The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses)

In identifying himself in this way, Apuleius—as would not have been the case had he simply named himself—was deliberately drawing attention to his public persona. He was a notable figure in his province, the recipient of numerous civic honors and holder of an important priesthood. His reputation rested on two pillars: his oratorical powers and his status as a Platonic philosopher. St. Augustine calls him “the famous Platonist.” 34 His native place was clearly proud of its distinguished son; there has survived the base of a statue put up there at public expense “To the Platonic philosopher,” which can hardly commemorate anybody but Apuleius. 35 Lucius is not a Platonic philosopher, but he boasts (1.2 and note) of his descent from Plutarch, who was a declared Platonist and who had written a work On Isis and Osiris, in which he set out to make philosophical sense of the gruesome Egyptian myth of the murder and dismemberment of Osiris by Typhon. 36 He had also written a treatise On Curiosity, 37 very much to Lucius’ address. Obviously, the author of The Golden Ass cannot be identified tout court (simply put) with its narrator, 38 but equally the ass and the Platonic philosopher cannot be considered to have nothing to do with each other. A strong argument to the contrary is the presence in the book of the story of Cupid and Psyche, its structural and thematic centerpiece.

Though often, for understandable reasons, detached and edited or translated separately, Cupid and Psyche is an organic and integral part of The Golden Ass. Structurally it is firmly anchored in the “Charite-complex” (above, §5), the story being continued across the divisions between books 4–5 and 5–6, another technique characteristic of Ovid in the Metamorphoses. 39 Thematically the story of a, or rather the, human soul in quest of salvation through union with the divine is a parable for what is happening to Lucius even as he listens to it, though as with everything else he sees, hears, and suffers, it all goes in at one of his ass’s ears and out at the other. It calls attention to itself as a unique feat of literary combination: a fairytale plot of a traditional type transformed into a universal allegory by the symbolic status of its protagonists, Love and the Soul, and presented in terms of a Platonizing duality. 40

It is this last element that is important in the present context. In his contribution to the discussion in Plato’s Symposium, Pausanias had distinguished between two Aphrodites—Urania (Heavenly) and Pandemos (Vulgar)—and two Eroses to correspond, their respective provinces being the love of souls and bodies (180d2–181b8). Apuleius was familiar with the passage, which he paraphrases in his Apology (ch. 12).