Introduction

difficulties, but by practicing as a lawyer he succeeded in making a sufficient income to provide more than adequately for the expenses of this fresh initiation (Metamorphoses, book 11, chapters 28 and 30). While at Rome he made the acquaintance of Aemilianus Strabo and Scipio Orfitus, men of distinguished position, whom he was to meet again when their official career brought them to Africa as proconsuls A high-ranking Roman official acting as a provincial governor. of that province (Florida, chapters 16 and 17).

At last he returned home, and it was probably at this period of his career that he wrote his famous novel, the Metamorphoses or Golden Ass.¹ It is based on the lost work of a certain Lucius of Patras, of which we have another version in the Lucius or the Ass original: "Λούκιος ἢ ὄνος", falsely attributed to Lucian. He enlarged the original by the free insertion of sensational or humorous stories of the kind popularized later by the Decameron of Boccaccio, above all by the insertion of the beautiful fairy-tale of Cupid and Psyche. And then at the end comes the curious personal note, where Lucius, a Greek at the outset of the romance, becomes strangely transformed into a native of Madaura Apuleius's own birthplace, suggesting the novel is semi-autobiographical..

But he did not settle down in his native town. After a time he visited Alexandria, and it was in the course of his return from the capital of Egypt that the crisis in his life occurred, to which we owe that remarkable human document, the Apologia Apuleius's legal defense against charges of magic.. For on his homeward journey he fell sick at Oea, the modern Tripoli.² In this town there dwelt a wealthy lady,

¹ See Introduction to my translation of Metamorphoses.
² See Apologia, chapter 68 and following.