The beginning of the twenty-first century has seen a welcome surge of scholarly interest in Apuleius and different aspects of his literary and philosophical work. There have been several noteworthy attempts to reassess both Apuleius’ position as an author and orator within the context of the Second Sophistic and his Platonist allegiance as a philosopher. The two books reviewed here are both welcome additions to recent scholarship, and both have important contributions to make of different kinds.
Claudio Moreschini is no stranger to Apuleian scholarship; he has been publishing steadily on the topic since the 1960s, including his seminal Apuleio e il platonismo (1978). His 2015 monograph sets out to offer a holistic account of Apuleius’ work and to synthesise the dichotomy that has tended to characterise scholarly studies on Apuleius, namely the contrast between the literary/sophistic and the philosophical sides of Apuleius.
The Introduction sets the stage by providing an overview of recent scholarship on Middle Platonism and Apuleius’ position therein. It powerfully argues that Apuleius would have wanted to be known ‘as a philosopher and, at the same time, as a man of letters (a sophist)’ (27), and that this fusion of philosophy and sophistic is precisely what constitutes the distinctive character of Apuleius’ work.
Ch. 1 focuses on the two evidently epideictic works, the Apologia (or De magia) and the Florida, and Apuleius’ role as a popular, but firmly Platonist philosopher. M. gives a helpful, if rather descriptive summary of the content of these two works and points out their Platonising elements, which Apuleius, operating mainly as a sophist, (justifiably) presented in a non-precise and non-scholastic way.
Chs 2 and 3 are dedicated to the best known of Apuleius’ works, namely the Metamorphoses (ch. 2) and the embedded story of Cupid and Psyche (ch. 3). As M. observes, most of the recent scholarship has tended either to focus almost exclusively on narratology, or to read the work in too philosophical a fashion, resorting to ‘some sort of “pan-Platonism”’ (59). Both chapters provide extensive, but rather densely written critical surveys of the different interpretations of the Metamorphoses and its centrepiece story. M. acknowledges the presence of Platonic doctrine both in the novel as a whole and in the story of Cupid and Psyche, through echoes from the Phaedrus and the Symposium. However, he argues that in this work Apuleius operates as a ‘Halbphilosoph’: he both wishes to provide some elementary Platonising philosophical instruction (docere) and to offer entertainment to his audience of pepaideumenoi (delectare). Although M.’s measured philosophical reading of the Metamorphoses is welcome, his emphasis on the presence of only non-profound Platonist doctrine seemingly undermines the starting point of this book, namely the desire to marry the literary with the serious philosophical side of Apuleius.
Ch. 4 deals with Apuleius’ demonology as presented in the De deo Socratis, a work in which M. sees a clearer and more meaningful intermingling of Platonist philosophy and epideictic rhetoric. He argues that in Apuleius we find a coherent and systematic exposition of typically Middle Platonist demonology (118). He also provides instructive comparisons with other Middle Platonists (Alcinous, Plutarch, Maximus of Tyre), thus placing Apuleius firmly within the philosophical context of Middle Platonism. Whilst the presentation of Apuleian demonology here is comprehensive and clear, it could have benefited from a more extensive comparison with Plutarch and his similarly-titled De genio Socratis.
Ch. 5 sketches out the intellectual milieu to which Apuleius belonged. The chapter is full of detailed information about Apuleius’ contemporaries, but it does not always draw connections that actually throw light on Apuleius’ work. Moreover, its position in the middle of the monograph creates an unhelpful break between the more literary-epideictic chapters and the philosophical chapters that follow.
Chs 6, 7 and 8 form the philosophical core of M.’s study. The first of these chapters gives a descriptive overview of the three hard-core philosophical works attributed to Apuleius: De Platone et eius dogmate (a manual of established Platonist doctrine on physics and ethics), De mundo (a translation into Latin of a Greek treatise Peri kosmou attributed to Aristotle) and De interpretatione (a work on logic). M. defends the authenticity of the first two and argues for a late chronology, but firmly doubts the authenticity of the De interpretatione. Ch. 7 offers a detailed presentation of Apuleius’ Platonist physics, structured around key themes (god, matter, ideas, cosmic soul and cosmology, creation of the world, providence, time, soul). Ch. 8 focuses on Apuleius’ Platonist ethics, again thematically presented (goods, oikeiosis, virtues, goods and evils, rhetoric, the sage, likeness to God and following God). M.’s comprehensive accounts of Apuleius’ physical and ethical doctrines are heavily focused on the purely philosophical works; there are only a few scattered references to the presence of these doctrines in the literary/epideictic works. Yet the comprehensive nature of these accounts comes at the cost of depth: critical discussion of the doctrines is lacking, partly as a result of the sheer volume of information that is presented. Perhaps the most impressive and helpful aspects of these chapters are the systematic comparisons of Apuleian doctrine with other Middle Platonists and the numerous references to parallel passages in other writers. The reader does thereby get a sense of Apuleius’ place within the wider Middle Platonist context.
Finally, Ch. 9 discusses Apuleius’ Nachleben in the Christian authors, with emphasis on Arnobius and Augustine and his polemic against Apuleius’ demonology. This is a fitting final chapter, bringing to a close a rounded discussion of Apuleius and his work.
Overall, this monograph is an erudite, rich and enlightening overview of Apuleius’ work and his position in the context of the Second Sophistic and Middle Platonism. However, whether it has succeeded in marrying the literary/sophistic with the hard-core philosophical side of Apuleius is, in my view, more doubtful. The literary works and the philosophical works are still kept apart, and M.’s attempt to tone down the ‘pan-Platonism’ of the Metamorphoses somewhat contradicts the portrait of Apuleius the philosopher. The book offers a truly comprehensive account of Apuleius and his works, but the wealth of information often comes at the cost of detailed analysis and critical reflection.
Justin A. Stover's book offers a critical edition and English translation, with introduction and commentary, of the Latin philosophical text discovered in 1949 by Raymond Klibansky in the thirteenth-century Codex Reginensis in the Vatican Library. The text appears to be a fairly idiosyncratic epitome (henceforth Expositio) of Plato's dialogues, with a particularly interesting section in the middle (§14) discussing the classification of Plato's works into three categories: the dialogues representing Socratic philosophy (Republic, Euthyphro, Menexenus, Apology, Crito, Phaedo); the Laws and Epinomis which reflect Plato's own philosophy; and the dialogues with Pythagorean and Parmenidean origin (Epistulae, Parmenides, Sophist, Statesman, Timaeus, Critias). S.’s main thesis is that the Expositio should be attributed to Apuleius and identified with the third, and hitherto lost, book of Apuleius’ De Platone et eius dogmate. This is a bold position, and S. builds a well-structured and expertly argued — if not always thoroughly persuasive — case in its favour.
Ch. 1 discusses the manuscript transmission of the text and, in particular, the relationship of the Codex Reginensis with other extant sources for and references to this text. S. asserts, without extensive evidence, that the work in the Reginensis must have an ancient origin because ‘no known scholar between the seventh century and the date of the Vatican manuscript was capable of composing this work’ (11). And he goes on to argue — through a technically excellent comparison of the Reginensis with the manuscript tradition of Apuleius’ other philosophical works — that the text in the Reginensis stems from an earlier stage of the archetype of the other extant manuscripts of Apuleius.
Ch. 2 attempts to define the genre of the Expositio by placing it within the context of the scholastic Platonist tradition of the second century a.d., and by comparing it with works such as abbrevationes, placita and isagogae. The Expositio, S. argues, in effect distils complex Platonic dialogues into simplified and abbreviated doctrines. The idiosyncratic taxonomy of the dialogues therein has no obvious parallels in other similar Platonist writings, though S. suggests, not very convincingly in my view, that the author of the Expositio must have been influenced by Thrasyllus’ arrangement of the Platonic dialogues into tetralogies (30).
In chs 3 and 4, S. lays down the case for Apuleian authorship. He firstly (ch. 3) focuses on textual evidence and stylometric analysis, and examines parallel texts (or ‘intertexts’) which show close linguistic correspondence between the Expositio and the De Platone. He argues that the eccentric use of words, style and rhythmical patterns in the Expositio is very similar to the type of language and style that characterise Apuleius’ other works. Particularly impressive is the section on computational analysis of texts by Apuleius and other Latin philosophical works which ‘offer strong quantitative arguments in favour of the view that the author of the Expositio is Apuleius himself’ (42). S. further strengthens his case for Apuleian authorship through an expert analysis (in ch. 4) of the manuscript tradition and transmission of the philosophical works of Apuleius alongside that of the Expositio.
Ch. 5 forms the core of S.’s interpretation of the Expositio as the third (missing) book of Apuleius’ De Platone. S. argues that the Expositio is in effect an index of Platonic doctrines, codified from the dialogues, that ‘retains the integrity of the original works … while using homogenization of language and phrasing to create links between thematically similar passages’ (63). S.’s most innovative, but also controversial thesis comes at the end of this chapter: the Expositio is both Apuleius’ own compendium of notes from his study of Plato's dialogues, which formed the substrate for the doxographical two books of the De Platone, and is in fact the third book of De Platone, which completes the introduction to Plato's philosophy by adding at the end of the doctrinal analysis an index of the Platonic doctrines as distilled from the dialogues (following the model of Thrasyllus: 74).
S.’s book culminates in the editio princeps, translation and commentary of the Expositio (now known as the Liber Tertius of Apuleius’ De Platone). The edition comes with a thorough critical apparatus as well as an extensive list of internal cross-references, showing how ‘deeply the principle of indexing is woven into the fabric of the text’ (92).
Overall, S. has produced a philologically robust edition of a hitherto neglected Latin philosophical text that is accompanied by a novel, well-argued critical interpretation. The case for the attribution of this text to Apuleius is persuasive, as it consists of a careful analysis of textual evidence corroborated by an expert reconstruction of the manuscript tradition. The reading of this text as the lost third book of the De Platone is innovative, but not entirely convincing. We have no compelling indication, other than the supposed similarity with Thrasyllus’ compendium on Plato's dialogues (not extant), that an index of Platonic doctrines summarising the dialogues would be the natural complement to the doxography of Plato's physics and ethics in the two books of De Platone. Instead, what we would have more naturally expected is a book (or at least a section) on logic–dialectic that would complete the standard tripartite division of Plato's philosophy, as Apuleius himself presents early on in the De Platone (naturalis-rationalis-moralis, 1.3.187). S. suggests that the section on logic was most likely appended at the end of the first book and was somehow lost in transmission (56). But perhaps this is one assumption too many, in an effort to make an admittedly intelligent and creative interpretation fit with inconclusive evidence.
