INTRODUCTION

a statue in his honour, and Aemilianus Strabo promised to erect another.¹ He was also appointed to the chief-priesthood of the province,² an office which entitled its holder to the first place in the provincial council, and was the highest honour that the province could bestow. Civil office he never held, perhaps never sought.³ His genius was probably far from fitting him for judicial or administrative functions. If we may trust Apollinaris Sidonius⁴, Pudentilla showed herself a model wife by the passionate interest she took in her husband’s work. It is even possible that she bore him a son, as the second book of the de Dogmate Platonis On the Doctrine of Plato is dedicated to ‘my son Faustinus’.⁵ Of his death we know nothing. Testimony as to his appearance is conflicting. His accusers charge him with being a ‘handsome philosopher’.⁶ He replies that his body is worn with the fatigues of study and that his hair is tangled as a lump of tow!⁷

References to Apuleius and his works are not frequent outside the pages of Augustine. Apollinaris Sidonius speaks of ponderis Apuleiani fulmen the thunderbolt of Apuleian weight.⁸ Macrobius alludes casually to his powers as a romancer,⁹ and we learn from Capitolinus¹⁰ that the pretender Clodius Albinus was passionately devoted to him, while Christodorus in his ἔκφρασις descriptive poem hails him with awe as a sage,¹¹ and his peculiarities of style and diction make him

¹ Flor. 16.
² Flor. 16 suscepti sacerdotii of the priesthood undertaken.
³ See note on Apol. 24 splendidissima colonia most splendid colony.
⁴ Epist. ii. 10. 5.
⁵ See also p. xxiv.
⁶ Apol. 4 ad init. A portrait with the inscription Apuleius is preserved on a contorniate at Paris. But it is probably imaginary. See Bernoulli, Röm. Ikon. i. 284-6. A reproduction is in Purser’s Cupid and Psyche, facing p. ix.
⁷ Ib. ad fin.
⁸ Apollin. Sid. Epist. iv. 3. 1.
⁹ Comm. in Somn. Scip. i. 2. 8.
¹⁰ Capitol. Clod. Alb. xii. 12. Severus writing to the senate says maior fuit dolor, quod illum pro litterato laudandum plerique duxistis, cum ille neniis quibusdam anilibus occupatus inter Milesias Punicas Apulei sui et ludicra litteraria consenesceret the greater was the pain, that many of you thought he should be praised as a literary man, when he was busy with certain old women's nursery rhymes, growing old among the Punic Milesian tales of his Apuleius and literary trifles.
¹¹ The passage refers to a statue of Apuleius at Byzantium. Anth. Pal. ii. 303 καὶ νοερῆς ἄφθεγκτα Λατινίδος ὄργια Μούσης | ἄζετο παπταίνων and gazing with awe at the unspoken rites of the intellectual Latin Muse.