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PSEUDO-APULEIUS’ DE FATO
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2021
Abstract
The note presents the discovery of a spurious Apuleian work entitled De fato from MS n° 1040 at the Bibliothèque patrimoniale Villon in Rouen. This work is, in fact, a series of excerpts from Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis Book 1.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
References
1 Apuleius’ name is misspelt in both cases: cf. fol. 49v, col. 2, line 13: incipit Apuleus de fato; fol. 54v, col. 2, lines 6–7: explicit Apuleus de fato. Reynolds, L.D. (ed.), Texts and Transmission. A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford, 1983), 67Google Scholar mentions the Rouen MS in the context of Cicero's speeches and gives a reference in passing to the De fato therein preserved, without discussing or disputing the Apuleian authorship.
2 The manuscript is written in an early Northern Textualis and was likely produced in a French scriptorium; on this script, see Derolez, A., The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books (Cambridge, 2003), 72–101Google Scholar. The parchment leaves are ruled with a sharp point and divided into two columns, each of 40 lines. The folios I inspected (via high-resolution digitizations) show the intervention of a second hand—contemporaneous to the scribe—correcting small lacunae interlinearly or wider sauts du même au même in the margins. Later, a humanistic hand added a few variants in the margins.
3 These different sections of the Mathesis in fols. 54r and 54v are introduced by enlarged capitals in red or blue ink.
4 Text and paragraph subdivision of De deo Socratis after Magnaldi, G., Apulei opera philosophica (Oxford, 2020)Google Scholar. On the medieval circulation of Apuleius’ philosophica, see Reynolds (n. 1), 16–18; Klibansky, R. and Regen, F., Die Handschriften der philosophischen Werke des Apuleius. Ein Beitrag zur Überlieferungsgeschichte (Göttingen, 1993), 46–52Google Scholar; Carver, R.H.F., The Protean Ass. The Metamorphoses of Apuleius from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Oxford, 2007), 59–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Apuleius’ presence in Augustine's works, see Hagendahl, H., Augustine and the Latin Classics, 2 vols. (Göteborg, 1967), 1.17–28, 2.680–7Google Scholar.
5 For a handy overview, see Harrison, S.J., Apuleius. A Latin Sophist (Oxford, 2000, repr. with rev. 2008), 13–14 and n. 57Google Scholar. To this list we may add a spurious prognostic text transmitted under the title Sphaera Apulei Platonici de uita et morte, or Ratio sphaerae Pythagorae philosophi quam Apuleius descripsit, on which see Liuzza, R.M., ‘The sphere of life and death: time, medicine, and the visual imagination’, in O'Keeffe, K. O'Brien and Orchard, A. (edd.), Latin Learning and English Lore, 2 vols. (Toronto, 2005), 2.28–52Google Scholar; Chardonnens, L.S., Anglo-Saxon Prognostics, 900–1100 (Leiden, 2007), 181–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar.