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APULEIUS
attributable to an impulsive prayer. Photis (her name is derived from the Greek
for 'light', so she is contrapuntal to Lucius, derived from lux) is more romantically
and sentimentally depicted than is Palaestra ('"Wrestling-arena"), the slavegirl
of the original. Milo is more miserly, Pamphile ('Love-all') more horrific
than their counterparts in the Greek romance. The characters in the inserted
anecdotes (their names usually by etymology or historical association indicate
their role, sometimes ironically) are frequently inconsistently drawn, partly
because Apuleius takes pleasure in welding together different tales, partly
because his main effort goes into the alignment of the anecdote with the main
plot. So, for example, the widow in the story of Thelyphron, the stepmother
in the 'Phaedra' tale (io.2ff.), the female criminal (io.23ff.) all undergo
implausible changes of character.
The audience envisaged by Apuleius was one of highly educated Romans.
As in Petronius the texture of the story can be highly literary, evoking a wide
range of Greek and Latin authors for the pleasure of sophisticated readers.
Psyche, for example, not only recalls by her appearance the heroines of the
Greek love-romances but also by the nature of her wanderings reincarnates the
Io of Aeschylus' dramas, and in her progress through Hades evokes the similar
journey of Aeneas. The literary model for Charite's psychological anguish as
she prepares suicide is Virgil's Dido. There are scenes in which the more
histrionic aspects of forensic speeches are parodied for comic effect, as in the
'trial' at the Festival of Laughter, and again in the speech by the cruel boy's
mother after his death (7.27). The novel abounds also in legal quips and jocose
references to the activities and interests of the senatorial class at Rome.
The style of the Metamorphoses, paralleled in parts of the Florida and De
deo Socratis, is profitably analysed in the company of Fronto and Gellius. The
studied artificiality and verbal extravagance which mark all three are not
attributable to a peculiar African tradition (though Apuleius' trilingualism in
Punic, Greek, and Latin may have fostered a tendency towards exotic diction)
but rather to the epideictic tendencies of the Second Sophistic. The elocutio
nouella associated with the three writers consists of the artistic collocation of
words of arresting novelty — a combination of archaisms and Graecisms, vulgarisms
and neologisms. The language of comedy is frequently exploited in
dialogue, especially where the homely, old-fashioned flavour is apposite to
the characters. Occasionally the etymological sense of a word is restored with
bizarre effect; Cupid, for example, is not only inuisus ('unseen') but also
inhumanus ('divine'). The influence of Asianic oratory, so marked in the Greek
novels of Achilles Tatius and Longus, is even stronger in Apuleius, inspiring
the rhythmical, rhyming riots of double, triple and quadruple phrases and
clauses, consummately balanced by isocolon, homoioteleuton, alliteration,
and assonance.
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