Do we have the actual speech as delivered?
Thomas D. McCreight, "Exemplum or Historiola?: Literature and Magic in Apuleius’ Apology," Syllecta Classica 15 (2004): 153-175, at p. 5.
The Apology purports to be a speech given in Apuleius’ own defense on the serious charge of practicing sorcery, delivered in the Tripolitanian city of Sabratha in 158 C.E. before the provincial governor Claudius Maximus. There is a range of scholarly opinion about the “reality” of the speech. Some see it as a stenographic account of an actual trial; others insist it was revised or rewritten after delivery to put it in its current form; some maintain there was no real trial, but that this is a fictional speech like Isocrates’ Antidosis or Gorgias’ Defence of Palamedes. As Hunink points out, there is no external evidence to safely confirm or falsify any of those positions. He therefore elects to treat it simply as it appears, as a finely wrought “literary performance.” I incline towards his view; whatever the relationship between the events leading to its writing and the form in which it has come down to us, we are left with an elaborate and allusive literary tour de force.