The Works of Apuleius (Golden Ass, God of Socrates, Florida, On the Doctrines of Plato)

...will be found in this volume. It is a clever and amusing performance, having nothing of the tragic earnestness of a man pleading for his life; on the contrary, Apuleius appears, from first to last, to have felt quite secure as to the outcome, and to have thrown himself with great glee into a contest which afforded him such excellent opportunities for displaying his wit, his learning, and his powers of rhetoric. His adversaries had a bad hand to play; they played it right into his, and he made good use of their blunders. The main charge was ridiculous enough, and Apuleius had a ready and sufficient answer for it: "You are surprised," he said, "that a woman should have married again after thirteen years of widowhood; but the real wonder is that she should have remained unmarried so long. You pretend that magic alone could have forced a widow of her years to marry a young man; but that is just the sort of case in which magic would be quite superfluous." As if to give more force to this argument, the prosecutors were foolish enough to lay great stress on the graces and accomplishments of the accused, and to press upon the notice of the court that Apuleius was altogether such a man as was most likely, in the natural course of things, to find favor in a woman's eyes; for he was handsome, and not negligent of his person; he used a mirror; he combed his hair; he actually cleaned his teeth! And this handsome man, who cultivated cleanliness as well as philosophy, had a ready wit and a fluent tongue!

After the defeat of his wife's relations, it seems probable that nothing very remarkable occurred to disturb the even tenor of a life of literary labor to which Apuleius devoted himself. All that is known of this latter part of his career is that he was a most voluminous writer; that he frequently declaimed in public with great applause; that he was a priest of Æsculapius, the patron god of Carthage; that he had the charge of exhibiting gladiatorial shows and wild beast hunts in the province; and that statues were erected in his honor by the senate of Carthage and of other states. It was probably in his later days that he composed his most celebrated work, The Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass; for he neither alludes to it in those passages in which he boasts...