Apuleius

Richard Jenkyns reviews Susan Ruden’s The Golden Ass in the current TLS . He highlights the oddity of Apuleius’s Latin style: “He did the things that classic Latin style had eschewed. He liked loosely hanging clauses, symmetries, echoing phrases, rocking rhythms and hints of rhyme. At the start of The Golden Ass , the narrator claims to be a Greek who has learned Latin only in adulthood: that is why his lingo may seem eccentric. And indeed it is a unique farrago of archaisms, colloquialisms, coinages and sheer fantastication, combining a driving energy with elusive beauty.” Jenkyns thinks that Ruden succeeds in capturing the original feel.

He devotes several paragraphs to the end of the story, where the slapstick story of magic and metamorphosis turns into a religious ecstasy (anticipating Bottom’s bottomless vision): “the narrator sees a vision of the goddess Isis, passes through a mystic initiation, and is last seen inhabiting the temple of Isis in Rome as a kind of monk.” According to Jenkyns, this is “the one account from classical paganism of the kind of conversion experience familiar to us from Christian writings, and raises the question whether Apuleius was trying to steal the Christians’ clothes or we glimpse here an aspect of pagan religious experience otherwise hidden from us.”