Apuleius Madaurensis. Metamorphoses, Book III. Text, Introduction, and Commentary by Leonardo Costantini

Abstract

Reviewed by: Apuleius Madaurensis. Metamorphoses, Book III. Text, Introduction, and Commentary by Leonardo Costantini Donald Lateiner Apuleius Madaurensis. Metamorphoses, Book III. Text, Introduction, and Commentary. By Leonardo Costantini. Leiden and Boston: Brill. 2021. Pp. xiii, 375. The "Groningen Commentaries" on the Metamorphoses began with Rudy van der Paardt's edition of Book 3 (Amsterdam 1971). Recent developments in the study of ancient fictions and of Apuleius with regard to his career, context, and the influences on him have required a new commentary on this book, which relates Lucius' arrest and trial for murder during the parochial Risus festival as well as his transformation into an ass. Costantini differs at points from van der Paardt's predecessor commentary and copiously adduces perceptive but less familiar Italian scholarship. He divides the third book into three principal sections occupying few days: the Risus festival's capital trial (ch. 1–12), Lucius and Photis' erotic pleasures (ch. 13–20), and Lucius' disastrous curiosity and risible transformation (ch. 21–29). The incidents of Pamphile's lust for a handsome blond lad and the consequent (but previously narrated) unheroic "utricide" (3.18) are also covered. Costantini provides a conservative text (printed consecutively, 20–41), a wide-ranging introduction of twenty-seven pages, and commentary on its twenty-nine chapters. Thirteen [End Page 383] chapters offer extended introductions on germane topics, such as "Pamphile turning into an owl: the motif of metamorphic witches" in Chapter 21. Chapter 3 (Comm. 74–89) has an introduction to declamation in the ancient novel and to the head night-watchman's oratorical strategy. Costantini notes that Apuleius presents all the canonical elements of a forensic accusation in the gruesome trial scene interrupting Lucius' witless search for magical transformation. He explicates, for example, puzzling phrases such as praeconis amplo boatu (3.3) by tracing Apuleius' figurative use of a verb initially denoting the bellowing of oxen, first to Varro, but before him, to Ennius and Pacuvius. For further history, Costantini refers readers forward to 5.29 (GCA 2004, 333–334), where we meet Venus, another histrionic seeker of attention, quam maxime boans.1 The mock trial allows the sophist/novelist and the desperate dabbler in magic Lucius to dazzle with inappropriate but otherwise impressive rhetoric of a long literary lineage. In the Introduction to Chapter 4, the author surveys the characters of Met. 3. Here Costantini points out stock comic elements in the maid Photis, the host Milo, the witch Pamphile, Lucius' fabricated latrones, and the real ones by whom he is abducted with their Plautine slapstick, door-banging irruption. Lucius is ass-ish before he becomes Lucius-ass. The "reality-show" drama, as Costantini observes (9, and Comm. 3.3.2–9), features the commander of the night-watch's grotesque narrative and the grieving women "relatives" of the three dead men—magically inflated goat-skin-bags. Forensic oratory and hysteria introduce Lucius' pompous but unprepared defense and "hilarious" (3.12), humiliating moment of truth.2 The Introduction to Chapter 8 examines Apuleius' "baroque aesthetics" (Louis Callebat's phrase),3 situating it in the Antonine epoch, and highlighting its innovative stylist, Fronto the hypochondriac (23). Numidian Fronto, the imperial Tutor to Marcus Aurelius (and Lucius Verus) and consul in 143, wrote a Laudes Fumi et Pulveris (and another essay carefully praising Carelessness) explicitly with a view of producing pleasure, not wisdom. The Frontoniani embraced early Latin writers and popular speech; Apuleius was arguably his most successful enthusiast. The style's characteristics include obscure archaizing, epicisms, neologisms, idiolectic syntax, pleonasms, diminutives, suspected hapax legomena (which may have once been less rare or even colloquial), and colloquial phrases. Is plusculus (3.17.2), for example, archaic or colloquial—or both? Costantini limits the noted effect of Apuleius' Platonism in Book 3 to the "negative characterisation" (21) of Lucius—wisely so. He frequently notes allusions to and quotations of Plautus, Cicero, Vergil, and Ovid, and illustrates how metaliterary references to comedy, tragedy, and epic enrich the narrative texture. Travel narratives invite sudden peripeteiai and inset narratives such as Diophanes the Chaldaean's prophetic words to [End Page 384] young Lucius: gloria satis florida...