Apuleius and Antonine Rome: Historical Essays by Keith Bradley

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 213 that Carlon seeks—because there is a readerly element here—involves much speculation about his authorial intent. Speculation is useful, and sometimes necessary, but it also opens the door to variability of interpretation and compels the author to declare rather than prove that something is true. This inevitably leaves the reader wondering: just how consciously and cannily did Pliny exploit the women of his letters in the pursuit of self-aggrandizement? Mount Allison University Leslie Shumka Apuleius and Antonine Rome: Historical Essays. By Keith Bradley. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (Phoenix Supplementary Volumes 50). 2012. Pp. xii, 97, 14 images. This is a great book by a major Roman social historian that vastly enriches a reading of Apuleius. Composed of eight previously published essays and four new ones, the book paints a vivid picture of the sociocultural and material realities lurking behind and embedded in the works of Apuleius. One of the recurring points in Bradley’s book is that “all works of literature are historical documents” (231), and the project of the book is to point out the particular nature of these realities, partly as a corrective to literary readings that ignore them. So, like Bradley’s other work, the book is intensely interdisciplinary, using all evidence at hand. The previously published essays have long been recognized for their importance in understanding Apuleius in his context—several already core articles in the field—but it has not always been easy to keep track of them all, for which reason this collected volume, along with its new contributions, is very welcome. The twelve essays in this volume are arranged in their order of composition from 1997 to 2012 and have not been reordered or revised, although some are given a postscript and some an endnote.1 The book thus remains a collection of discrete essays which, however diffuse, cohere and together admirably recover the world of Apuleius. One of the great joys of this book is Bradley’s masterful ability to evoke the sights, sounds, colors, and striking cultural mixtures that constituted this complex world, pieced together with deceptive ease. For example, the setting of the Apology: “Within sight of the sea, and with the commotion of the forum in the background, it was from the tribunal in the basilica at Sabratha in all probability that Claudius Maximus tried Apuleius” (5). (In Chapter Eight, he adds that the smell of fish was also doubtless in the air, Sabratha being a garum-producing city.) Describing the theater of Carthage “of Vitruvian design” where Apuleius delivered the Florida, he mentions its location above a Punic burial ground and takes us to the top where “there was probably a colonnaded portico of green marble” (133). We hear of Neo-Punic names like Iddibal, son of Balsillac, grandson of 1 The twelve essays are: 1. “Law, Magic and Culture in Apuleius’ Apology”; 2. “Contending with Conversion: Reflections on the Re-Formation of Lucius the Ass”; 3. “Romanitas and the Roman Family: The Evidence of Apuleius’ Apology”; 4. “Animalizing the Slave: The Truth of Fiction”; 5. “Fictive Families: Family and Household in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses”; 6. “Sacrificing the Family: Christian Martyrs and their Kin”; 7. “Apuleius and Carthage”; 8. “Appearing for the Defence: Apuleius on Display”; 9. “Apuleius and the Sub-Saharan Slave Trade”; 10. “Apuleius and Jesus”; 11. “Lucius and Isis: History in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses”; 12. “Apuleius and Adultery in the Age of the Antonines.” The last four are new. 214 PHOENIX Annobal, from Lepcis, and patron deities like Shadrapa and Milk’Ashtart who co-exist with imported Roman deities. The detail itself is so rich that the reader feels present in the theater, at the trial, and walking around the city of Carthage. Both by dense description and by argument, Bradley has changed the common perception of Apuleius’ milieu, revealing a world only partly displayed in his writings, which tend to suppress the Punic and parade the Roman. Chapters One, Three, Seven, Eight, and Nine emphasize the strong persistence of pre-Roman culture in North Africa, shown in bilingual inscriptions, native gods, Punic architectural forms, and demographics revealing the low percentage of those of Roman blood and a surprising...