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Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION the Apuleian Corpus Apuleius Of Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-02547-9 - Apuleius' Platonism: The Impersonation of Philosophy Richard Fletcher Excerpt More information chapter 1 INTRODUCTION The Apuleian corpus The scrupulous reader, according to the role that Apuleius has scripted, is one who closely observes details and will object to inconsistencies.1 Apuleius of Madauros, who lived in the second half of the sec- ond century ce in Roman North Africa, is best known today as the author of the Metamorphoses (aka The Golden Ass), a fic- tional narrative about the transformation of a man into a don- key. Yet, unlike other ancient fiction writers, such as Petronius, Longus, Heliodorus or Achilles Tatius, we are fortunate to have more than Apuleius’ work of fiction to read. Even though much of Apuleius’ literary production is now lost to us, and some of what has been ascribed to him is of disputed authen- ticity, we can still read five authentic works: a forensic defence speech (Apologia), a collection of excerpted epideictic orations (Florida), a popular philosophical lecture (De deo Socratis), a cosmological treatise (De mundo) and a handbook of Platonic natural and ethical philosophy (De Platone et eius dogmate).2 These five works, taken together with the Metamorphoses, com- prise a literary corpus that is comparable in diversity to that of any other ancient author.3 In spite of this diversity, however, 1 Winkler (1985) 61, in a discussion of the lector scrupulosus addressed by Lucius at Met. 9.30. 2 As the debate stands, I agree with the consensus view that the Asclepius and Peri hermeneias, both of which have been attributed to Apuleius, are not authentic works. For a helpful summary of the arguments for and against, see Harrison (2000) 10–14. However, I am also well aware that this present study could provide some momentum to arguments that would reopen the authenticity debate of either work. 3 While the claim could be made for the corpus diversity of several other authors (e.g. Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch) to compete with Apuleius, few, if any, of these corpora are more immediately divisive than the Apuleian. On the benefits of reading the Senecan corpus as a whole, see Ker (2006). 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-02547-9 - Apuleius' Platonism: The Impersonation of Philosophy Richard Fletcher Excerpt More information Introduction there have been several literally divisive issues that have pre- vented a full appreciation of the corpus as a whole. First of all, the Metamorphoses, as the undisputed masterpiece of the corpus, has dominated and directed any engagement with, and caused inconsistencies of attention to, the other extant works.4 In addition, the corpus has too often been simplistically divided into ‘literary’ or ‘rhetorical’ works (Metamorphoses, Apologia and Florida) and ‘philosophical’ or ‘Platonic’ works (De deo Socratis, De Platone and De mundo).5 That this division pres- surises Apuleius’ identity as an author is clear from two broad reconciliatory approaches that seek to understand Apuleius as either a novelist who dabbled in Platonism or as a Platonist who tried his hand at novel-writing.6 By way of introducing some of the debates surrounding how we read the Apuleian corpus, I shall first explore an alterna- tive approach to the standard themes of the centrality of the Metamorphoses and the division between literature and philos- ophy. Then I shall show how the question of authorship, which was critical to these two traditional approaches, can actually lead the way in decentring and unifying the corpus in terms of Apuleius’ particular approach to Platonism as inspired by a key moment in the reception of the Apuleian corpus: Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean. Pater’s approach leads us to an appreci- ation of Apuleius’ identity as a Platonist that provides coher- ence to the corpus and not division. This coherence will then be explored in a series of passages of Apuleius’ speeches from the Florida collection that not only emphasise the unity of his liter- ary production with his philosophical activities, but also reflect 4 For the primacy of the Met. and the role of the rest of the corpus as backdrop, see Winkler (1985) 5–6. All major studies of the whole corpus – Sandy (1997), Harrison (2000), May (2006) – make the Met. not only the end-point of their analyses, but the telos of their arguments. 5 For how this division is grounded in the early transmission of Apuleius’ works, see the illuminating and balanced discussion of Gaisser (2008) 1–41, especially com- ments at 36 and 40–1 with n. 3. On the manuscript tradition in general, see Reynolds (1983) 15–19. 6 For the former, see Harrison (2000) 255, and Schlam (1992) 11, for the latter. It is the latter that Augustine and Macrobius refer to in their brief references to the Met. On an author’s literary career as a totalising ‘preparation’ for a novel, see Leger´ in Barthes (2010) viii. ‘it is unquestionably the totality of Barthes’ oeuvre that can be heard throughout The Preparation of the Novel’. 2 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-02547-9 - Apuleius' Platonism: The Impersonation of Philosophy Richard Fletcher Excerpt More information The Apuleian corpus on how he mobilises his cultural identity, in terms of his bilin- gualism to philosophical aims. This revisionist approach to the Apuleian corpus readdresses Apuleius’ Platonism in terms of my main theme of the impersonation of philosophy. Decentring the corpus: the Metamorphoses The Metamorphoses is the undisputed masterpiece of the Apuleian corpus. It is often read separately from Apuleius’ other works, and discussed in relation to other ancient nov- els and a range of traditions of Greek and Roman poetry and prose.7 Even when the other works of the Apuleian corpus are discussed, the shadow of the Metamorphoses looms so large that it demands to be not only the end-point of the discussion of the whole corpus, but also the rationale for discussion of the corpus. In many ways, the other works of the Apuleian corpus, and even the very idea of an Apuleian corpus, have been under- stood as acting as so many footnotes to the Metamorphoses. Given this understandable gravitation towards Apuleius’ mas- terpiece, any attempt to come to terms with the Apuleian cor- pus as a whole suffers an imbalance and is necessarily inconsis- tent. Highlighting this inconsistency is not merely my criticism of a blinkered scholarly approach, but also a way of showing how the corpus, itself a kind of consistency, has not been suf- ficiently theorised in Apuleian studies.8 When we use the term ‘corpus’ to describe an author’s body of work, his or her ‘whole corpus’ is more often than not understood. Thus, either an inconsistent reading of a corpus or a description of a corpus as inconsistent can undermine the status of a corpus qua corpus.9 7 See Graverini (2007) for a fully developed reading of the Met. in terms of the range of Greek and Roman literature. 8 The nearest we get to a critical account of the Apuleian corpus is in a passing com- ment in Too (1996) 152: ‘Apuleius is the deity of the Apuleian corpus. Accordingly, efforts to pro-duce (sic.) representations of Apuleius other than the complex personae which he has authorised in his texts are sacrilegious acts against his true person.’ 9 Derrida (2001) 14 refers to his use of the ‘old concept’ of oeuvre, ‘because the strategic wager I make at a certain point, when I say “this rather than that”, means that, beyond the limits of this context, tomorrow, whatever the situation may be, whatever I say will still have a certain consistency – even if there is no scientific value that is omnitemporal and universal, what I say will still be considered an oeuvre.’ 3 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-02547-9 - Apuleius' Platonism: The Impersonation of Philosophy Richard Fletcher Excerpt More information Introduction If surveys of the Apuleian corpus are too often guided by an attempt to make sense of one work (the Metamorphoses), then the very idea of a corpus as any kind of consistency or unity is simultaneously put in question.10 Even so, the presence of a masterpiece like the Metamorphoses can also call for a partic- ular consistency of approach to the corpus in terms of retroac- tive reading, i.e. the reading of one work back onto the whole.11 Therefore, it is a more important question, albeit somewhat beyond the limits of the present study, to understand how the presence of a masterpiece like the Metamorphoses makes a cor- pus like Apuleius’ at one and the same time both inconsis- tent and consistent, rather than passively accepting it as either the end-point or the rationale for discussing or dismissing the rest of the works in a given corpus. To give a concrete exam- ple, if Apuleius’ De Platone is to be understood in terms of the Apuleian corpus, as in this present study, this dry Platonic handbook must first be approached from a position that resists, even if it does not directly disregard, the retroactive reading of the work under the need to understand the Metamorphoses. Yet resisting the pull of the Metamorphoses does not entail the traditionally polarised reading of De Platone that isolates it from the rest of the corpus and instead incorporates it into another discursive unity, e.g. ‘Middle Platonism’. Indeed one could argue that there was as much of a push effect on the dry handbook from readers of the literary masterpiece as a pull effect from scholars of the history of Platonism.
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