Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-npj9w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-08T15:21:18.577Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

AN EMENDATION TO APULEIUS, APOLOGIA 47.1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2018

Leonardo Costantini
Leonardo Costantini*
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
*
L.Costantini@leeds.ac.uk
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The most authoritative testimony for the text of Apuleius’ defence-speech known as Apologia or Pro Se De Magia is a Cassinese MS indicated with the siglum F (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 68.2), written under the abbotship of Desiderius (1058–1087) in a mature Beneventan script, which also preserves the text of the Metamorphoses and the Florida. The text that F preserves is unsurprisingly not flawless, and in this note I argue for the presence of a corruption affecting aut in Apol. 47.1. For the sake of clarity, I provide the passage from Apol. 46.6 to 47.2 below.

Information

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 68 , Issue 1 , May 2018 , pp. 347 - 350
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2018 

The most authoritative testimony for the text of Apuleius’ defence-speech known as Apologia or Pro Se De Magia Footnote 1 is a Cassinese MS indicated with the siglum F (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 68.2),Footnote 2 written under the abbotship of Desiderius (1058–1087) in a mature Beneventan script, which also preserves the text of the Metamorphoses and the Florida.Footnote 3 The text that F preserves is unsurprisingly not flawless, and in this note I argue for the presence of a corruption affecting aut in Apol. 47.1. For the sake of clarity, I provide the passage from Apol. 46.6 to 47.2 below:

quod si forte patronus tuus uerbo prolapsus est et nullos pueros habes quos producas, saltem XIIII seruis quos exhibui ad aliquid utere. a[u]t cur sisti postulabas tantam familiam? magiae accusans de XV seruis denuntiasti: quid si de ui accusares, quot tandem seruos postulares? sciunt ergo aliquid XV serui et occultum est. an occultum non est et magicum est?

At Apol. 47.1 I propose emending the transmitted aut to at cur sisti postulabas tantam familiam? Footnote 4 This sentence comes from a section of the Apologia (42–7) where Apuleius counters the allegation of having enchanted a slave-boy by the name of Thallus with magical incantations during an occult ceremony (42.3). More specifically, this clause marks the passage to another part of this section of the speech in which Apuleius attempts to twist his accusers’ argument against them in order to emphasize its self-contradictory nature: as discussed below, he maintains that, since magic is notoriously occult and secretive, and since the attackers demanded the presence in court of several eyewitnesses to the allegedly magical ritual, it follows that this ritual could not have anything to do with magic, given the number of witnesses (47.1–6).

Translations of the reading aut such as those by Butler,Footnote 5 Hunink,Footnote 6 Hammerstaedt and MartosFootnote 7 prevent us from fully understanding the cogency of Apuleius’ counter-argument, characterized by a recurring feature of Apuleius’ rhetorical style which consists in introducing a lambasting with the disjunctive at. I would, therefore, propose to read this and translate the question at 47.1 as follows: ‘But why on earth did you require the presence of so many servants?’. To conserve the preserved reading aut, translating it with ‘or’, would imply that at 47.1 Apuleius is merely taking up an exhortation addressed to his enemies at 46.6, so that they may put to some use the fourteen witnesses that he produced in court (saltem XIIII seruis quos exibui ad aliquid utere); or why else demand so many witnesses?

Yet, this interpretation prevents us from comprehending not only the real meaning of the whole passage at Apol. 47.1–6 but also the structure of the previous section of the speech, which goes from 45.1 to 46.6. There Apuleius provokes his opponents with ‘repeated staccato rhetorical questions’, as Harrison puts it.Footnote 8 First, Apuleius employs these rhetorical questions to attack his arch-enemy Sicinius Aemilianus, provocatively exhorting him to question the witnesses in the courtroom of Sabratha instead of demanding the presence of Thallus (45.1), and claiming that the collapse of the slave boy cannot be ascribed to his supposed incantations (45.2–3).Footnote 9 Second, he again uses fast-paced rhetorical questions to batter the advocate Tannonius Pudens, who accused Apuleius of having also enchanted other pueri in Oea without substantiating this allegation with any evidence or depositions (46.1–4); finally, Apuleius attacks Aemilianus with another barrage of provocative questions (46.5–6).

Therefore, Apol. 46.6 (saltem XIIII seruis quos exibui ad aliquid utere) brings to its conclusion this invective against Aemilianus and Tannonius, a micro-section that runs from 45.1 to 46.6, by slightly varying the opening lines of this section at Apol. 45.1 (XIIII seruos quos postulasti exhibeo. cur illis ad quaestionem nihil uteris?), with a clear ring-composition. This enables Apuleius to move to a different point, and in this context the strong adversative at would fittingly mark the beginning of a passage where Apuleius reproaches his attackers’ arguments by demonstrating how they are contradictory, while the preserved reading aut trivializes both this and the previous passage.Footnote 10 In Apol. 47.1–6, in fact, Apuleius formulates an argument to disprove the accusation of having practised an eerie magical ritual (sacrum magicum)Footnote 11 in which he allegedly enchanted the slave-boy Thallus. The strategy of Apuleius’ defence from this charge (42–7) is based on underscoring the implausibility of his enemies’ argument: Thallus, whose epilepsy is known to everyone (43.7–44), could never have been used in magical divination, as the prerequisite for such rituals was the purity of the youth (43.3–6). Since the prosecution employed the depositions of Sicinius Pudens (45.7) and of some of Thallus’ conserui (44.4) to corroborate the accusation, Apuleius needs to counter their validity, and he does so in 47.1–6: here he argues that the commonplace rule of magic is secrecy (47.3) and explains that only a very few free men are allowed access to such rites (47.4). Therefore, the presence of the fourteen servants,Footnote 12 whom the prosecutors called to testify as witnesses to the alleged rite (44.2–45.3), implies that no occult magical action could really have taken place.Footnote 13

Furthermore, in 47.1 the opening of the sentence with the adversative conjunction at Footnote 14—as often happens in Apuleius’ prose—displays his contempt for the feebleness of the indictment, similarly to Apol. 40.5 (‘at enim,’ inquit, ‘piscem cui rei nisi malae proscidisti [...] ?’) and to 25.2 (at non contraria accusastis?).Footnote 15 In the first passage, Apuleius reproduces his opponents’ suspicious reaction to his allegedly magical dissection of fish.Footnote 16 The sentence is inserted by Apuleius to highlight that the prosecutors’ suspicions are misplaced: he has, in fact, already explained that his interest in sea creatures is merely scientific (36–9), and in the passage which follows ‘at enim,’ inquit, ‘piscem cui rei nisi malae proscidisti […] ?’ Apuleius underlines once again the scientific character of his fish enquiry (40.5). This enables him to underscore his self-presentation as a knowledgeable philosopher, whose interests have nothing to do with magic, before giving more details about the dissection of an unspecified mollusc, which his enemies identified as the poisonous sea-hare (40.6–10). The second passage (25.2) introduces a strong counter-attack against Apuleius’ attackers: his claim is that they brought forward a frivolous body of charges, and by means of a fast-paced summary he refutes these charges as being self-contradictory.Footnote 17 It is possible to observe, therefore, that Apuleius’ implementation of at in both of these questions introduces a strong point against his accusers, whose arguments and suspiciousness are presented as inconsistent. I argue that the same forensic strategy is adopted at 47.1, in which the interrogative sentence (a[u]t cur sisti postulabas tantam familiam?) serves to introduce Apuleius’ point that the presence of so many witnesses to the alleged magical ritual implies that no real magic could have actually taken place.

In addition to stylistic and content-based explanations, the hypothesis of a textual corruption is not implausible from a palaeographical viewpoint, given that the copyist of F often produces various kinds of interpolations under the influence of contiguous wordsFootnote 18 and, amongst these, some concern the letter u—at times in association with other letters—such as in Met. 1.13.1: succus[sus]su; Met. 8.7.7: munia, pro[ru]rsus; Met. 10.29.1: mihimet[u] uolens; Flor. 9.30: proconsul [ut]Footnote 19 optime. Interestingly enough, in two passages of the Metamorphoses the erroneous insertion a[u]t under the influence of adjacent words occurs twice: Met. 3.22.6–23.1: quando? a[u]t mihi Footnote 20 scelus istud; Met. 5.30.3–4: saepius? a[u]t rusticae. Analogously to these cases, the reading aut in Apol. 47.1 may have originated because of the proximity to the previous utere (46.6) and following cur. The phrase's wider context—as written in F, fol. 114v, col. 1, line 3—with its repetition of the letter u, may have induced the scribe to erroneously write a[u]t: aliquid utere. aut cur sisti postulabas tanta3.Footnote 21 Moreover, the similarity of the letters a and c in Beneventan script would have also facilitated this kind of dittography.Footnote 22

In conclusion, for content-based, stylistic and palaeographical reasons, the emendation at in place of the transmitted aut enables us to recover the pregnant meaning of Apuleius’ rebuttal in Apol. 47.1–6 with only very slight alteration of the text as transmitted in F.

References

1 On the title of this work, cf. Schindel, U., ‘Der Titel von Apuleius’ Verteidigungsrede’, StudMed 39 (1998), 865–88Google Scholar.

2 Editors of the Apologia acknowledge the stemmatic importance of F: cf. Helm, R., Apulei Platonici Madaurensis Florida (Leipzig, 1910, 19592), xxxiv–xliGoogle Scholar; Butler, H.E. and Owen, A.S., Apulei Apologia siue Pro se de magia liber (Oxford, 1914), xxix–xxxiiiGoogle Scholar; Vallette, P., Apulée. Apologie, Florides (Paris, 1924), xxxi–xxxviiGoogle Scholar; Marshall, P.K., ‘Apuleius. Apologia, Metamorphoses, Florida’, in Reynolds, L.D. (ed.), Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford, 1983), 15–16Google Scholar; Hunink, V., Apuleius of Madauros Pro Se De Magia (Apologia), 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1997), 1.28Google Scholar; Martos, J., Apuleyo de Madauros. Apología o discurso sobre la magia en defensa propia. Floridas. [Prólogo de El dios de Sócrates] (Madrid, 2015), liGoogle Scholar.

3 Piccioni, F., ‘Il De magia di Apuleio. Un testimone trascurato: il codice assisiate 706’, in Linguaggi del potere, poteri del linguaggio (Alessandria, 2010), 365–75Google Scholar suggests that the Assisi fragments of the Apologia (Assisi, Fondo Biblioteca Comunale no. 706, siglum C) are an apograph of F; cf. also Piccioni, F., ‘Sul De magia di Apuleio. Alcune proposte di constitutio textus’, in Vestigia notitiai. Scritti in memoria di Michelangelo Giusta (Alessandria, 2012), 445–54Google Scholar, where the validity of some readings is discussed in view of a forthcoming edition of the Apologia by Piccioni. However, Pepe, L., ‘Un nuovo codice di Apuleio del sec. XI’, GIF 4 (1951), 214–25Google Scholar and Pecere, O., ‘Qualche riflessione sulla tradizione di Apuleio a Montecassino’, in Cavallo, G., Le strade del testo (Bari, 1987), 102Google Scholar—reprinted in Pecere, O., Stramaglia, A., Studi apuleiani (Cassino, 2003), 42–3Google Scholar—argue that C is independent from F, since the former is thought to be earlier on the grounds of palaeographical evidence, about which cf. Lowe's assessment in Robertson, D.S., ‘The Assisi fragments of the Apologia of Apuleius’, CQ 6 (1956), 68–80, at 69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 In case the hypothesis of Pepe (n. 3) and Pecere (n. 3) were correct, the corruption aut might have originated in a common ancestor of F and C, given that the latter also reads aut cur in fol.7v, line 4.

5 Butler, H.E., The Apologia and the Florida of Apuleius of Madaura (Oxford, 1909), 84Google Scholar is quite free and avoids translating aut: ‘If you refuse, why did you demand the appearance of such a houseful’.

6 Hunink, V. in Harrison, S.J. (ed.), Apuleius. Rhetorical Works (Oxford, 2001), 71Google Scholar translates: ‘Or why else did you summon so large a staff.’ This mirrors the French translation by P. Vallette (n. 2), 57 and the Italian translation by Marchesi, C., Apuleio. Della magia (Milan, 1955, repr. 2011), 65Google Scholar, which underplays the meaning of the whole passage for the reasons discussed above.

7 The German translation by J. Hammerstaedt in Apuleius: De Magia. Eingeleitet, übersetzt und mit interpretierenden Essays versehen von Jürgen Hammerstaedt, Peter Habermehl, Francesca Lamberti, Adolf M. Ritter und Peter Schenk (Darmstadt, 2002), 138, and the Spanish translation by Martos (n. 2), 83 render the preserved reading aut with ‘or’ (i.e. ‘oder’ and ‘o’ respectively). Because of this interpretation, Martos (n. 2), 83 rearranges the canonical subdivision into paragraphs and puts aut cur sisti postulabas tantam familiam? at the end of Apol. 46.6, instead of leaving it at the beginning of Apol. 47.1.

8 Harrison, S.J., Apuleius. A Latin Sophist (Oxford, 2000), 70Google Scholar; Harrison focusses on the Ciceronian style of Apol. 46.3–6 and does not emphasize the fact that Apuleius employs a similar strategy at Apol. 45.1–3.

9 In the following part of Apol. 45 Apuleius inserts a digression on the idea that epileptics could have a fit by smelling burning jet, or by seeing the wheel of a potter while spinning (45.4–5). Then he underscores Aemilianus’ mala fides, since the only deposition corroborating the accusers’ argument is that given by Sicinius Pudens, on whose behalf Apuleius was tried (45.6–8).

10 It could be observed that the syntagm aut cur recurs in Apol. 54.7, but in that passage aut is used to introduce a series of disjunctive sequences, differing from 47.1 where the connotation of the sentence is contrastive.

11 Cf. 45.6; 45.8; 47.5 for the ceremony described as sacrum.

12 In 47.1–6 Apuleius speaks of fifteen slaves, including Thallus, in order to make their number appear even bigger. For other references to these fourteen witnesses, cf. Apol. 44.6; 44.7; 45.1; 46.6.

13 Cf. 47.2; 47.5–6.

14 Cf. Apol. 78.4; Met. 1.24.9; 2.24.5; 6.15.3; Mun. 17. For Apuleius’ predilection for using at at the beginning of a sentence in general, cf. Keulen, W.H., Apuleius Madaurensis Metamorphoses Book I (Groningen, 2007), 63Google Scholar on the opening of Met. 1.1.1, and Graverini, L., Le Metamorfosi di Apuleio: letteratura e identità (Pisa, 2007), 2–11Google Scholar.

15 I translate these passages as follows: Apol. 40.5: ‘but why on earth, if not for an evil reason, did you tear apart the fish?’; 25.2: ‘but did you not bring self-contradicting arguments against me?’.

16 The whole charge concerns the magical seduction of Pudentilla by means of sea creatures resembling human genitals; this indictment is rebutted at 29–41.

17 Cf. 25.2: peram et baculum ob auctoritatem, carmina et speculum ob hilaritatem, unum seruum ut deparci, tris libertos ut profusi, praeterea eloquentiam Graecam, patriam barbaram? (‘the bag and the staff to accuse me of austerity; some poems and a mirror as evidence of my frivolity; the possession of one slave to claim that I am miserly; the manumission of three slaves as evidence of my squandering; and even my Greek eloquence and my foreign origins?’). For further remarks on Apuleius’ manipulations in this passage, cf. Hunink (n. 2), 2.85–6; and especially Harrison (n. 8), 62.

18 E.g. Apol. 3.3: quanto obsole[n]tior; 26.6: omnia quae uelit incredibili[a]; 35.3: per plurim[is]os piscatoris quaesisse; 38.2: subent[ant], mares suriant; 55.10: p[l]ublice; 63.2: e[n]uidens; 68.4: filio[s] suo[s] Sicinio; 75.4: uxorem no[n]ta[m] conlusio; 84.6: nulla[m] impertita; 102.9: form[orm]atum. Cf. the discussion in Helm (n. 2), xlviii–il, li–lii. For general remarks on the influence of contiguous letters, cf. Havet, L., Manuel de critique verbale appliquée aux textes latins (Paris, 1911), 135–6Google Scholar.

19 Hunink, V., Apuleius of Madauros. Florida (Amsterdam, 2001), 34 and 118Google Scholar defends the reading uir in place of F's ut which is found in later MSS and early editions.

20 mihi is abbreviated mi in F fol. 137v, col. 1, line 16, thus making the influence of the contiguous scelus istud on aut even stronger.

21 The characteristic abbreviation for m in Beneventan script was the so-called ‘m-stroke’ or ‘3-shaped sign’, as it has been defined by Lowe, E.A., The Beneventan Script. A History of the South Italian Minuscule, 2 vols. (Rome, 1980 2), 171–3Google Scholar and Newton, F., The Scriptorium and Library at Monte Cassino, 1058–1105 (Cambridge, 1999), 168Google Scholar respectively.

22 Cf. Lowe (n. 21), 133–4 and Newton (n. 21), 144, 146.