Introduction

by Odessa Asp

I had never heard of Apuleius’s Apologia when Professor Francese proposed putting together a commentary on it – but it didn’t matter. He could have proposed any text at all and I would have jumped at the chance. He has cultivated such a collegial, spirited and cordial working environment for students of all ages and levels of Latin ability, and working with our Dickinson Summer Latin crew is always such a powerful good in my life that I wanted to be first in line to join in whatever it would be.

When I found out the basic premise of his Apologia – namely, that Apuleius was defending himself against a charge of witchcraft – I was unsurprised. After all, his Metamorphoses has witchcraft and magic as central themes; it isn't hard to imagine that people might have thought he was involved in such practices. I was also excited at the prospect of seeing what exact actions he had been accused of and how he defended himself; there would certainly be some interesting information in this text about how witchcraft was perceived outside a fictional setting where details might derive from literary tropes (reversing the courses of rivers, causing stones to rise from the bottom of the sea, e.g.) rather than actual contemporary understanding of what the practice of magic looked like.

Over the course of the next three years of reading and re-reading the text, annotating and editing the notes, I not only learned a great deal about Roman conceptions of religious and magical practices, but found many other reasons to love this speech, a few of which I will outline here, starting with possibly the most boring but also the most beneficial:

Why Read Apuleius's Apologia?

Prose Grammar

When it comes to reading Latin, my first love is with the poets. By the time I started attending Summer Latin at Dickinson I had just finished a full read-through of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Vergil’s Georgics, and was following it up with his Eclogues and then a plan to read one book per month of his Aeneid the following year. I had, however, always found Cicero somewhat tedious and Tacitus impenetrable. 

I have found Apuleius to be a great help in reading and appreciating other prose authors: Apuleius can be wordy, but not as wordy as Cicero; he is elliptical, but nowhere near as elliptical as Tacitus. In the last year I have read the first two of Cicero's Philippics, helped along the way by many of the oratorical and semantic signposts that I have grown familiar with from reading Apuleius' Apologia. I have also finally gotten past the first two pages of Tacitus's Historiae. In writing notes for Apuleius's Apologia I have been careful to notice when words and thoughts have been left in ellipse and to think through their accurate summary or replacement – in this way I've honed the skill of mentally filling in the blanks, which is essential to wrangling Tacitus's more loose and elliptical style.

Archaic and Colloquial Expressions

One of the oddities we noticed in reading through the Apologia was how many rare forms and words in the Apologia are only otherwise attested in Plautus. This observation led to discussions of whether these were meant as archaisms used for stylistic effect (grandiose or comic), or whether these were elements of colloquial Latin that merely went unattested between the two authors because the preserved classical authors avoided them. I don’t know whether there will ever be an answer to this question but now it’s one I can barely stop thinking about. At any rate, if you want to read Plautus next, you’ll at the very least recognize the heck out of ‘cedo’ (‘gimme’) by the time you do.

Humor & Sarcasm

Apuleius is funny in this speech. I remember the first time I noticed, and was taken aback – wait, was that sarcasm? It was! And then it never seemed to stop. I was careful to mark the sarcastic comments as such in the notes and, where the force of the sarcasm was a little more obscure, to explain that as well. Several times I actually found myself laughing aloud at a remark of his.

Not only did this pervasive ironic humor make the text delightful read, it also may have served a point in his defense. At the climactic moment of the speech, when he finally addresses the main piece of evidence presented by his accusers of his engaging in sorcery – namely, a letter from his wife which seemed to claim that Apuleius was indeed a sorcerer and had cast a spell on her to make her fall in love with him – what was his defense? She was being sarcastic. She was speaking ironically in order to say the very opposite of the explicit text of the letter – something which Apuleius had been "priming the pump" for, as it were, by doing the same thing constantly to his accusers and their ridiculous accusations in the build-up to his big reveal.

Incidental Cultural Information

As with many texts, some of the most interesting pieces of Apuleius’s Apologia are the incidental details which give us a sneak peek into life in the Roman Empire. Most famously, this work gives us the true identity of Catullus’s Lesbia, as well as names associated associated with the other puellae of the elegiac era. Beyond that, I never even knew to be curious about how someone’s age might have been confirmed for the sake of a trial before Apuleius took us through the steps – and when Apuleius complains that Aemilianus never even puts wreaths on the branches of trees on his farm, we catch a little peek of something that must have been common rustic practice for those without the means to build shrines on their property. The text is rich with little gems like these.

Notes on Notes (or: My Apologia)

I’d like to take a minute to explain a basic set of precepts which have underscored my writing process for anyone who might take the following exceptions to the grammar notes which accompany this text.

Why Are There So Many Notes?

As someone whose constant experience with commentaries has been to find plenty of notes on the things that I had already figured out on my own but absolute silence on the one thing that was tripping me up, I wanted to be comprehensive and not let that one person down. If you don’t need the note, feel free to skip right past it, and spare a thought for the person who might. 

Why Are the Notes So Repetitive?

I always wanted to keep in mind “those of you just joining us” as we went along, with the personal opinion that “see note on … “ notes are annoying and disruptive of the reading experience. I don’t think that many people are going to want to read the entire speech, especially not at the high school and college levels at which this commentary is aimed. 

But that’s perfectly fine! There are lots of great individual sections on a wide variety of interesting topics. For people looking for a short snippet of interest, or teachers looking for an interesting prose selection for the new AP curriculum, I am including in this introduction a list of some interesting topics with section numbers and short descriptions.

Why Do You Translate So Many Words and Phrases?

Because honestly nothing beats the dopamine hit of finding a perfect phrase that encapsulates the meaning in modern, colloquial English while allowing the grammar of the section to remain intact. Let me have this.