Within the Terentian corpus the senes (‘old men’) Simo (of the Andria) and Chremes (of the Heauton Timorumenos) enjoy an extraordinary understanding of the conventions of Roman comedy. While slaves in Plautine comedy certainly exhibit similar knowledge of their genre's conventions, as do the young men who are allied with them (one thinks of Charinus' prologue to the Mercator), Plautine senes do not usually share in this awareness. This paper focuses on the Andria's Simo and the Heauton's Chremes because—despite their unusual generic knowledge, which each man reveals in several metatheatrical remarks—they nevertheless misinterpret their slaves. Indeed, we shall see that both men's knowledge of the character type of the clever slave leads to their belief that they can control the slaves and see through their attempts at deception. However, in the end both men actually deceive themselves because their knowledge leads them to see deceptions where there are none—to interpret truth as a fiction contrived by their slaves. Interestingly, Simo and Chremes have something else in common: they both appear in plays whose prologues feature references to an unnamed opponent of Terence—the maleuolus uetus poeta (‘spiteful old poet’). This individual is alleged to have charged Terence with (1) mixing the plots of multiple Greek comedies together in the composition of his own plays, and (2) accepting the help of powerful friends in the writing of his comedies.

…sed pro his praeoptare me fateor uno chartario calamo me reficere poemata omnigenus apta uirgae, lyrae, socco, coturno, item satiras ac griphos, item historias uarias rerum nec non orationes laudatas disertis nec non dialogos laudatos philosophis atque haec et alia eiusdem modi tarn Graece quam Latine, gemino uoto, pari studio, simili stilo.

Apuleius Florida 9

…but in place of these I confess that I prefer to employ one single reed to bring to life on papyrus poems of all kinds, ones attuned to the rod, the lyre, the slipper, the buskin, likewise satires and riddles, likewise various accounts of things, and of course speeches that win plaudits from experts, and again dialogues that win plaudits from philosophers—and these and other things of the same kind in both Greek and Latin: double offering, equal application, similar style.

non respondeo tibi, Aemiliane, quem colam βασιλέα; quin si ipse proconsul in-terroget, quid sit deus meus, taceo.

Apuleius Apology 65

I am not telling you, Aemilianus, who I worship as my king; nay, even if the proconsul himself should question me as to what my god is, my lips are sealed.

‘immo uero,’ inquam, ‘impertite sermone non quidem curiosum, sed qui uelim scire uel cuncta, uel certe plurima.’

Apuleius Metamorphoses 1.2

Apuleius of Madauros was a Romano-African, a provincial from Africa Proconsularis who, most of the time, conveys the impression of being fully assimilated, more steeped in Graeco-Roman culture than his contemporaries in the cultural centre, disdainful of his countrymen who know no Latin, and even an agent of Romanisation. Yet, given the new ways of thinking about provincial identity and centre vs periphery under the Roman Empire, it may be time to revisit the complicated hybrid and fluctuating identity of someone who, on the one hand, actively imparted Roman culture to his homeland and, on the other, pronounces his allegiance to Carthage (over Athens and Rome) and who, at least in certain contexts, refuses to be ashamed of his Numidian-Gaetulian roots. Weighing both Apuleius' few explicit statements about his allegiances to his homeland (and rejection thereof) and his fictionalised portraits of cultural outsiders, this essay argues that Apuleius expresses a dual and conflicted sense of Romano-African identity. Reading Florida 3 (Marsyas and Apollo) against the grain of current scholarship, I argue that Apuleius is not simply an Apollo, but both a Marsyas and an Apollo, with implications for a reading of what might be provincial and African in his works.

This paper is concerned with the impact made on Mark Antony by Cicero's First Philippic. Although the speech outwardly maintains a conciliatory attitude, it certainly upset Antony. Scholars have noted criticism of Antony in the First Philippic, both political and personal in character, which would not have pleased him. The following discussion argues that there are numerous associations with the stock figure of the ‘tyrant’ which would have been displeasing too. Such a vein of criticism in effect bridges the personal and political dimensions in potentially devastating fashion.

The First Philippic was delivered in difficult circumstances. Brutus and Cassius sent a letter to Antony on 4 August 44 BCE and concluded with a stark warning: neque, quam diu uixerit Caesar, sed quam non diu regnarit, fac cogites (‘keep in mind not the length of Caesar's life but the short time he ruled [sc. as a tyrant]’, Cic. Fam. 11.3). On 1 September, the senate met to consider a proposal which would have seen an extra day in honour of the deified Caesar added to all public thanksgivings (Cic. Phil. 1.13, 2.110). Antony was angered by Cicero's failure to attend the meeting. He apparently left Rome later that day for Tibur. His consular colleague Dolabella summoned a meeting of the senate ‘for the next day, and this time Cicero attended. It was at the meeting of 2 September that Cicero delivered his First Philippic. In comparison to later speeches in the Philippics corpus, the First Philippic has seemed to many a moderate and polite speech that concentrated upon Antony's political behaviour and left the door ajar for future cooperation. It certainly contrasts greatly with the Second Philippic, which is well known for its bitter and sustained personal invective. Nonetheless, the First Philippic was enough to make Antony angry and it is worth re-examining the reasons for this reaction. In particular, allusions in Philippic 1 to Antony as a tyrant and to death as the fate of tyrants, especially in the wake of Caesar's assassination, were probably interpreted by contemporaries as more sinister threats than they have generally been recognised to be by modern readers.

This paper rereads Apuleius' Apologia through its Platonic readings. I claim that the recent focus on the ‘literarisation’ of the speech based in the speaker's learned use of literary citations needs to be contextualised within the Apuleian corpus as a whole and that one way of doing this is to emphasise the role of Platonic citation in the speech. I argue that Apuleius' strategy of literary citation as juridical defence in the first half of the speech (4-65) undergoes a process of ‘Platonisation’ that relies upon the direct quotation of Plato's Greek. I show how this ‘Platonisation’ chimes with two related themes in Apuleius' brand of Platonism that is manifest across his multifarious corpus: firstly, the role of the philosopher's biography as a heuristic device for encouraging an induction into philosophy and, secondly, the uniting of Platonic philosophical theory with Apuleius' particular literary (dramatic and rhetorical) concerns. From this basis, I show that in the second half of the speech (66-103), in spite of the absence of literary and Platonic citation, the general ideas of citation and Platonism developed in the first half are still very much at work in the contested place of Apuleius' wife Pudentilla's Greek letter as evidence for both the prosecution and the defence. While the citation of the letter by both sides raises some troubling questions for the role of literary citation in the first half of the speech, it operates as a powerful argument for the dissemination of Apuleius' Platonic message beyond the event of the trial.

ecce inter medios caedum Tiburna furores
fulgenti dextram mucrone armata mariti
et laeua infelix ardentem lampada quassans
squalentemque erecta comam ac liuentia planctu
pectora nudatis ostendens saeua lacertis
ad tumulum Murri super ipsa cadauera fertur.
(Punica 2.665-70)

So Silius reintroduces the figure of Tiburna into the mass suicide at Saguntum in Punica 2 before concluding with a description of her suicide. The fury that surrounds Tiburna is not surprising of a female figure in Latin epic, yet her suicide in this context is perhaps at odds with the literary tradition in that it is not the result of erotic passion but political despair. The suicide of female figures has a long literary tradition going back to Greek tragedy (Antigone, Deianira, Phaedra) as well as the Roman paradigms, Lucretia and Dido. In the epics of the Flavian period, Statius, Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus all offer up their own depiction of female characters who take their own lives. But unlike their literary sisters, whose suicides are an aspect of or the result of their gender, the Flavian epic heroines commit suicide despite their gender, a phenomenon that demands explanation.

Seruitium amoris, the notion of love as slavery, is a frequent theme in Roman elegy. It inverts Roman reality in representing a free Roman citizen dominated by a woman, evidently from a lower social class. The elegiac amator (‘lover’) elevates his beloved puella (‘girl’) and treats her as a slave would treat his mistress (domina), obeying her orders and yielding to her wishes and moods. Although it has been widely observed that Lucius, the protagonist of Apuleius' Metamorphoses, acts like a slave towards his beloved, the slave girl Fotis, the idea of elegiac seruitium amoris has not been analysed systematically as an explanation of this strange relationship, and affinities between the Metamorphoses and Roman elegy have even been denied altogether. To date, most investigations have focused not on the mode but on the consequences of Lucius' servile behaviour, culminating in his transformation into an ass and a series of painful adventures brought to an end by the intervention of the goddess Isis.

My discussion will argue that in presenting Lucius and Fotis as an elegiac couple, Apuleius adds yet another form of love to the broad spectrum of relationships between the sexes that he presents in the Metamorphoses. It will also contend that by introducing the theme of seruitium amoris, he helps his audience interpret the complex and richly described relationship between protagonist and slave, a key theme throughout the work.

In the course of the evolution of an epic hero, there comes a point at which he has to make a choice between two ways of life. It is a motif that goes right back to the Iliad:

In the chapter called ‘Terce’ of the Second Day, the Franciscan monk William of Baskerville and his young apprentice Adso visit the scriptorium of an abbey in northern Italy, and discover, among the papers of the murdered Greek translator Venantius, a surprising text:

This paper will consider the 1887 Japanese translation of Apuleius' Golden Ass from the angle of classical reception. Although this was the first translation of Greco-Roman literature to appear in modern Japanese, it has, at least in print, never been examined by a classicist before. With the rising interest in the study of classical receptions, including those taking place outside the West, the time may be ripe for a serious look at this early Meiji translation by Morita Shiken—its content, source, intellectual climate surrounding its production, and its own subsequent reception in Japan.

The ancient novel, as Whitmarsh observes, is a genre uniquely suited for reception studies, especially of the more usual kind that is concerned with the modern period. Although a late and ignoble genre within antiquity, despite its often considerable linguistic and literary artistry, it came to enjoy relatively wide cultural recognition and circulation in the early modern period, before being outshone by the modern Western novel and sinking back into relative obscurity again both in the public and in academia—and its literary character is still very much controversial, to the extent that it is debated whether the ancient genre may justifiably be called ‘novel’. The history of the reception of the novel therefore may show more intriguing twists and contradictions than that of such established and uncontroversially ‘great’ genres as epic or tragedy.