Apuleius and Africa

Abstract

Apuleius is an emblematic figure of the relational network existing among different ethnic and cultural identities in 2nd century imperial society. In particular this author, who is the most brilliant artist of both Latin archaism and the Second Sophistic, plays a central role in important phenomena of linguistic interaction, i.e. bilingualism and the connected question of the existence of African Latin (Africitas), which his ‘eccentric’ language has been thought to offer significant evidence of. Although in the past a well-founded body of criticism seemed to have definitively dismissed the thesis of Africitas, the issue has come up again in recent studies, and must therefore be reexamined. The first part of this paper deals with the history of the concept of Africitas and the debate around it, from the Renaissance to recent research on bilingualism and the regional diversification of Latin. The second part focuses on Apuleius’ linguistic identity, based on a new examination of the passages in his works relevant to this issue. Our study leads to a new way of understanding the question of Africitas in relationship to Apuleius’ linguistic and rhetorical education. If Punic was his mother tongue, then Latin was learned as an ‘other’ language, which later became the basis for comparison for learning a third language, Greek; in any case Apuleius was clearly a product of the school of rhetoric, which would have been able to erase any traces of interference from Punic in his Latin. So, both his precocious and complicated bilingualism – which involved a particular attention paid to language – and the exceptional vigor of the African school of rhetoric, in which certain baroque features of sophistic origin were more strongly developed (e.g. verbal inventivity, redundancy and attention to the phonic and rhythmical aspects of the language), seem to have played a determining role in his linguistic and stylistic virtuosity. In this light, Apuleius’ language might in some way reflect his African ‘marginality’.

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