Aspects of Apuleius’ Golden Ass, vol 3. The Isis book

269 Pages·2012·4.89 MB·English

by  Keulen

Golden Ass
Aspects of Apuleius’
Golden Ass
Aspects of Apuleius’
Volume III: Th e Isis Book
A Collection of Original Papers
Edited by
W. Keulen
U. Egelhaaf-Gaiser
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2012
Th is book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aspects of Apuleius’ Golden ass : volume III, the Isis book : a collection of original papers /
edited by W. Keulen, U. Egelhaaf-Gaiser.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-22123-9 (hardback : acid-free paper) 1. Apuleius. Metamorphoses. Book 11.
2. Latin fi ction--History and criticism. 3. Isis (Egyptian deity) in literature. I. Keulen, Wytse
Hette. II. Egelhaaf-Gaiser, Ulrike.
PA6217.A84 2012
873’.01 23
2011044661
ISBN 978 90 04 22123 9 (hardback)
ISBN 978 90 04 22455 1 (e-book)
Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Th e Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing,
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Contents

Preface vii

M. Zimmerman
Text and Interpretation, Interpretation and Text 1

Lara Nicolini
In spite of Isis: Wordplay in Metamorphoses XI
(an answer to Wytse Keulen) 28

Ulrike Egelhaaf-Gaiser
The Gleaming Pate of the Pastophorus:
Masquerade or Embodied Lifestyle? 42

Stephen Harrison
Narrative Subversion and Religious Satire in Metamorphoses 11 73

Luca Graverini
Prudentia and Prouidentia. Book XI in Context 86

Friedemann Drews
ASINUS PHILOSOPHANS: Allegory’s Fate
and Isis’ Providence in the Metamorphoses 107

Stefan Tilg
Aspects of a Literary Rationale of Metamorphoses 11 132

Ken Dowden
Geography and Direction in Metamorphoses 11 156

Luc Van der Stockt
Plutarch and Apuleius. Laborious Routes to Isis 168

Ellen Finkelpearl
Egyptian Religion in Met. 11 and Plutarch’s DIO:
Culture, Philosophy, and the Ineffable 183

Warren Smith
An Author Intrudes Into ‘His’ Narrative:
Lucius ‘Becomes’ Apuleius 202
General Bibliography 221

Indices 239
Preface
The majority of the contributions to this volume comprise the papers pre-
sented at the Symposium on Metamorphoses Book Eleven (‘Apuleius’ Isis-
Book. The Religious Ending of The Golden Ass’), organised by Wytse
Keulen on November 20-22, 2008 in the context of a guest lectureship at the
University of Rostock (2008-2009), financed by the Deutsche Akademische
Austauschdienst (DAAD). This Symposium, the first ever fully dedicated to
this topic, was intended as a prelude to the initiation of a collective research
project that has as its aim the preparation of a new fully-fledged commentary
on Book Eleven of the Metamorphoses. The present volume is, on the one
hand, intended as a companion to this commentary, which is planned to ap-
pear in the Groningen Commentaries on Apuleius series (at the end of 2013),
but, on the other hand, it can of course also be used independently as a new
monograph on the Isis Book, which not only brings together the striking
diversity of opinions that continues to enliven the discussion about Book
Eleven, but also sets new trends in reading the narrative in its literary, reli-
gious, archaeological and cultural context.
Until now, the scholarly discussion of the Isis Book has been character-
ised by a tendency to reduce the problems of interpreting Lucius’ narrative
of Isis and Osiris to the choice between different ‘fixed’ alternatives. In a
simplified manner, such a choice could be phrased as follows (for a more
detailed overview of the various interpretations of Book Eleven and the
status quaestionis see e.g. Egelhaaf-Gaiser, Tilg, and Drews in this volume):
should we interpret the religious narrative of Book Eleven as the true and
serious report of the protagonist’s genuine experiences as an Isiac convert, or
should we read it as comedy, continuing the atmosphere of entertaining fic-
tion in the preceding ten books of the Metamorphoses, with the credulous
dupe Lucius featuring in the final book as the butt of authorial irony and the
victim of an exploitative cult? Starting from these ‘old’ questions, the con-
tributions to this volume introduce new and stimulating directions to take in
interpreting Apuleius’ literary representation of religion.
Through a variety of approaches, including religious studies (the ‘liter-
arisation of religion’), textual criticism, literary analysis, Greek philosophy,
and iconography, the volume sheds new light on important aspects of Book
Aspects of Apuleius’ Golden Ass III, vii-xvi
viii Preface
XI, such as the relation with Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride; Lucius’ multi-
farious physical self-presentation viewed against the cultural and archaeo-
logical background; aspects of style and language and wordplay, textual
problems in two-way relation to problems of interpretation; the role of
Providence and Platonic philosophy, and metaliterary and intertextual as-
pects. The order of the contributions follows a thematic structure, organised
around the following topics: (1) text-constitution and style (Zimmerman;
Nicolini); (2) persona, self-fashioning and Second Sophistic (Egelhaaf-
Gaiser; Harrison); (3) philosophy and fiction (Graverini; Drews); (4) topog-
raphy and narrative movement (Tilg; Dowden); (5) Apuleius’ reception of
Plutarch (Van der Stockt; Finkelpearl); (6) authorial presence in (fictional)
literature (Smith).
The first two contributions (1) focus on details of textual criticism, lan-
guage and style, while embedding their analysis in the larger perspective of
the much-debated ‘nature’ of Book Eleven.
Maaike Zimmerman in her essay ‘Text and Interpretation – Interpreta-
tion and Text’ offers a few out of many instances in the Isis Book, where
interpretive stances on a macro-level have influenced approaches to textual
questions on a micro-level, and vice versa. This includes a brief overview of
the various ways in which scribes as well as scholars have dealt with the
‘famous last words’ of the narrator of the Metamorphoses. After a short sur-
vey of recent developments in research on the manuscript tradition of Apu-
leius’ Metamorphoses, Zimmerman deals successively with 11,1,4 (adopting
the text as given by Robertson: <laetus et> alacer exurgo ... [laetus et al-
acer] deam praepotentem lacrimoso vultu sic adprecabar); 11,2,3 (reading
udis, found in some recentiores); 11,5,2-3 (applauding Robertson’s Eleusinii
vetust<i Actae>am Cererem, but expressing reservations about his expansion
<et occidentis inclinantibus>); 11,7,1 (defending the transmitted text pavore
et gaudio ac dein sudore permixtus); 11,10,1-2 (keeping the phrase magnae
religionis terrena sidera in the transmitted order of words, in apposition with
the preceding hi capillum derasi funditus verticem praenitentes: the transmit-
ted text can be read as expressing Lucius’ genuine admiration of the bald
initiates, but, on a different level, it also confronts the reader with important
questions related to the polysemous quality of baldness, which is also dis-
cussed by Egelhaaf-Gaiser in this volume); 11,10,6 (discussing the transmit-
ted auream vannum aureis congestam ramulis, where some editors adopt
Passerat’s conjecture laureis); 11,14,5 (sacerdos vultu geniali et hercules
inhumano, defending the transmitted inhumano); 11,15,2 (adopting Lütjo-
hann’s <in> servitium ... vindicavit); 11,19,1 (narratisque meis pro et pris-
tinis aerumnis et praesentibus gaudiis, deleting pro with Novák); 11,24,3
Preface ix
(explaining Olympiacam); 11,30,5 (commenting on the transmitted final
words gaudens obibam, and discussing the idea raised by some scholars that
the actual concluding part may have been lost).
Lara Nicolini’s article on wordplay in Metamorphoses XI opens with a
problem of text and interpretation in 11,27,7, the passage containing the
name Asinius Marcellus, where editors in the phrase reformationis meae
alienum nomen have felt the need of some negative adverb (non, minime)
before alienum; Nicolini herself, thinking the joke might go in the opposite
direction, suggests iam: ‘a name that by this time sounded foreign to me’.
Her conclusion, after re-reading book XI, is that etymological wordplay does
not seem any less frequent in this final book than in the other ten books.
Even in the most solemn moments, wherever he has an opportunity, Apu-
leius plays with language, his “most venerated deity” (p. 41). Nicolini uses
the same categories as in her 2007 article on wordplay in the Metamorphoses
(‘Ad (l)usum lectoris: giochi di parole nelle Metamorfosi di Apuleio’): ‘lexi-
cal hapaxes’ (e.g. 11,18,1 adorabile; 11,9,2 amicimine; 11,3,3 elocutilis),
‘lexical hapaxes with calque from Greek’ (11,22,6 multinominis; 11,2,2 tri-
formi facie), ‘etymological reinterpretations’ (11,5,2 trilingues; 11,10,2
strictim; 11,25,4 nutriunt; 11,9,2 obvium obsequium), ‘etymological figures
and polyptota’ (11,8,2 venabula venatorem; 11,16,6 quam purissime purifi-
catam; on this ground Nicolini at 11,29,2 prefers cogitationes cogitabam),
‘reinterpretations of stock phrases or proverbs’ (11,28,2 inter sacrum et
saxum; 11,18,3 ad cultum sumptumque).
The next pair of articles (2) deal with aspects of persona and self-
representation in the narrative, connected to the Bildungskultur of the second
century A.D.; yet, whereas Egelhaaf-Gaiser lays emphasis on contemporary
performance culture and visual connections between literary self-
presentation and artefacts (e.g. sculpture), Harrison focuses on contemporary
literary trends, which, in his view, are reflected in the sophisticated playful-
ness of Apuleius’ satirical fiction.
Ulrike Egelhaaf-Gaiser starts her essay ‘The Gleaming Pate of the Pas-
tophorus: Masquerade or Embodied Lifestyle?’ with the anecdote on Aesop
in the theatre of Samos, quoted by Winkler (1985, 287) under the heading
‘The Grotesque Perspective’. Egelhaaf-Gaiser observes that, as a result of
Winkler’s postmodern interpretation of the Metamorphoses, Apuleian schol-
ars must choose between four interpretive approaches, especially with regard
to the Isis book: a satirical one (e.g. Harrison 2000), a serio-philosophical
one (e.g. Dowden 2006), a serio-comic one (e.g. Graverini 2007), or an
open, narratological one (e.g. Finkelpearl 2004). Feeling that aligning with
one particular uniform approach “offers a very limited perspective at best”
x Preface
(p. 43), Egelhaaf-Gaiser compares Lucius to the monstrum/teras Aesop, and
prefers to examine four ‘embodied lifestyles’ that shape Lucius’ complex
identity: (1) the religious symbolism inherent in the office of pastophorus;
(2) the self-transformation of Lucius into a ‘body of sound’ for Osiris; (3)
the resulting similarity to the image of Socrates in the Symposium; (4) the
singular body of the forensic orator, which has been transformed into an
exhibit, while the orator’s brilliance in the forum is commanded by Osiris.
Egelhaaf-Gaiser includes the polysemous connotations of Lucius’ baldness
in her investigation of the full body as a ‘bearer of signs’; she concludes that
the highly complex final image does not lend itself to one definitive interpre-
tation, as Lucius has accumulated a maximum number of lifestyles to em-
body simultaneously. This ‘literary spectacle’ can be compared with the
‘impersonations’ of various celebrities of the Second Sophistic, the cultural
phenomenon in which the “Sophistic play on performative self-
transformation” (p. 70) provided a key to success.
In his paper ‘Narrative subversion and Religious Satire in Metamor-
phoses 11’, Stephen Harrison restates and reinforces previous arguments for
a fundamentally satirical interpretation of the Isis Book through a reading of
some key scenes. Under the headings ‘Lucius on the beach’ (11,1-7),
‘Lucius’ transformation’ (11,12-16), ‘From retransformation to initiation’
(11,16-23), and ‘The final bombshell – Madaurensem’ (11,27,9), Harrison
argues that the final book of the Metamorphoses shows a continuity with the
rest of the novel in the characterisation of Lucius’ foolishness. While Lucius
(whether actor or auctor) may speak in a genuinely committed religious
voice, we are also allowed to hear the ironic voice of Apuleius-author, who
emphasizes the playful fictionality of the work rather than its spiritual truth
or echoes of realistic religious experience.
The next two articles (3) offer a philosophical approach to the Isis Book,
focussing on the relation between Isis, Providence and Fate; yet, whereas
Graverini emphasises the influence of Stoic doctrine and draws attention to
the role of the Emperor, Drews makes a case for the presence of Platonic
doctrine in the Isis Book. Both stress the ‘serious’ character of Book Eleven,
but whereas Graverini, who in his 2007 book on Apuleius (Le Metamorfosi
di Apuleio. Letteratura e identità) had already argued for the seriocomic
character of the novel, emphasises the ‘opposition’ between Book Eleven
and Books I-X against those scholars who argue for ‘continuity’ (e.g. Harri-
son), Drews presents the ‘humorous’ dimension of the Isis Book as an aspect
of Apuleius’ philosophical, i.e. Platonic outlook.
In his essay ‘PRUDENTIA and PROVIDENTIA, Book XI in Context’,
Graverini brings forward further proof that there are some fundamental dif-
Preface xi
ferences between the last book and the preceding ten. In his opinion, these
differences suggest that we should not reject the ‘serious’ character of the
Isis-book. Focusing on Apuleius’ use of prudentia and providentia, he first
notes that providentia and related terms appear 18 times in the first ten
books, and 11 times in the last; prudentia and related terms occur 15 times in
the first ten books, but never in the last. In the first ten books, providentia is
most often invoked as a divine force. “In many cases, however, this divine
providence has little to reveal itself as truly divine, and the reference to its
power is undermined by parody or irony.” Likewise, prudentia in the first
ten books is often used ironically; yet, there are two shining paradigms of
real prudentia, Socrates and Odysseus. The final book, from the very begin-
ning, is the realm of divine providentia, not of prudentia. Providentia is one
of the most important forces producing narrative in this book; it is also one
of the main characteristics of Isis. Graverini makes some additional remarks
on providentia from a philosophical point of view and from a political per-
spective: in Imperial times, it is especially a virtue of the emperor – “and
since the Emperor is himself divine, the circle is closed” (p. 102). So in the
first ten books prudentia is mostly unattainable, and providentia as a rule is
more a conventional idea than an effective and protective force. The last
book suggests that Lucius has reached some form of prudentia, and it pre-
sents us with an effective, personal, benevolent and maternal providentia,
embodied in the goddess Isis. Concluding, Graverini states that we should
read the last book in opposition to the previous ten: “the world-view of the
first ten books is overcome in the last” (p. 106).
Friedemann Drews, in ‘ASINUS PHILOSOPHANS: Allegory’s Fate
and Isis’ Providence in the Metamorphoses’, argues that (1) the Isis-book
contains, in a way, more Platonic philosophy, especially with regards to the
providence-theme, than perhaps previously assumed, and that (2) these fea-
tures do not contradict the entertaining character present in the first ten
books. Drews first gives a short survey of diverging views on ‘Platonic’ and
‘serious’ elements in Apuleius and the Metamorphoses: some scholars feel
that Apuleius’ Platonism and Isiac religion are overvalued, others consider
him a ‘real’ Platonist. Drews particularly focuses on allegorical interpreta-
tions of the novel (e.g. by Reinhold Merkelbach), criticising the concept of
allegory behind those interpretations, especially the contradictory identifica-
tion of Isis and blind fortune, and the related implication of some kind of
theological determinism within the plot of the novel. In a section ‘Apuleius’
Platonic distinction between providence, fate and free will in De Platone et
eius dogmate’, Drews argues that to Apuleius (pace his theoretical works)
fate is subordinate to providence (opposing Graverini’s “almost identical