This volume represents the culmination of a series of studies conducted over the past ten years by Emmanuel Plantade, partly in collaboration with the anthropologist Nedjima Plantade. The book aims to demonstrate that Apuleius found the plot of the Cupid and Psyche tale in the folklore of his North African homeland, and amplified it based on contemporary Hellenising aesthetics and his native culture.

This original approach, which combines philological-literary analysis with the folkloric research method of the historical-geographical school, is part of the current trend in Apuleian criticism to reevaluate the author’s African identity and transcultural poetics (see the collective volume Apuleius and Africa, 2014). Its polemical target is the opinion, originated by D. Fehling (1977), that the bella fabella was invented by Apuleius exclusively on the basis of classical mythical and literary materials, and that modern fairy tales with a similar plot derive from it. Other recent investigations into iconographic evidence and folktales from the Mediterranean area (see A. Stramaglia 2010 cited by P. and T. Braccini, Myrtia 39, 2024, 113–35) further reveal the limits of Fehling’s thesis, which was provocatively hostile to the folkloric approach. However, this approach would also seem to be justified by the modus operandi of Apuleius, who was a skilled rehasher of pre-existing material rather than a primus inventor, as L. Nicolini rightly notes in the most recent commentary on the Cupid and Psyche tale (Apuleio, Metamorfosi, II, 2023, 265–8). Hence these new studies, of which our volume is magna pars, seriously reevaluate the possibility that the story of Psyche is the reworking of a pre-existing narrative, analogous to the folkloric type ATU 425, which for P. had its origins in Africa.

Through a systematic consultation of international collections and field research, in ch. 1 P. identifies 59 North African versions of the aforementioned folkloric type. From this corpus, much larger than previously thought, he isolates 10 versions from Kabylia (an Algerian region with a Berber majority corresponding to Apuleius’ native land), which allow him to relaunch E. Dermenghem’s pioneering thesis (1945) of the Berber origins of the Psyche story. The Kabyle versions constitute, in fact, a compact ancient nucleus, similar to Apuleius’ tale in two aspects in particular: the presence of the supernatural husband and the transgression of a visual taboo by the bride. But before moving on to a systematic comparison with the Latin tale, P. wonders whether there are other traces of African culture in Apuleius’ work, that could justify the revival of a ‘barbarian’ tale by a refined Latin sophist.

This is the topic of ch. 2, which — in addition to demonstrating that Apuleius’ first language was Libyan (ancient Berber) and not Punic, which was not widely spoken in his homeland — examines an impressive number of elements that reveal the author’s original Libyan culture. Among these, the most significant are the gesture, made by the people towards the beautiful Psyche, of bringing the index finger resting on the thumb to their mouth, and that of Venus shaking her head and scratching her ear when she angrily welcomes Psyche. These are all gestures that traditional exegesis, limited to the literary and intertextual approach, has failed to explain; they become intelligible in light of comparisons with ancient African mosaics and practices still alive in Kabylia, where they express an attitude of veneration in the first case and threat in the second. Also interesting is the hypothesis that, in the reworking of the Aesopic fable of the crow and the fox preserved in the false prologue to De deo Socratis, the initial contest between the two animals for food, newly introduced by Apuleius, calls to mind North African versions of the type ATU 275C, in which the antagonist is the jackal, an African symbol of cunning and, as such, comparable to the fox. Other conclusions are less convincing, such as that of identifying the grotesque characterisation of Aemilianus, in the Apologia, with the type of the stupid ogre, popular in North African stories (ATU 709A). And perhaps it is going too far to see in Charite, the addressee of the story of Psyche, many African traits, also in an autobiographical key (see the comparison with the virago Pudentilla of the Apologia). However, P.’s overall analysis convincingly shows that Apuleius was familiar with Libyan culture and that he was not the only one to refer to it, since Dio of Prusa, in his Libyan Myth (Or. 5), had already portrayed Libya as a land of mirabilia for which allegorical exegesis is legitimate.

In ch. 3, P. returns to the Psyche tale, which is analysed in the light of the folkloric motifs of the Kabyle oral tradition. He highlights four processes of adaptation (calque, alteration, transposition and addition) and shows how elements completely absent in the North African versions, such as Psyche’s pregnancy and the revenge on her sisters, are introduced to make the plot more complex and evocative, in the wake of Aristotelian poetics, by exploiting tragic and declamatory motifs. The result is a skilful literary reworking of what P. considers a specific Libyan folkloric model. While one may doubt that the Kabyle version is Apuleius’ only folkloric source, and that it was from here that the tale-type later spread throughout the Mediterranean area and Europe, in my opinion P.’s volume constitutes a definitive demonstration of the need to investigate the bella fabella not only with the tools of philological-literary analysis, but also with those of folkloric research, of which African folklore is a significant part.