Apuleius
Apuleyus (Madaura, 123/5-m. around 180), sometimes called Lucius Apuleius —although the praenomen Lucius is taken from the protagonist of one of his works, The Golden Ass—, he was the most important Roman writer of the second century, highly admired both during his lifetime and by posterity. Possibly a highly Romanized Berber, he was born in Madaura, a Roman city in Numidia on the border with Getulia, now known as Mdaourouch (in Algeria). In his time it was an area relatively far from the main cultural centers of Latinism, based in Italy, although its urban and economic development allowed important Roman intellectuals and politicians to come from the area around the 2nd century.
Biography
Apuley's father was a provincial magistrate who, according to an inscription found at the site, rose to the rank of mayor of Madaura. From him he inherited a large fortune, which consisted of a million sesterces for him and another million for his brother. Such an amount was necessary to enter the Roman Senate at the time. Apuleius studied first in Carthage, where he was acquainted with Greek and Latin rhetoric, and then in Athens, where, among other subjects, he became acquainted with Platonic philosophy.
He is remembered for his Metamorphoses, an allegorical and picaresque novel, also known as The Golden Ass. It is not certain that Lucio was his name: it was from the homonymous character in the novel that it began to be attributed to him. Although he is considered one of the few original writers of the second century, there is an antecedent of this novel, Lucio o el asno , of Greek origin, attributed to Luciano de Samosata. In such a work the protagonist has the same name and, although much less elaborate and extensive, some of the adventures narrated are similar. However, there is a certain ambiguity regarding the dating of this work, which could be a later reworking in Greek; In any case, they are works that appear around the same time.
A man eager for knowledge, Apuleius was interested, in addition to philosophy, religion, science and rhetoric. After being initiated into the cult of Isis, he went to Rome to study rhetoric. Later, he dedicated himself to touring Asia Minor and Egypt to continue his studies in philosophy and religion.
Around 156-158, on the way from Carthage to Egypt, he stopped at Oea (present-day Tripoli), where he made a public declamation in a basilica. He then married a very wealthy local widow. He was then accused of using magic to get the favors and riches of the widow Pudentila; accusations from her family. In his defense he declaimed and published a sharp speech, the Apology pro se libera , before the proconsul of Africa, Claudio Maximus, and the magistrates of the city of Sabratha, in Tripolitania.
Triumphant in his speech, he went to live with Pudentila in a villa of hers on the outskirts of Oea. The widow owned at the time about four million sesterces and she had already granted her sons vast fertile fields, four hundred slaves, huge dwellings and much wine, wheat and olives. They lived outside the city to avoid giving the amount of fifty thousand sesterces for the marriage of one of Pudentila's sons. Such a son became an enemy of Apuleius, although he had already recommended him to the proconsul as a lawyer (he had been educated in Rome and Athens). Apuleius refers that, however, the aforementioned gave himself up to vice, spending all his time with gladiators and not wanting to speak Latin, but Punic. The accounts of these events made by the writer refer us to the wealth and daily life of wealthy North Africans in imperial times.
Work
His best-known work, The Golden Ass (or Metamorphoses), is the only surviving Roman novel in its entirety. It can be considered the antecedent of a literary genre, that of the picaresque novel, in which we will later find great developments from the 16th century (influences are postulated, for example, in different episodes of Don Quixote ). It narrates how the young Lucio, victim of a failed spell that transforms him into an ass, without losing his intellectual faculties —except language—, goes through various masters and various adventures. The humorous tone is dominant, but there are also philosophical and religious reflections. It is an imaginative, irreverent and funny work that recounts the incredible adventures of Lucio metamorphosed into a donkey. Under this appearance he hears and sees a large number of strange things, the same ones that are related as interspersed stories in the novel, until Isis returns her human form to him. An interpolation develops one of the most beautiful samples of the short stories of Classical Antiquity: the fable of Eros and Psyche (Cupid and Psyche). This story is the longest in the novel and tells of the tribulations of the Soul (Psyche) to reach Love (Eros) and immortality. As already mentioned, there are some theories that maintain that the initiation into the mysteries of Isis recounted in the last book of the Metamorphoses is autobiographical.
Apuley's work also aimed at the dissemination of philosophy (especially Platonic), rhetorical knowledge and the dissemination of the predominant mystery cults in the Roman Empire. Of his work as a philosopher, only texts with characteristics of translations have survived, with very little personal development: De deo Socratis (The Demon of Socrates), where he expounds the idea of the mediating beings between gods and men), De Platone et eius dogmate (On Plato and his doctrine, which is a compendium of the main concepts of Plato's philosophy), De mundo (About the world, compilation of scientific topics from the Aristotelian Lyceum).
Regarding rhetoric, a discipline that was created in Greece but had an important boom in Rome thanks to treatises such as those of Cicero, Apuleius left the only sample of a legal discourse: Apology or De magia pro se libera (Apology or Discourse on magic in self-defense), as well as a set of discursive fragments: the Florida.
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