Apuleius and Antonine Rome: Historical Essays by Keith Bradley (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Apuleius and Antonine Rome: Historical Essays by Keith Bradley Stephen Harrison Keith Bradley. Apuleius and Antonine Rome: Historical Essays. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Phoenix supplementary volume 50. Pp. xviii + 397. US$75. ISBN 9781442 644205. Bradley here collects a series of important essays on the historical and cultural context of Apuleius, which forms a welcome counterpart to the largely literary study of this author in the last generation. His general claim is that the works of Apuleius, not only the forensic oration Apologia, which has an established date and place in Roman North Africa in 158/159 ad and the Florida, extracts from speeches made in Carthage in the 160s, but also the novel Metamorphoses or Golden Ass, which he dates to the 160s, can tell us more about the cultural and social context of their composition than has previously been recognized. This is undoubtedly so, and Bradley, as a distinguished Roman social historian, is well placed to argue the case. The 12 essays in this book fall into three categories: those on the Apologia, those on the Metamorphoses, and those on the other works and the more general cultural context. The three essays focusing on the Apologia (Chapters 1, 3, and 8) rightly emphasize the importance of this speech as “a document of social and cultural life” (3) and give us a good idea of the kind of community for which the speech was written. In Chapter 1 Bradley (alongside others, at least for Apuleius’ wife, Pudentilla) is keen to flesh out the social positions of the characters involved in the court case and brings in some new and fascinating local evidence. Here and elsewhere Bradley makes good use of art and archaeology alongside literary sources, a key benefit of this book, as of his knowledge of ancient magic, a major element in the speech. Especially important is his insistence that Apuleius was perceived as a “hostile intruder” into the local elite: Bradley’s expertise in Roman family history allows him to tease out in Chapter 3 a tight local structure of property and marriage, which the interloper disturbed (in particular his suggestion that levirate [End Page 119] marriage was a local custom is attractive), and he rightly sees that Apuleius in the speech presents himself as a model of elite Roman culture in order to impress a provincial audience. Chapter 8 provides an interesting analysis of Apuleius’ presentation of his own dress and appearance in the speech as befitting a hard-working orator as well as an ascetic philosopher, pointing to “the code-like capacity of dress and demeanour” in the Roman Empire (151) and rightly suggests that Apuleius sought impact by claiming to embody the Roman tradition of the learned orator as established by Cicero and Quintilian. These essays are an important addition to the literature on the speech. The five essays focusing on the Metamorphoses (Chapters 2, 4, 5, 11, and 12) look at some important cultural and historical themes of Apuleius’ fiction. Chapter 2 argues that religious conversion to the cult of a particular deity, so often deployed in analyzing Metamorphoses 11, is a Christianising anachronism not really appropriate to polytheistic pagan antiquity, and points to the switch between Isis and Osiris in Book 11 as evidence; this is certainly worth thinking about, though some may think that it does not do justice to Lucius’ intense (if sequential) monotheism. Chapter 4 brings in another part of Bradley’s expertise, looking at the analogy between slaves and animals as subhuman in Roman culture and as recipients of bad treatment in the novel and elsewhere: Lucius-ass’s retention of human feelings and values is nicely seen as mirroring the retained human dignity of the resistant slave. Chapter 5 again employs Bradley’s family researches in arguing that “the diversity of family life on display in the Metamorphoses is to be regarded as an authentic representation of the diversity of family life in the Roman world of the high imperial age in which Apuleius lived” (88). Here one can agree that the cultural values and models deployed are indeed those of Antonine Rome, but the particular prevalence of adultery in the novel (for...