By Christopher Francese
This site contains a Latin text of the courtroom speech of self-defense delivered in the Roman province of Africa by the author, orator, and philosopher Apuleius of Madauros, who is better known today for his beloved novel, Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass. Apuelius stood accused of successfully using magical means to entice a wealthy widow into marriage in an effort to control her very substantial fortune. His accusers were relatives of Pudentilla, including her son (by her first husband) Pudens, and members of her first husband's family. The judge in the case was Claudius Maximus, who is known to have been governor of the province of Africa in AD 158-159, and is likely the same Maximus to whose teaching Marcus Aurelius pays tribute in Book 1 of the Meditations.
Our edition is intended for readers of Latin, so no translation is given. The notes attempt to gloss and explain phrases that may be confusing when translated literally. The vocabulary lists provide contextually appropriate definitions for all words not in the DCC Core Latin Vocabulary. We hyperlink liberally to open resources such as Logeion, the Latin texts at the Packard Humanities Institute, and to Allen and Greenough's Latin Grammar as digitized at DCC.
As will become apparent, our notes draw on the authoritative commentaries by H.E. Butler and A.S. Owen (Oxford, 1914, abbreviated B/O) and by Vincent Hunink (Amsterdam, 1977). We also referred to the excellent English translation by C.P. Jones in the Loeb series (Cambridge, MA, 2017). We borrow from their work, always with attribution, and do not hesitate to give more than one interpretation in doubtful cases. We offer more explanation of the Latin than either of these commentaries, and less in the way of discussion of textual problems, literary interpretation, and references to secondary scholarship. In line with the goals of DCC more generally, our intent is to help Latin readers read the Latin expeditiously, so we have tried to limit notes to matters that bear on the understanding of the Latin--though in a text offering as many fascinating insights into daily life in the Roman Empire as this one, it often seemed important to discuss these matters and link out to other reference works. Our intended reader has a grasp of the fundamentals of Latin, but may not be familiar with Apuleius, his style, or his abundant vocabulary, and may need help navigating his sometimes complex syntax and sophisticated rhetoric.
The Latin text is essentially that of Hunink, though we consulted Helm's Teubner as well as Jones' Loeb, which not seldom differ from Hunink. Hunink is reluctant to accept emendations of the main manuscript (F) that seem reasonable to other editors, such as Jones. A list of cases in which we departed from Hunink is included here. In almost all these cases we adopt the reading of Jones. We modernize and regularize Latin orthography without comment, as does Jones. We also generally do not include bracketed words and letters which Hunink prints but, like most other editors, believes to be interpolations. Our goal is readability, rather than an exact transcription of what is found in F. Those interested in textual issues should consult Helm, Hunink, and B/O.
The vocabulary lists were drafted using The Bridge application created by Bret Mulligan at Haverford College. The output of the Bridge required extensive editing to re-order lemmas, check lemmatizations, add section milestones and proper names, and to make sure that contextually appropriate definitions appeared. Readers of Apuleius are familiar with his extensive, ebullient vocabulary. His works feature many words uniquely attested, words used in playful, punning, unusual or idiosyncratic ways, and sometimes include words whose exact definitions are unclear. We did our best to capture this delightful variety in the lists with a level of precision that will allow readers to see where he deviates from the expected.
Process
This commentary had an unusual and unusually enjoyable collaborative genesis. I will say a few words about its origin and our working methods in the hope that it might inspire others to do something similar.
The project arose from the Dickinson Summer Latin Workshop series. These workshops are attended mostly, though not exclusively, by Latin teachers. The July 2022 workshop used a new DCC commentary on selections from Seneca’s Natural Questions by Christopher Trinacty of Oberlin College. At the end of the workshop I put out a call to participants who might like to continue reading together on Zoom with Apuleius's Apologia and try to prepare a set of notes for the following year’s workshop (an overly optimistic timetable, as it turned out).
Once the group was assembled, we worked independently on specific tasks, then met weekly on Zoom for an hour to read aloud and translate the Latin text one paragraph at a time and edit what we had done in between sessions. We met almost continuously between August 2022 and December 2025.
We began by gathering the raw material in shared Google docs. Hunink’s Latin text was freely available on The Latin Library (thank you, Professor Hunink!) but had no macrons. Each member of the group was assigned a section to macronize using Johan Winge’s Alatius Macronizer, then check it by hand. We broke the text up into six documents for ease of handling. I created a shared working bibliography document with links to the commentaries and various versions of the Latin text and translations available online, as well as the very useful dissertation of Thomas Nelson Winter, "Apology as Prosecution: The Trial of Apuleius" (Northwestern University, 1968). We all acquired copies of Jones' Loeb. Though the 1959 edition of Helm's Teubner text is available online at PHI, the apparatus is not, so I kept a hard copy of that at hand. I made a workflow document with specific instructions about how to carry out the lemmatization, what kind of annotations we wanted, and how to format them.
Bret Mulligan, the creator of Haverford’s Bridge Project, supplied a spreadsheet in which each word in the text had its own row, and successive columns gave, among other things, a full dictionary form and English definition from the Bridge dictionary. This master spreadsheet was broken up into six new Google sheets, each with individual tabs for the items in a single paragraph of the text. The Bridge lemmatizations were good, having come ultimately from Oldfather’s Index Apuleianus, as digitized and re-ordered via the Concordance Liberation Project. But the words were grouped only by subsections as listed in Oldfather’s concordance (all words in, say, paragraph 3, subsection 1 were together, alphabetically but not in actual running order). Some resourceful pre-processing performed by Patrick Burns at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World mitigated this problem, but it still took considerable work each week to re-order wandering words, double check the lemmatizations and the display lemmas, make sure the contextually appropriate definitions were present, and add navigational milestones. After initial editing in Google Sheets the lists had to be re-formatted in html and uploaded to the site.
Over time a stable division of labor evolved such that during the week before the meeting everyone had a task: Odessa "Dessa" Asp drafted notes as comments on the Latin text itself using the comment feature in Google docs. This allowed the others to comment and ask questions. I added my own notes, often in response to Dessa's. Barry Brinker and Maryel Schneider worked primarily on editing the vocabulary lists. Keziah Armstrong wrote some of the section summaries and monitored the vocabulary lists to make sure that all non-core words were included. Janet Brooks researched matters of legal procedure and vocabulary and investigated such recondite topics as the crocodile-plover myth. We all inserted notes we thought pertinent from the commentaries of Hunink and Butler-Owen (sometimes edited for concision and clarity), and put in other insights gleaned from scholars such as Costantini, McCreight, Jones, and Winter (see Bibliography for full references).
After a full pass, I exported all the comments on the Google docs as plain text. Export unfortunately detaches the anotations from the Latin text itself, so it was crucial to include the lemma (the Latin text being commented on) in each marginal comment. These were re-formatted to something approaching DCC style in new documents by means of a Google Docs add-on created by Samuel Francese. In later stages, ChatGPT was very helpful in the re-formatting of notes and vocabulary lists.
Meanwhile, Meagan Ayer created the pages and menus in Drupal, the Content Management System in which DCC is housed. I uploaded notes and vocabulary into individual pages in Drupal and edited the notes again in that interface, after which they received a third round of group polishing. Since the work involved a series of related tasks being performed in parallel (formatting notes, editing notes, uploading notes, adding milestones, writing summaries, embedding hyperlinks, editing vocabulary, uploading vocabulary, checking vocabulary, final proof-reading), it became useful to have a spreadsheet to keep track of our progress. Each row continued a paragraph number, and each column a discrete task. Individuals put their initials in cells to indicate completion.
Our group of co-editors included three veteran teachers (Maryel Schneider, Keziah Armstrong, and Dessa Asp), a college professor (me), a retired proof-reader (Barry Brinker), and a practicing attorney (Janet Brooks). Having a mix of non-teachers and teachers of Latin in middle school (Maryel), high school (Keziah and Dessa) and college was invaluable in making sure the notes served a broad audience. Having mixed levels of Latin experience in the group crucially helped solve the expert blindness problem, a cognitive bias that makes so much commentary writing less useful to readers and students than it could be. The fact that we had several experienced Latinists ensured a level of scholarly double checking that has hopefully saved us from the kind of blunders often found in solo self-published efforts in this genre. Having a professional proof-reader (Barry) on the team helped us to achieve consistency of presentation and conformity with accepted usage, and thus to reduce distractions for users. Janet’s legal training and research moxie saved us from innumerable blunders in English legal usage and illuminated many other topics. I served as the final editor, and any remaining errors or infelicities are my responsibility. I would be glad to hear of any that you find.
In the process of making this commentary we became fast friends, and even got to meet some of our scholarly heroes. Professors Costantini and McCreight graciously joined and read with us on Zoom on separate occasions. We hope that this edition of the Apologia brings as much pleasure and enlightenment to readers as we have enjoyed over the past three years.