Lines 3.20–2 of the text published by Justin Stover as Apuleius’ De Platone 3Footnote 1 are printed by him as follows:
improbat deinde eos qui negantis homines in seruitute habeant aut qui omnino eiusdem ciuitatis nationem belli iure diruant aut qui hostium spolia deorum aedibus adfigant.
He [sc. Plato] then rebukes those who hold people in slavery against their will, or else who destroy utterly the people of that same city by right of war, or who hang the spoils of enemies on the shrines of the gods. (transl. J. Stover)
Gregory HaysFootnote 2 notes, however, that the word negantis is extremely suspicious, since ‘[m]ost, if not all, slaves are enslaved unwillingly’, the accusatives in –is are very rare in the ‘new Apuleius’ and, moreover, what Plato discusses in the corresponding passage is actually the enslavement of Greeks by other Greeks, not simply enslavement in general; cf. Resp. 469b–c:Footnote 3
πρῶτον μὲν ἀνδραποδισμοῦ πέρι, δοκεῖ δίκαιον ῞Ελληνας ῾Ελληνίδας πόλεις ἀνδραποδίζεσθαι, ἢ μηδ’ ἄλλῃ ἐπιτρέπειν κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν, καὶ τοῦτο ἐθίζειν, τοῦ ῾Ελληνικοῦ γένους φείδεσθαι, εὐλαβουμένους τὴν ὑπὸ τῶν βαρβάρων δουλείαν;
ὅλῳ καὶ παντί, ἔφη, διαφέρει τὸ φείδεσθαι.
μηδὲ ῞Ελληνα ἄρα δοῦλον ἐκτῆσθαι μήτε αὐτούς, τοῖς τε ἄλλοις ῞Ελλησιν οὕτω συμβουλεύειν;
πάνυ μὲν οὖν, ἔφη· μᾶλλόν γοῦν ἂν οὕτω πρὸς τοὺς βαρβάρους τρέποιντο, ἑαυτῶν δ’ ἀπέχοιντο.
‘Firstly enslavement. Does it seem right for Greek states to enslave fellow Greeks, or, as far as possible, should they prevent any other state from doing so, and make a habit of sparing the Greek race, in order to avoid slavery at the hands of barbarians?’
‘Sparing them would be far and away the better thing to do’, he said.
‘Then they themselves should not acquire a Greek as a slave and should advise the rest of the Greeks to do the same?’
‘Very much so’, he said. ‘In that way, they would be more inclined to turn against the barbarians, and keep their hands off their own people.’ (transl. C. Emlyn-Jones and W. Preddy)
Hays suggests that ‘negantis conceals a term equivalent to Graecos’ and that ‘[s]omething like cognatos or <eiusdem> nationis would fit for sense’, but finds himself unable to come up with a solution that would seem ‘immediately right’ and consequently limits himself to obelizing the word.
I suggest that to solve this problem we need to recall that the word preceding negantis in the manuscript is actually quis; qui is Stover's conjecture.Footnote 4 Accordingly, we can conjecture qui suae gentis instead of quis negantis; the corruption was obviously due to incorrect word-divisionFootnote 5 and the similarity of u and n in Latin minuscule script. This solution fits the sense postulated by Hays very well, and is at the same time quite plausible from the point of view of palaeography. For the expression suae gentis homines, cf. Livy 21.20.6, 38.26.6.
