Literature and Identity in The Golden Ass of Apuleius Literature and Identity in The Golden Ass of Apuleius Luca Graverini Translated from the Italian by Benjamin Todd Lee The Ohio State University Press • Columbus Copyright © 2007 by Pacini Editore S.p.A. All rights reserved. English translation published 2012 by The Ohio State University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Graverini, Luca. [Metamorfosi di Apuleio. English] Literature and identity in The Golden Ass of Apuleius / Luca Graverini ; translated by Benjamin Todd Lee. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1191-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8142-1191-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8142-9292-1 (cd-rom) 1. Apuleius. Metamorphoses. 2. Latin fiction—History and criticism. I. Lee, Benjamin Todd. II. Title. PA6217.G7313 2012 873'.01—dc23 2012004578 Cover design by Jerry Dorris, AuthorSupport.com Type set in Adobe Garamond Pro Text design by Juliet Williams Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na- tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 contents Translator’s Note vii Author’s Note to the English Translation ix Preface and Acknowledgments xi Chapter 1 • A Sweet Poetics 1 1.1 “But I . ” 2 1.2 The ass and the cicada 10 1.3 A sweet and misleading whisper 12 1.4 Between philosophy and entertainment: Astonishment (ut mireris) 36 1.5 The poetics of the novel 38 1.6 Lucius of Patrae and Aristides of Miletus 42 Chapter 2 • Old Wives’ Tales and Servile Pleasures 51 2.1 Entertainment, initiation, aporia, and satire 52 2.2 Dissonances 57 2.3 Greedy priests 69 2.4 Isis and her sisters 75 2.5 Lucius’ shaven head 82 2.6 Horizons of expectation 89 2.7 An old wives’ tale (anilis fabula) 95 2.8 Paradox, satire, and levels of reading 118 2.9 Lucius, before and after 131 vi CONTENTS Chapter 3 • Metamorphoses of Genres 133 3.1 Philosophers on the road 134 3.2 Eyes and ears as criteria for truth 141 3.3 Lucius and his Sirens 146 3.4 Readers, listeners, and spectators 154 Chapter 4 • Greece, Rome, Africa 165 4.1 On the road with Lucius 166 4.2 The reputation of Corinth 169 4.3 Romanization 175 4.4 Romanocentrism 179 4.5 The readership of the novel 198 4.6 Between Rome and the provinces 200 Bibliography 209 Index locorum 228 General Index 236 translator’s note I volunteered to translate this book because, as a classicist interested in Apuleius, I found it to be one of the most useful and stimulating pieces of Apuleian scholarship I had come across in years. Above all it synthesizes and makes reference to many European studies of Apuleius that are not always easily accessible to the American reader. I hope this translation will help nar- row the gap between European and American studies of Apuleius. I have tried to give a lucid approximation of Graverini’s text, but many Italian idioms do not have precise equivalents in English. The relative pov- erty of my own prose style must be held responsible if the translation pre- sented here turns out, in some places, to be less elegant than the original. Nevertheless, I will be happy if the reader will be able to understand what the author meant in the Italian. All translations of Greek and Latin passages come from the Loeb series, except the following: • Greek novels, which come from the collection edited by Reardon 1989 • Apuleius’ rhetorical works (Apologia, Florida, De deo Socratis), which come from Harrison-Hilton-Hunink 2001 Other sources of translations are mentioned when I use them. Minor changes have been introduced to all these translations when necessary. Translations of ancient works that are not included in the Loeb series or in the collections cited above are my own, unless otherwise indicated in the text. Lastly, I would like to thank Christopher Trinacty and Victoria Neuman for their help editing and proofreading this book. Any errors that remain vii viii TRANslator’S NOTE are solely my responsibility. I would also like to thank Eugene O’Connor and Marian Rogers for their help with the formidable task of editing and formatting the manuscript. Benjamin Todd Lee Oberlin, March 2012 author’s note to the english translation There is no rest, it seems, for Apuleian scholarship, and indeed this wide- spread interest testifies to the appeal of studying the Metamorphoses. In the few years since the original publication of this volume, several important monographs and journal papers have appeared, and even more are expected in the near future. Besides all these published and forthcoming studies, more occasions for illuminating discussions with several colleagues have been pro- vided by several conferences on the ancient novel—let me mention only two recent ones here: Apuleius and Africa, held at Oberlin College in April–May 2010 and organized by the translator of this volume, with some help by the author and other distinguished colleagues; and ISIS: The Religious Ending of the Golden Ass, organized in Rostock in November 2008 by Wytse Keulen, the proceedings of which have been published as volume 3 of Aspects of Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (AAGA 2012). Equally invaluable have been the meetings of the team that is producing the next Groningen commentary on the last book of the Metamorphoses; I have greatly enjoyed the opportunity to discuss different views on the novel with learned friends and colleagues like Wytse Keulen, Stephen Harrison, Lara Nicolini, Stelios Panayotakis, Danielle van Mal-Maeder, Ulrike Egelhaaf-Gaiser, Stefan Tilg, Friedeman Drews, and Warren Smith. I am also most grateful to Roberto Nicolai for the instructive and helpful conversations we had when we met in Cordoba (Argentina) for a double event (both the Curso de posgrado Apuleyo y la novella antigua and II Jornadas Internacionales de Estudios Clasicos), which was organized by Marcos Carmignani, Guillermo De Santis, and Gustavo Veneciano, the editors of the journal Ordia Prima. And so it seems that a great deal has happened in a short time. Nev- ertheless, though I could not abstain from some very small changes and ix x AUTHOr’S NOTE TO THE ENGLISH TRANslatioN additions, I limited myself to a bare minimum; I have already confessed to being pervicax pertinax in the introduction to the original Italian edition, so I think it will be no surprise that my positions have not changed after only five years. On the contrary, I have even tried to restate them with further support in a few papers that the reader might find of interest; these are cited in the bibliography as Graverini 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2013a and b. Of course, nobody is ever going to have the final word on the interpretation of the Metamorphoses (or, indeed, of any first-rate literary work), and this book is certainly not an exception. But I still think it will have something to say for some time at least in regard to its main points: that is, to give a better understanding of the literary and cultural identity of Apuleius’ novel, and to challenge John Winkler’s conclusions about its general “meaning.” While Winkler’s methods still stand, and are his most valuable legacy together with his illuminating discussions on so many aspects of the Metamorphoses, my hope is that I can incite at least some discussion about the nearly general consensus, reached in the last two decades, about his “comic” interpretation of the novel. Last but not least, a few words are needed to express my deep gratitude. Ben, the reason you offered to undertake the daunting task of translating my difficult and sometimes too Byzantine Italian into good English still escapes me: all the more reason to say a very heartfelt thank-you. preface and acknowledgments For many years now, the Metamorphoses of Apuleius has garnered a remark- able degree of critical attention that, with an ever-increasing emphasis, has demonstrated the highly sophisticated literary nature of the work, as well as its many considerable hermeneutic difficulties. Apuleius’ pursuit of a highly complex and elaborate narrative style is in fact combined with a sort of essential ambiguity, which seems to leave the greatest diversity of interpretive possibilities open to the contemporary reader: and so it is that the Metamor- phoses can be read as a sophisticated and detached narrative divertissement; or as an allegorical novel (roman à clef ), whose goal is religious and/or philo- sophical propaganda; as a satire of fatuous belief in otherworldly powers; or even, for all intents and purposes, as an utterly aporetic text in its own right, a detective novel that presents its case to the reader in the form of a mystery that s/he alone can solve. Similarly, different genres of readings, as we shall see, are to be found not only among modern scholars, but ancient readers as well. At least to some degree, then, one might think that such a broad spectrum of interpretive choices and possibilities is the result of a certain ambiguity inherent in the text and cannot have been caused merely by the extreme diversity found in the cultural settings of its critics—a span that finds, to cite only two examples, Fulgentius at one end, and John Winkler at the other. In the case of a narrative text, moreover, this ambiguity takes on a special significance, since the possible transmission of any message (whether religious, philosophical, or of some other sort) becomes subordinated to the act of narration.