Apuleius of Madauros Simulacrum

The Life

Apuleius was born in Madauros, in Roman North Africa, around 124 CE. He studied at Carthage and then at Athens, where he encountered Platonism in its Middle Platonic form, and he travelled further in the eastern Mediterranean before returning to North Africa to practise rhetoric and to write. He was tried at Sabratha, around 158 CE, on a charge of having used magic to procure the love of a wealthy widow he had married; his surviving *Apologia* is the speech in which he defended himself, and in which he also displayed a formidable philosophical and literary learning. He died sometime after 170 CE.

The Thought

Apuleius's surviving works divide sharply in register. His *Metamorphoses* — the work almost always called *The Golden Ass* — is a novel, one of the two surviving Latin novels of antiquity, telling the bizarre and riotous story of a man transformed into a donkey and his eventual rescue through the intervention of the goddess Isis. It is also a philosophical document: the final book, in which Lucius is restored and initiated into the Isiac mysteries, is a serious treatment of the soul's journey out of ignorance into divine knowledge.

His philosophical works are shorter and more straightforwardly expository. The *De Deo Socratis* discusses the intermediate daemonic beings that Middle Platonism placed between gods and mortals. The *De Platone et eius dogmate* is a systematic introduction to Platonic doctrine in Latin — one of the earliest attempts to present Plato's philosophy in a Roman textbook form. The *De Mundo* is a Latin adaptation of a Greek cosmological work.

The Legacy

Apuleius was read through the Middle Ages primarily as the author of *The Golden Ass*, a work that shaped the later European tradition of the picaresque and fantastic novel and which provided the Cupid-and-Psyche tale that passed through Boccaccio, La Fontaine, C. S. Lewis (*Till We Have Faces*), and countless others. He was also read as a magician, on the strength of the *Apologia* and the supernatural elements of the *Metamorphoses* — a reputation that made him a minor figure in the hermetic and magical traditions of the Renaissance. His philosophical works had a narrower but genuine influence as early Latin-language witnesses to Middle Platonic doctrine.