Lucius Apuleius

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The first known record of the the poignant tale of Psyche's labors to reclaim the love of Cupid is recorded by Lucius Apuleius in the second century AD. When the beautiful Psyche attracts the jealous wrath of Venus, Venus sends her son Cupid to bewitch the girl and cause her to fall in love with a monster, but Cupid himself falls in love with his mother's nemesis and secretly becomes her husband. Psyche is instructed that she must never look at Cupid, for in looking at him she will lose him. Unable to resist temptation she violates this law.Desperate to find her lost love the young woman commences a succession of grueling tasks dictated by the vengeful Venus aspiring to win him back. Unable to behold her anguish Cupid appeals to the gods. Psyche is granted immortality and the two are reunited and married.Many have interpreted Cupid as the allegorical representation of Love and Psyche as the Soul and their union is still seen as a perfect symbol of eternal love.

Book digitized by Google from the library of Harvard University and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb.

In The Golden Ass, or Metamorphoses, Lucian is on a business trip to Greece when his curiosity gets the best of him and he finds himself accidentally transformed into a donkey. He then narrates his provincial odyssey in a world where old gods rule, myth informs life, Fortune is fickle, Thessalian witches are puissant, and a curious man seeking to learn their craft might well lament making an ass of himself. Apuleius was a second-century speaker and writer born in present-day Algeria who authors, narrates, and is the subject of this bawdy, picaresque, quasi-autobiographical story. He himself traveled extensively, studied philosophy, was initiated into mystery cults, and became a priest. He was also tried for witchcraft, accused of having betrothed his wife Pudentilla by charms other than those of his personality. The novel was translated into “Tudor prose” by Adlington in 1566 during the “golden age of translation,” and it was this version that was read by Shakespeare and influenced his work. The novel contains many digression, mythological references, and inset stories, the most significant being the story of Cupid and Psyche. This is the only complete Latin novel from antiquity that has survived to the present day, and has been called “a beginning of modern literature.” The Latin original was the one read by Augustine of Hippo who adapted Apuleius’ confessional style in his own writing—he even responded to Apuleius directly in his own philosophy. In its theology, The Golden Ass embodies an inclusive monotheism. From Kafka, to Pinocchio, to the motion picture The Fly, the influence of Apuleius and his Metamorphoses continues to be felt.

This is a welcome mini-successor to Charlton Tebeau's out-of-print A History of Florida. Gannon (history, Univ. of Florida) has updated coverage of the state's long history to include minorities, women, and environmental concerns through the year of Hurricane Andrew, focusing more on social than political history. The book contains some minor factual errors: the town of Cedar Key is misspelled several times as Cedar Keys, which is an offshore wildlife refuge; Gannon laments the exclusionary policies of the Universities of Miami and Florida, which in the 1940s excluded blacks from sports teams, while ignoring the opportunities then afforded African Americans at A&M College, which produced renowned athletes Willie Gallimore and Althea Gibson. Despite these slips, Gannon's work belongs on all library shelves.

"These rhetorical texts by Apuleius, second-century Latin writer and author of the famous novel Metamorphoses or Golden Ass, have not been translated in English since 1909. They are some of the very few Latin speeches surviving from their period, and constitute important evidence for Latin and Roman North African social and intellectual culture in the second century A.D. They are the work of a talented writer who is being increasingly viewed as the major literary artist of his time in Latin." "The Apologia, Apuleius' self-defence against a charge of magic delivered in North Africa in A.D. 158-9, has been well described as 'a masterpiece of the Second Sophistic'. It is a brilliant, lively, and colourful piece and is the only Latin forensic oration preserved from the second century A.D., providing important evidence for contemporary North African life." "The Florida ('flowery pieces') is a collection of excerpts deriving from an earlier anthology of Apuleian speeches, most apparently delivered at Carthage in the 160s A.D. As a whole, these passages offer a unique view of the rhetorical practice of a performing intellectual in Latin in the second century A.D. They also give important information on civic life in Carthage through their treatment of proconsuls and the local senate." "The De Deo Socratis, probably also from the 160s, is an oration in the form of a popular philosophical lecture on the 'god' of Socrates, the inner voice which, according to Plato, advised him. This is the only surviving sophistic declamation in Latin. The material is treated brilliantly by Apuleius, being much ornamented with poetic quotation and rhetorical and stylistic pyrotechnics."--Jacket.