Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

APULEIUS
The two main anecdotes in this section, told by Aristomenes and Thelyphron,
are each an ingenious patchwork of different tales stitched together by
the professional collector. In themselves they can be criticized for minor inconsistencies,
but in their function as indicators of Lucius' weaknesses and as
creators of the Hypatan atmosphere of malevolent magic they are most felicitous.
But what was the precise nature of Lucius' fault indicated by these warnings?
Critics are agreed that the unhealthy curiosity for knowledge through magic is
central; the proper way to attain knowledge of God and the cosmos, to bridge
the chasm between the human and the divine, is not by magic but by the
healthy curiosity of study and meditation, a lesson which Plutarch's descendant
should not have had to learn. But was the preliminary sexual romp also culpable?
The exchanges with Photis are told with such verve that some critics
discount sexual culpability. Yet Socrates, the primary exemplum, is reprehended
for this fault, and in the final book the priest of Isis tells Lucius that his
sufferings have been the 'unhappy price for unpropitious curiosity after your
descent to slavish pleasures'. Lucius himself confesses the evil errors (jnalis
erroribus) of his entanglement with Photis. We should be concerned here not
with ancient attitudes in general to such sexual relationships but with the
Platonist preoccupations of our author, who in a key passage of the Apology
(12.1-5) distinguishes the true love of the few from the enslaved passions of
beasts and mankind at large. Lucius' sin was chiefly curiosity but also lasciviousness.
The sufferings consequent upon this sinning follow the general pattern of
the Onos. Of the two sections the first, played against the backcloth of the
robbers' hideout, demonstrates the essential ambivalence of the novel. On the
one hand the trinity of bandits' stories is recounted in a mock-serious tone
undercutting the savagery of Lucius' experiences and encouraging the reader
to interpret the romance as light-hearted escapism; on the other, the conte of
Cupid and Psyche adds a mythological dimension to the serious theme of the
romance. Artistically inserted at the heart of the book by Apuleius himself, it
presents the experiences of Psyche in parallel with those of Lucius.
Versions of the folk-tale of the bride forbidden to gaze on her husband, who
departs in anger when she breaks the taboo and whom she then seeks forlornly
through the world, becoming reunited with him only after surmounting
apparently impossible tasks imposed by a witch, were already widespread in
Apuleius' day; a known North African variant is of particular interest. But no
written version incorporating Cupid and Psyche as protagonists predates
Apuleius. The likelihood is that our Platonist philosopher has created the story
of the marriage, separation and reunification of the god of love and the maiden
symbolizing the soul by fusing a version of the folk-tale with a developing
motif of literature and art; for the poetry and sculpture of the Alexandrian age
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