The literary texture of the Metamorphoses contains many further elements which can be labelled “sophistic”: a fondness for ekphrasis, and a continuous interest in alluding to and playing with classical literary texts (cf. Finkelpearl 1998), showing sophistic paideia; especially pronounced are the echoes of epic texts (cf. e.g., Harrison 2013) and drama (cf. e.g., May 2007). The work of Plato (especially Phaedrus) also serves as a source, as often in the Second Sophistic, but largely for literary learning and entertainment rather than ideological content (see Harrison 2000, 252–259). Many of the broad range of Apuleian intellectual interests evident from his many and varied technical works (see above) also emerge in his novel, for example elements from zoology, medicine, and law. Perhaps the most sustained display of technical knowledge is in the account of the Isis-cult in book 11, where much religious detail is deployed. In my view this is not a token of Apuleian promotion of the Isis-cult, though Apuleius himself may well have been an initiate (at Apol. 55.8 he claims to have been initiated into a number of Greek cults), but a demonstration of the “cultural capital” of elite learning (cf. Bourdieu 1984, applied well to sophists by Schmitz 1997); here as elsewhere Apuleius displays recondite and prestigious knowledge to impress a readership or audience. In general, scholars are deeply divided on the seriousness of Apuleius’s account of the Isis-cult: some argue for a straight religious reading, some opt for a mixed view of both humor and religious significance, and some (like myself) advocate a satirical approach.
A satirical reading of Lucius’s cult narrative can be supported by other evidence in both Apuleius himself and other contemporary writers. The only other religious cult which appears in the main narrative of the novel, that of the Syrian Goddess in Books 8-9, is shown as unambiguously corrupt: its priests are plainly charlatans, matching the false prophet Alexander of Aboutneichos in Lucian’s Alexander, and the Syrian Goddess herself is the subject of an apparently serious treatise in Lucian’s De dea Syria (see Lightfoot 2003), which could be satirized here. It can even be suggested that Apuleius’s satirical approach to Lucius’s religious experience in Metamorphoses 11 firmly locates the novel within the sophistic world as a scathing response to the self-promoting and improbable narrative by Aelius Aristides in the Sacred Tales of his visions of and connections with the god Asclepius (cf. Harrison 2000–2001). On this view, Apuleius would be sending up his age’s taste for writing about religious cults and personal religious experience, and in particular attacking the self-important pretensions of a well-known sophistic author.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, it is clear even from this brief exploration that in his training and interests, his career as rhetorical performer and educator, his range of works, and his prominent deployment of the especially sophistic novel form, Apuleius can be plausibly described as a sophistic figure. More than any other Latin writer of the period, such as Fronto or Gellius, he deserves the label of “Latin sophist.”
FURTHER READING
An extensive and up-to-date bibliography on all Apuleius’s works (Harrison 2011) is available in Oxford Bibliographies Onlinehttp://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/. This should be consulted for more detailed scholarly material, especially the many commentaries available, alongside the earlier and much fuller Schlam and Finkelpearl 2000. There are two current complete editions of the works of Apuleius in Latin, for the Teubner series (philosophical works by Moreschini 1991; the other works by Helm 1910, 1912, 1931) and for the Budé series (philosophical works and fragments by Beaujeu 1973, Apologia and Florida by Vallette 1924, and Metamorphoses by Robertson 1971); an important new critical edition of the Metamorphoses has been published for the Oxford Classical Texts (Zimmerman 2012). A good bilingual edition of the Metamorphoses is available in the two Loeb volumes of Hanson 1989, while modern annotated translations of the Apologia, De Deo Socratis, and Florida can be found in Harrison, Hilton, and Hunink 2001; of the Metamorphoses in Kenney 1998 and Walsh 1994.
Among general critical works, apart from the basic orientation for the whole author to be found in Harrison 2000, there are excellent accounts of the Metamorphoses in Walsh 1970 (pioneering in valuing Apuleius as a literary artist), Winkler 1985 (especially sophisticated and influential), and Schlam 1992 (clear and balanced); Tatum 1979 and Sandy 1997 anticipate Harrison 2000 in stressing the Greek sophistic elements of Apuleius’s output, while Finkelpearl 1998 and Harrison 2013 demonstrate in full the modern emphasis on Apuleius’s subtle literary texture with much further bibliography.
On Apuleius’ Platonism see Fletcher 2014. On the issue of the seriousness of the novel’s religious ending, see Merkelbach 1995 (serious), Winkler 1985 (sophisticated mixed approach), Harrison 2000, 238–259 (satirical), and especially Keulen and Egelhaaf-Gaiser 2012 (presenting the latest research on the Isis book) and Keulen and Egelhaaf-Gaiser 2015 (the new commentary). On the Apologia, see Hunink 1997 (a useful and modern literary commentary), Riess 2008 (a conference volume with several papers of interest), both with extensive bibliography, and Bradley 2012 (important historical contextualisation),
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, G. 1993. The Second Sophistic: A Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire. London and New York.
Beaujeu, J. 1973. Apulée: Opuscules philosophiques et fragments. Paris.
Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Theory of Taste. London.
Bowersock, G. W. 1969. Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire. Oxford.
Bowie, E. L. 2002. “The Chronology of the Earlier Greek Novels since B. E. Perry: Revisions and Precisions.” Ancient Narrative 2: 47–63.
Bradley, K. 2012. Apuleius and Antonine Rome, Toronto.
Champlin, E. 1980. Fronto and Antonine Rome. Cambridge, MA.
Finkelpearl, E. 1998. Metamorphosis of Language in Apuleius. Ann Arbor, MI.
Fletcher, R. 2014. Apuleius’ Platonism. Cambridge.
Hanson, J. A. 1989. Apuleius: Metamorphoses. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA.
Harrison, S. J. 2000. Apuleius: A Latin Sophist. Oxford.
Harrison, S. J. 2000–2001. “Apuleius, Aelius Aristides and Religious Autobiography.” Ancient Narrative 1: 245–259.
Harrison, S. J. 2011. “Apuleius.” In Oxford Bibliographies Online. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195389661/obo-9780195389661-0100.xml.
Harrison. S. J. 2013. Forming the Ass: Literary Texture in Apuleius’ “Metamorphoses”. Oxford.
Harrison, S. J., J. Hilton, and V. Hunink, eds. 2001. Apuleius: Rhetorical Works. Oxford.
Helm, R., ed. 1910. Apulei Florida. Leipzig.
Helm, R., ed. 1912. Apulei Apologia. Leipzig.
Helm, R., ed. 1931. Apulei Metamorphoseon Libri XI. Leipzig.
Hunink, V. 1997. Apuleius of Madaura: Pro se de magia (Apologia). 2 vols. Amsterdam.
Kahane, A., and A. Laird, eds. 2001. A Companion to the Prologue of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. Oxford.
Kenney, E. J., trans. 1998. Apuleius, “The Golden Ass”. Harmondsworth.
Keulen, W. and U.Egelhaaf-Gaiser, eds. 2012. Aspects of Apuleius' Golden Ass
Volume III: the Isis Book. Leiden.
Keulen, W/ amd U.Egelhaaf-Gaiser, eds. 2015. Apuleius Madaurensis Metamorphoses, Book XI, The Isis Book. Leiden.
Lightfoot, J. L., ed. 2003. Lucian, “On the Syrian Goddess”. Oxford.
May, R. 2007. Apuleius and Drama: The Ass on Stage. Oxford.
Merkelbach, R. 1995. Isis Regina – Zeus Sarapis. Stuttgart.
Moreschini, C. 1991. Apuleius: De Philosophia Libri. Stuttgart and Leipzig.
Riess, W., ed. 2008 Paideia at Play: Learning and Wit in Apuleius. Groningen.
Robertson, D. S. 1971. Apulée: Les Métamorphoses. 3 vols. Paris.
Sandy, G. 1997. The Greek World of Apuleius: Apuleius and the Second Sophistic. Leiden.
Schlam, C. C. 1992. The Metamorphoses of Apuleius: On Making an Ass of Oneself. London.
Schlam, C. C., and E. Finkelpearl. 2000. “A Review of Scholarship on Apuleius’ ‘Met
amorphoses,’ 1970–1998.” Lustrum 42: 7–224.
Schmitz, T. A. 1997. Bildung und Macht: Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. Zetemata 97. Munich.
Tatum, J. 1979. Apuleius and the Golden Ass. Ithaca, NY.
Vallette, P. 1924. Apulée: Apologie, Florides. Paris.
van der Paardt, R. T. 1981 “The Unmasked I: Apuleius Metamorphoses XI.27.” Mnemos. 34: 96–106.
Walsh, P. G. 1970. The Roman Novel. Cambridge.
Walsh, P. G., ed. 1994. Apuleius: The Golden Ass. Oxford.
Winkler, J. J. 1985. Auctor & Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’ “Golden Ass”. Berkeley, CA.
Zimmerman, M. 2012. Apulei Metamorphoseon Libri XI. Oxford.
CHAPTER 23
PAUSANIAS
WILLIAM HUTTON
PAUSANIAS’S Periegesis Hellados (Description of Greece), a ten-volume topographical account of the antiquities of the Hellenic homeland, is one of the more frequently cited texts from the period of the Second Sophistic, yet until recently the work and its author have played at best a marginal role in studies of the literature and culture of the era. The Periegesis is hardly a typical work of the period, and there is no evidence that Pausanias had the sort of career as a public intellectual that many of the other notable authors of the time did. However, his text reflects and responds to a number of literary and cultural trends of the age, and serves as an important piece of evidence for the variety of discourse that made up the intellectual context in which the sophists flourished.
As late as the early nineteenth century it was commonly supposed that the author of the Periegesis was identical with the Pausanias of Caesarea mentioned by Philostratus (VS 594) and thus that he inhabited the innermost circles of the sophistic world (Harloe 2010). Since then, that identification has been abandoned in favor of the clear indications within the text that he was an otherwise unknown native of the region around Magnesia-on-Sipylos, close to the epicenter of sophistic culture on the Ionian coast (Diller 1955). Although it is not written as a first-person travelog, Pausanias’s Periegesis adopts the point of view of a visitor who arrives from the direction of Ionia and proceeds on a step-by-step tour of the cities and shrines of the southern and central mainland. For a lengthy prose work of this or any period the Periegesis is uncommonly well organized (Hutton 2005, 54–82). Each of the ten volumes covers one of the traditional divisions of the mainland (with the exception of books 5 and 6, which are both devoted to Elis and Olympia) and the places within those territories are linked by a complex series of itineraries that tend to radiate out from central locations. Despite its structural coherence, internal references make clear that the Periegesis was composed not in one sitting but over a long period that extended, at a minimum, from the early 160s to the mid-170s CE (Bowie 2001). Pausanias attests to his own presence at many of the sites he writes about, and archaeological research has made it clear that the vast majority of his assertions about what there was to see in Greece were based on his own eyewitness experience.
For the places he visits, Pausanias offers descriptions of buildings, temples, statues, and other things that he deems “worth seeing.” For modern readers who are not passionately interested in ancient Greek material culture (and even for many who are), this can make reading the Periegesis from cover to cover a bit of a slog. Large stretches of the work resemble this excerpt from Pausanias’s description of the central forum of Corinth, with catalogs of monuments listed in the order one might see them on a stroll through the city (2.2.8):
There is also a temple of Tyche; upright statue of Parian stone. And beside it is a shrine for all the gods. Nearby a fountain has been constructed, and a bronze Poseidon is on it and a dolphin under the feet of the Poseidon spouting water. And an Apollo with the surname Klarios is in bronze and there is a statue of Aphrodite sculpted by Hermogenes of Kythera.
Such tracts of colorless prose have tried the patience even of some of Pausanias’s most devoted modern students, including J. G. Frazer, who lamented that this sort of thing might cause the ordinary reader “to yawn . . . and shut up the book” (Frazer 1898, 1:xxxiv). At first glance nothing could be further from the rhetorical panache and literary showmanship that are the stereotypical hallmarks of Second Sophistic writing. Yet the existence of such contemporary texts as Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae and Aelian’s Varia Historia suggests that there was an audience for works that that offered generous helpings of punctilious detail (Arafat 2000). In any case, there is much more to the Periegesis than spare catalogs of temples and statues. Pausanias also produces a considerable amount of historical and mythographical information related to places and monuments that he visits. The amount of text devoted to sights and narratives, or, to use Pausanias’s own terms (1.39.3), theôrêmata and logoi, is roughly equal (Akujärvi 2005, 182–187), giving rise to the question of whether it is better to think of Pausanias’s account as a topography with extended historical supplementations or a history arranged topographically rather than chronologically.
As an eyewitness account of what there was to see in Greece in the second century CE, the Periegesis has been of inestimable value to modern scholars, particularly to archaeologists, who have come to rely on the work as a treasure map for the discovery and identification of ancient monuments. Pausanias’s usefulness has ironically contributed to the tardiness of his appreciation as a denizen of the cultural landscape in which he operated. Archaeologists and philologists alike have tended to think of him primarily as a sedulous collector of accurate information whose intellectual pretensions and literary aspirations, such as they are, could be safely disregarded (Elsner 2010; Hutton 2005, 20–29). An additional inducement to such an attitude is the superficial similarity of the Periegesis to modern travel guides, a resemblance that has earned for the Periegesis the nickname of “Ancient Baedekers” (Casson 1974, 292–299; Habicht 1998, 21–23), with the concomitant assumption that such works are utilitarian and subliterary. This assumption does little more than beg important questions about Pausanias’s methods and aspirations (Pretzler 2007, 45).
In discussing Pausanias’s aims we are hindered by the fact that the author himself offers us little guidance on the topic. While Pausanias frequently expresses his views on other subjects, such statements as he makes about the intent of his work are general and open to varying interpretations. Most famously, in book 1 he refers in passing to his intention of “pursuing all things Greek in like fashion” (πάντα ὁμοίως ἐπεξιόντατὰ Ἑλληνικά: 1.26.4). This phrase has been interpreted as an unfulfilled promise to write topographical accounts of all the Greek lands, but it is probably better understood as a somewhat tautologous undertaking to deal with all the Greek matters that his prospective audience would likely find interesting. The fact that the phrase is also a deliberate echo of Herodotus’s famous promise near the beginning of his Histories to “pursue in like fashion” cities great and small (1.5) provides insight into how Pausanias views his relationship to his subject matter and his predecessors, but that insight is more allusive than explicit.
In the absence of a specific authorial statement of purpose, modern scholars have come to divergent conclusions about Pausanias. Those who prefer to see in Pausanias a diligent if uninspired antiquarian can find plenty to support their view in the text. Those who wish to see him as an active participant in the self-conscious urbanities of the Second Sophistic can find evidence if they look for it, particularly since the latter often involves multiple levels of authorial role-playing in which a “guileless and enthusiastic antiquities buff” could be as much a pose as any other. Given the state of the evidence, neither hypothesis is susceptible to proof, yet since we are dealing with an educated author from western Anatolia of the same general period as Lucian, Arrian, Athenaeus, and Longus, the former cannot be taken for granted as the default hypothesis.
A basic question to ask regarding Pausanias and his contemporaries is whether any of the
m were aware of his work. Apart from a single citation in Aelian (VH 12.61), which is often rejected as an interpolation, there are no explicit citations of the Periegesis in the preserved literature until we get to Stephanus of Byzantium in the sixth century CE (Diller 1956). This silence has given rise to the suggestion that Pausanias “failed to find the audience he hoped for” (Habicht 1998, 22), but if the measure of an author’s importance were the number of times s/he was cited by name in his own era, then few authors of the period of the Second Sophistic would be considered noteworthy. Possible traces of Pausanias’s influence have been found in the works of numerous near-contemporary authors including Athenaeus, Lucian, Philostratus, Athenagoras of Athens, Longus, and Pollux.1 In most cases the material that the authors are alleged to have taken from Pausanias is factual information about sites and artifacts. The possible reference in Longus stands out, however, in that it would be a stylistic rather than an informational borrowing. Bowie (2001, 30–31), who suggested this possible connection, compares the wording and imagery of Longus’s description of an epiphany of Pan (2.25.3) to Pausanias’s description of portents that occur when a band of Gaulish marauders approach Delphi (10.23.1–7). If there is validity to this parallel, it suggests that at least one writer of Pausanias’s own era not only read his work, but appreciated it as a model for evocative narrative. In the final analysis, however, the paucity of references in the works of authors who dealt deeply with the sort of information that Pausanias had to offer, such as Athenaeus, Aelian, and the lexicographers, suggests that even if the Periegesis was known in some circles it was not considered an indispensible part of many libraries.
The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic Page 57