concepts and translations of anxiety—and as a result provide no interesting research cases. For instance, and to give only one of many examples, when Apuleius uses the expression misella flens cum hesternis testibus introrumpit anxia in 2.26, to mean that the young wife enters to find her lover dead, anxia can be neatly translated as “worried” or “mentally distressed” without much trouble. The same would be true for 2.5, 3.11, 3.19 and several other cases of the word. Not all of Apuleius’ uses of anxiety abide by this paradigm, however. Upon closer inspection, in fact, the adjective anxius seems to undermine that very same paradigm whenever it refers to Lucius, the novel’s narrator. In wake of Winkler’s research, the reader of this novel needs to be on high alert in dealing with matters of self-reference in the novel, since it is at these moments in particular that the author tends to introduce an interpretatively stimulating interplay between narrator (auctor) and narrative agent (actor).2 As this study will demonstrate, anxius represents a self-referential marker that changes the way a reader understand self-reference in the entire novel. Far from being just another word in the Apuleian metaliterary artillery, in fact, anxius is a term with some serious firepower. And it is for that reason that this study is devoted solely to the understanding of the word. Comprehending the semantics of anxius in the Metamorphoses, one of the most complex mélanges of ancient fiction, promises to be helpful in at least three ways. First, it will provide a new key for re-interpreting a notion of paramount significance in Apuleius, curiositas, arguing that anxius should be taken, in all but one cases, as a synonym for curiosus. Moreover, and as a logical consequence, a new study of anxiety as curiosity can facilitate a more stable and coherent interpretation of Lucius’ thorny “religious conversion” story in the final, and most controversial book of the Metamorphoses, Book XI, as an outright mockery of transformation. Finally, and perhaps most heretically, it may provide a very plausible conjecture for the initial inception of the modern 19th-century philosophical movement of existentialism, exemplified through Kierkegaard’s existentialist manifesto, The Concept of Anxiety, along with a thorough overview of Kierkegaard’s overall close readings of Apuleius’, as manifested through his newly-published personal diaries, notebooks, and newly re-edited classic, the Sickness Unto Death.3 1 For the noun, angor, cf. Ap. Met. 3.11 (angorem animi repelle); 3.19 (quo me tantis angoribus implicasti). For the adjective, anxius, cf. 2.1; 8.25; 9.12; 9.17; 11.20. For the adjective, anxia, cf. 1.7; 2.5; 2.26; 5.12; 6.2. For the adjective anxium, cf. 11.21 (anxium animum). For the adverb anxie, cf. 2.25; 8.25; 11.23. 2 Winkler 1985, esp. 12–20. 3 See Hannay 2014; Hannay 2008. See also the new and superior online Danish edition of Kierkegaard titled Søren Κierkegaards Skrifter (henceforth SKS), found at http://sks.dk/forside/indhold.asp.
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