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Despite unprecedented booms in both the field of magic and studies of Apuleius over the past few decades, one of the most intriguing questions about his life and career has been all but ignored: How is it that this philosophus Platonicus, sophist and novelist gained a reputation as a great miracle-worker a century after his death, a reputation so grand that he would be compared with Jesus, the Apostles, and Apollonius of Tyana? The earliest sign of this phenomenon is to be found in the polemics of Porphyry and Lactantius (PL 26, 1056D; Lact., Div. Inst. 5.3.7-21), and a century later he appeared in the letters of Augustine in a similar context (Eps. 102.32, 136.1, 137.13, 138.18-19) – passages revealing that Apuleius had become a figure for pagan intellectuals to rally around in their verbal conflict with the Church Fathers. Several other sources attest to this reputation, including an amulet quoted by the physician Priscianus (Addit. 15.21-22) that ordered bleeding to stop in the name of Apuleius – a practice reminiscent of the phylacteries invoking Apollonius.

Most scholars who treat Apuleius’s Nachleben do not explore this phenomenon in any depth, or do so without investigating its root cause (Carver 2007, Gaisser 2007). Ever since the publication of Paul Monceaux’s Apulée: Roman et Magie in 1888, the few scholars (e.g., Moreschini 1973) who have made an effort to reconcile the Late Antique figure of Apuleius the magician with the historical individual have focused on the Apologia and, to a lesser extent, Metamorphoses for explanation: after all, the latter seemingly indicates a preoccupation with magic, while the former records multiple charges that could have blackened Apuleius’s name in the public mind. None of the explanations put forth, however, is satisfactory, since they fail to recognize that both the acts performed by the witches of the Metamorphoses and the charges brought against Apuleius only concerned aggressive, anti-social forms of magic – and in the mind of posterity Apuleius kept company with great miracle-workers. Therefore, another explanation must be sought.

This explanation appears more likely to lie in the persona that Apuleius seems to have consciously crafted for himself and his demonstrations of scientific learnedness that were intended to impress his fellow, mostly uneducated, North Africans. In his speeches, most notably the Apologia, Apuleius clearly comes across as one who made a point of emphasizing his unusual lifestyle and activities: he dresses and wears his hair as a philosopher, devotes himself to areas of learning beyond the grasp of the masses, and takes pride in his worship of a “basileus” whose nature can only be comprehended by an elite few. Moreover, he enjoys publicly lecturing on science and shows an interest in both optical effects and the marvelous mechanical devices known as automata (Apol. 16, 61). Whereas the sophists of Asia Minor would expound on the Greeks’ glorious past or Rome’s greatness, Apuleius emphasized theology and science, and perhaps in some of his public demonstrations acted as an ancient Mr. Wizard. It is also possible that Apuleius gave readings from the Golden Ass that, in view of his eccentric, exotic persona, were readily accepted by some as a firsthand account of his miraculous conversion into a donkey – even Augustine appears to have been uncertain about whether this did in fact occur (Aug., CD 18.18), and parallels can be found in the reputation of magician gained by another sophist because of his declamations on magic (Phil., VS, p. 590) and even Boccaccio’s report that some actually believed Dante to have visited Hell. Overall, then, it would not have been feats of magic that earned Apuleius his thaumaturgical reputation, but rather a combination of words and deeds that left such an indelible impression among his contemporaries that over the course of a century he became a figure of legend – not only a North African Socrates, but also a North African Apollonius of Tyana.