In the Mill with Slaves: Lucius Looks Back in Gratitude

Abstract

At Apuleius Metamorphoses 9.13.3-5 Lucius confesses that his experiences as an ass have profited him only as a literary artist, not as a philosopher, an admission borne out by his own narrative. This, it is suggested, reflects Apuleius' own retrospective assessment of a fruitless attempt to reconcile Egyptian religion with Platonism. The Greek ass-story which he appropriated and embellished conveniently provided a fictional alter ego as narrator, a highly dramatic metaphor with Egyptian resonances for Apuleius' own experiences, and an opportunity for a bravura display of the rhetorical talents on which his reputation as at once Sophist and Platonic philosopher was based.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 51 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.