Apuleius

abstraCt. Migdał Justyna, Old Women: divination and Magic or anus in Roman Literature. Word anus was used in a primarily negative sense to describe an old woman. Anus is usually presented as a libidinous and hideous hag who indulges in strong wine or practices black magic, mainly for erotic purposes. Though Latin literature brings as well examples of a different type of anus: goddesses assuming the shape of old women to guide or deceive the mortals and old prophetic women, inspired by the gods. Anus can be gifted with divine powers and secret knowledge. The paper traces the motif of anus as a witch or a divine woman on the basis of selected examples from the works of Horace, Ovid, Petronius, Apuleius and Silius Italicus.

Facing charges of witchery, Apuleius defends himself by mentioning the name of the African village where one of his accusers, Sicinius Aemilianus, lives. The article begins with a summary of what should be known about the word (spelling, etymology, grammatical status) as well as the place it refers to.  It goes on to show how the utterance of the name is, in fact, used as a counterattack that aims to invalidate the charge of barbarism that faces the accused. The word, which is generally analyzed as a stroke of irony, covers though a complex game on the pronunciation of the accuser whose Punic accent is presented derisively, rather,  as a claim to the mastery of Attic Greek.This subtle game involves  making reference to authors brought back into fashion in the second century (Plautus, Catullus). In the end,  the paper  attempts to put into perspective this game on the  pronunciation of Sicinius Aemilianus in a reflection on the cultural identity of the sophist, who clearly rejects the Punic,  fetishizes Latin and carefully conceals his vernacular native language, the Libyan.

Why does Apuleius reference Pythagoras at the opening of the Metamorphoses’ final book? Drawing on Pythagoreanism’s importance to Plutarch and Apuleius, I suggest that Pythagoras signals Book 11’s overarching theme and tone.Thematically,Apuleius uses Pythagorean metempsychosis to connect Lucius’ quest for recognition as a human in asinine “form” (figura) with his later inability to access Isiac wisdom hidden by hieroglyphic animal “characters” (figurae). Tonally, Apuleius builds on the ambiguity of parody and sincerity in Pythagoras’ speech in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Couched in a set of Egyptian and Pythagorean topoi, Lucius’ reinterpretation of his metamorphic adventures hovers between profundity and absurdity.

Das Gemälde «La Primavera» (Frühling) gehört zu den bekanntesten Werken der abendländischen Kunst und hängt heute in den Uffizien in Florenz. Es wurde in den späten 1470er oder mittleren 1480er Jahre vom berühmten italienischen Renaissancemaler Sandro Botticelli (1444-1510) im Auftrag der Medici gemalt. Damals wie heute fasziniert es in seiner Komposition und Ausarbei-tung und lässt viel Spielraum für Interpretationen übrig. Um eine Interpretationsmöglichkeit zu geben, liegt die Analyse der literarischen Grundlagen für die dargestellte Szenerie auf der Hand. So findet man in diversen Werken antiker Autoren literarische Beschreibungen gewisser Teile des Gemäldes, nach deren Konsultation sich ein weiter Interpretationshorizont auf rezeptionsästheti-scher Basis sowohl für die Schriften, als auch das Gemälde eröffnet. Die Wiederentdeckung und die intensive Auseinandersetzung mit antiken Autoren und deren Werken durch italienische Humanisten in der Frührenaissance ermöglichten Künstlern, wie Sandro Botticelli, Tizian und Bellini, diese Aufarbeitung in ihr Schaffen einzubeziehen.
In dieser Arbeit werden daher mögliche Textgrundlagen diverser antiker Autoren für die Ausarbei-tung von Botticellis «La Primavera» zusammengetragen, übersetzt und dann zur Interpretation des Werkes selber herangezogen, um die Frage nach den rezeptionsästhetischen Einflüssen der Werke zu beantworten. Da eine solche Interpretation stets subjektiv geprägt ist, liegt der Schwerpunkt der Arbeit auf der Wirkung der Texte und Botticellis Gemälde unter rezeptionsästhetischen Gesichts-punkten, da die Rezeptionsästhetik basierend auf der Konstanzer Schule diese Subjektivität ermöglicht.

Cooking and the male gaze: Tamar as viewed by Lucius (II Samuel 13 and Apuleus' Golden Ass 2:7).  A comparison of two texts from the Ancient World that refer to a similar cooking activity by a woman in the context of male erotic reaction to it.  The texts are not related to each other as a literary tradition; however, the similarities in the everyday activity portrayed in both allow them to illuminate each other to the modern reader.

Che cosa raccontava la nutrice al piccolo Cicerone prima di metterlo a letto? Quali barzellette circolavano nelle botteghe dei barbieri di Atene? Nell'antichità, esattamente come oggi, nella vita di tutti erano presenti fiabe, facezie, fake news. Soltanto in pochissimi casi, tuttavia, questa "letteratura orale", considerata triviale e poco seria, è riuscita ad approdare alla pagina scritta, e spesso solo sotto forma di allusioni. Non tutto è perduto, però: combinando filologia e folklore si può tentare di ricostruire questo capitolo dimenticato della vita degli antichi. Ad aiutarci saranno le storie che, dal Medioevo fino a oggi, rispecchiano i racconti popolari di Greci e Romani, con differenze altrettanto significative delle somiglianze. Seguendo così le tracce narrative del dio Pan e di un gatto diabolico, del poeta Archiloco e del bluesman Robert Johnson, di imperatori, lupi cattivi e molti altri ancora, il libro getta nuovi squarci di luce sull'"enciclopedia culturale" degli antichi e, contemporaneamente, ci permette di comprendere meglio la nostra.

Apuleius gives Venus and Cupid, both divine characters, very human characteristics. When Cupid falls for Psyche, Venus behaves like an indignant and unsupported single mother, who cannot cope with the fact that her son is old enough to have a girlfriend. Venus behaves like a wary adolescent, avoiding publicly acknowledging Psyche. However, either he or Providence in the background secretly helps her and at the end Cupid stands up for her openly, going over the head of his mother to Jupiter, who resolves things.

The book provides an Italian translation of Apuleius' "De Platone et eius dogmate". The text was updated by taking into account the most recent studies on Apuleius' the Philosopher manuscript tradition. Introduction and commentary aim to make the text comprehensible also to non-scholars.

En Metamorfosis de Apuleyo la curiositas del personaje Lucio lo lleva a vivir distintas situaciones que tienen conexión con las prácticas mágicas. El primer encuentro de Lucio con lo mágico es de manera indirecta a través de una fabula (cuento, narración, historia) que escucha de dos viajeros, Aristómenes y el escéptico. Es en este primer cuento insertado que este trabajo se centrará y analizará los aspectos mágicos que lo rodean en relación con el sacrificio humano de Sócrates en manos de las sagae (hechicera, bruja) Meroe y Pantia.

Relating Dante's biography as an orphan and his Commedia one can see that his text pivots from shadowy father figures involved in bloodshed to images concerning lactating mothers, his guides, the male Virgil, the female Beatrice. The draft essay makes use of Florentine iconography for its argument.

Apuleius certainly quotes some epigrammatic texts and fragments in his Apology on secondary points of the argumentation, but these quotations remain misleading, because they hide the real presence of the epigrammatic genre in this speech: a both silent and efficient intertext. We shall show how we can discern allusions to the satiric epigram (especially that of Martial), which eventually create an alternative speech in some passages of the text, used for polemical purposes and intended to distract the learned public. But while requesting the cultural memory of the public and manipulating epigrammatic techniques and themes (often scandalous and contrary to the ethos that Apuleius explicitly creates in his own defense), the author has to find a just balance between caution and hidden knowledge.

Este trabajo parte de considerar anacrónicas las categorías de "novela antigua" y "novela romana", y de la inquietud por definir el género literario contemporáneo que guió la escritura de la obra. El autor propone leer Las metamorfosis como una fábula milesia, para lo cual emprende un doble camino: por un lado, estudia la tradición que comienza con las Milesíacas de Arístides de Mileto y la traducción de Sisena y que tiene como máximo exponente a Apuleyo; por otro lado, analiza Las metamorfosis en base a las características de la milesia.

In Monster Anthropology: Ethnographic Explorations of Transforming Social Worlds through Monsters, edited by Yasmine Musharbash and Geir Henning Presterudstuen. Forthcoming from Bloomsbury: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/monster-anthropology-9781350096257/. Discusses the cultural significance of stories about monsters lurking on roadways.

This paper interprets Robert Duncan’s conception of poetic form as the rhythm of awareness of the meaning of everything.  Starting with Duncan’s engagement with Ezra Pound’s concept of the tone leading of vowels, the paper progresses to Duncan’s critique of tone leading, and reconceives poetic materiality in order to propose a rapprochement of tone- and awareness-based composition techniques.  The paper demonstrates Duncan’s preoccupation with the entanglement between poetry’s material and meaningful dimensions in an extended close reading of the first section of “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar.”  The paper interprets Duncan’s understanding of the concepts of awareness and meaning in terms of his metaphysics of originary disresemblance.

The title page of Adlington's 1566 translation of Apuleius' Golden Ass advertises the "excellent narration of the mariage of Cupide and Psiches." This paper reads the ever-popular, interpolated story not just as a model for a revivified romance, but also as a theory of the soul, addressing how melancholy is cured. It compares the model of the psyche offered in Cupid and Psyche to the theories of Burton, Wright, Reynoldes, and Bright. These early modern psychologists define the causes and cures for melancholy. They offer readings of literary texts to explain how the central experience of romance--amazement--reifies trauma and then offers a pathway out of it. The literary structure of Cupid and Psyche suggests something similar. The paper explores the analogous strategies of romance, as imagined by Apuleius and interpreted by Adlington, and Renaissance psychological theory--embeddedness, ruptures, hyperbole, and repetition-- to fully imagine the causes of and cures for melancholy.

Oggetto di analisi sono le riscritture della favola apuleiana di Amore e Psiche in 'Angelica e la notte di maggio' e in 'La nostra anima':
alla luce delle riflessioni di Savinio nella prosa 'Metamorphoseon', vengono valorizzati gli 'agganci' con il testo antico, sia di natura tematica che stilistica: in 'La nostra anima', in particolare, la tecnica del 'pastiche' consente di integrare nella prosa saviniana sia lunghe citazioni latine, sia stralci di traduzione del testo apuleiano (identificata in quella di M. Bontempelli per la 'Collezione  Romana' di E. Romagnoli). La riscrittura di Savinio risulta 'corrosiva' non tanto nei confronti del testo antico, quanto di una certa lettura 'à la mode', pesantemente influenzata dall'estetismo dannunziano.

This book deals with the Greek cure of the soul, focusing in particular on Socrates, who turned this idea into the core of his own philosophy. The first chapter offers an overlook of the different meanings of psyche from myth to Homer, Orphism, and the Presocratics (until Diogenes of Apollonia). The following chapters deal with Socrates’ peculiar understanding of the cure of the soul. Chapter two introduces to the “Socratic question” from the viewpoint of the Socratic cure of the soul. Chapter three focuses on the dialogues attributed to Plato (Apology, Phaedrus, and the First Alcibiades). Chapter four on Xenophon’s Memorabilia. The study shows that one common thread among these different accounts is the relationship between the soul and the divine: the Socratic cure of the soul implies an openness to both the world and its cosmic order.

A Hermész Triszmegisztosz neve alatt fennmaradt Asclepius című dialógus első fejezeté-nek végén, mielőtt Hermész belekezd tanításába, ezt olvashatjuk 1 : ...conpetenti venerabiliter silentio ex ore Hermu animis singulorum mentibusque pendantibus, divinus Cupido sic est orsus dicere} W.Scott 3 kitér a kérdéses szöveghely kommentálására, azonban-véleményem szerint-nem hatol annak mélyére. Nock-Festugière a szöveghely magyarázatában egészen másfelé indul; Erószban a természet összekötő kapcsát látva, és egyben a világ összefüggő voltát hangsúlyozva, sőt az egész mű központi gondolatát ebben határozva meg. 4 Ε vélemény elméletileg igen jól megalapozott, a hermetizmus tudományával kapcsolatban Festugière egy helyen már korábban helyt adott ennek a magyarázatnak. 5 Talán éppen ezen jól kimunkált és a hermetizmus egyik alapvető gondolatát feltáró ma-gyarázat meggyőző mivolta miatt lett a hely ilyen értelmű interpretációja elfogadott. Azonban véle-ményem szerint nem kell-sőt nem szabad-Erószt megfosztanunk isteni aspektusától. A traktátus egészének értelme éppen azzal van összefüggésben, amit Erósz egyik isteni aspektusa kifejez. Vizsgá-lódásaink végén egyúttal megérthetjük azt is, miért volt a görög eredeti címe az, hogy Logosz teleiosz 6 , azaz " befejezett" vagy " teljes", sőt " kiteljesült tanítás".

George Kakavas, Witches of the stars and Sorceresses of the Hypati. Legends and Traditions.

In ancient times Thessaly was famous for its powerful witches and for its horses. Grandmothers of the area narrated tales, of which the main characters were not only beasts and demons, brave men and renowned
lords, but also beautiful enchanted princesses to whom witches gave poisonous herbs to drink. Somewhere in Katavothra, nowadays called Oeta, as well as in Vardousia and Neraidospilia witches and fairies were
gathered. The most famous of them were those of Hypati. They undertook love spells, filters that guided or forced into obedience, others that caused suffering. The Thettalides witches reached the peak of their glory. Their protector was the triple goddess Hecate.

This essay attempts to add its voice to the handful of scholars who have seen specific clues in Books 1-10 of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses which directly or indirectly point to the “surprise” Isiac ending.  The following pages suggest that we might read (or more specifically, a second century audience would have read) Lucius’ encounter (immediately following his transformation) at the shrine of the horse goddess Epona (3.27)—and other passages in the novel which may recall this goddess—as a direct foreshadowing of and link to the appearance of Isis in Book 11.  Literary and material evidence roughly contemporary with Apuleius (while not exactly abundant) suggest that Isis and Epona were indeed linked in the Roman era—largely because of their shared connections with fortune, abundance, maternity, and liminality—to the point of even being syncretized into facets of the same goddess.  Would the mention of Epona have triggered an association with Isis in the minds of the novel’s original aud...

В сказочной истории любви Купидона и Психеи, самой знаменитой из вставных новелл романа Апулея «Метаморфозы», присутствуют отсылки к римскому семейному праву и упоминаются различные элементы традиционного римского бракосочетания. Внимательное прочтение и анализ этих сюжетов позволяет не только лучше понять задуманный автором комический эффект, но и дополнить представление о содержании вставной новеллы и её связи с основным сюжетом романа. Сопоставление истории бракосочетания Хариты, слушающей после похищения прямо со свадьбы утешительную сказку, с историей отношений Купидона и Психеи позволяет увидеть структурное сходство в описании судьбы двух девушек и особенности авторской игры с читательскими ожиданиями. Герои сказки проходят путь от сожительства (напоминающего распространённый среди высших слоёв в I–II вв. конкубинат) до официально признанного matrimonium iustum. При этом наиболее подробно описываются этапы брачной церемонии, которых из-за нападения разбойников была лишена Харита: ритуал ведения невесты в дом мужа (deductio domum) и свадебный пир. Однако счастливая история любви бога и смертной при первоначальном совпадении с последующей историей Хариты обнаруживает в итоге разительный контраст с трагической судьбой последней, что было явным нарушением читательских ожиданий. Не меньшим сюрпризом для читателя могло быть и вплетение в сюжет сказочной истории прямых и завуалированных отсылок к актуальным проблемам современного семейного права (например, правовому регулированию конкубината или падению роли paterfamilias в устроении брака своих детей). Изучение вставной новеллы в историческом контексте показывает тесную взаимосвязь мира произведения с миром его автора и читателей. Внимательный читатель сказки мог также увидеть параллели между претензиями Венеры к законности брака Купидона и Психеи и собственным судебным процессом Апулея в связи с его женитьбой на богатой вдове Эмилии Пуденцилле.

In the fairytale of Cupid and Psyche, the best known inserted tale of Apuleius’s
Metamorphoses, we can find frequent references to the roman marriage law and roman wedding rites. A careful reading and detailed examination of such references helps to understand better not only the intended comic effect, but also the meaning of fairytale itself and the connection between the tale and the novel as a whole. The comparison of two wedding stories (Psyche’s and Charite’s), the last one being told to the girl abducted by the gang of robbers just from the conclusive part of her wedding ceremony, reveals the structural similarity between them and helps to understand the author’s play with reader’s expectations. The story of Cupid and
Psyche evolves from cohabitation (that resembles the practice of concubinage, widespread in 1st–2nd centuries CE upper-class) towards the official recognition as matrimonium iustum. The fairytale provides a detailed description of those stages of the wedding ceremony that are absent in Charite’s case: the ritual of deductio domum and cena nuptialis. Reading the love story of god and mortal with successful marriage at the final anticipates a happy ending of Charite’s own adventures. But Apuleius disrupts reader’s expectations with a tragic death of protagonists producing a striking contrast between two narratives. The references to the
Roman private law and traditional marriage customs that are incorporated into the fairytale could surprise readers too. It is possible to recognize direct mentions and veiled allusions to the current legal issues (e.g. decreasing significance of the father’s consent to his child’s marriage and legal regulation of concubinage). The study of the inserted tale in the historical context of 2nd century CE shows close interrelation between the world of the novel and the world of its author and readers. An attentive reader, familiar with the story of Apuleius’s own marriage to the rich widow Aemilia Pudentilla, could also find an interesting parallel between
accusations against Apuleius and Venus’s claims about illegitimacy of her son’s marriage.