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Overview

This paper presents a sketch of Apuleius’ descriptions of the lives of both historical personages and literary characters; it then compares these with the preoccupations and techniques of ancient biography. This is an approach largely missing in the critical literature. Through an examination of selected examples drawn from the range of Apuleius’ oeuvre, the paper exposes a similarity in approach and technique between Apuleius and ancient biographers.

Context and Examples

In Book 3 of Lucan’s Pharsalia, Caesar is temporarily detained in his rapid march towards Spain by representatives of Massilia, who seek neutrality on behalf of their city. Their appeal, in the form of a long, impassioned monologue, fails to convince their antagonist; after delivering his own speech in response, Caesar besieges the city and engages the Massilians in an extended naval battle that spans over 250 lines. This episode has attracted attention for its historical inaccuracy, and for the bizarre and grisly naval battle that follows.

Tacitus and Dio use intratextual references in their accounts of the Boudican revolt to indicate the sameness of provincial uprisings, as well as the uniqueness of Boudica as an individual. Boudica stands apart as a female leader, and her sex allows each author to meditate on the impact of Rome on the lives of women. Boudica poignantly demonstrates the psychological effects of servitude and the destruction of family life.

[νικέ]σας ℎό[δε πρτον Ἀθένεσ[ιν χο]ρι ἀνδρ[ν]

[-υυ]τς σοφ[ίας] τόνδ’ ἀνέθε[κ]εν ℎόρον

[εὐχσάμενο[ς π]λείστοις δὲ [χ]οροῖς ἔσχο κατὰ φῦλα

[ἀνδ]ρν νι[κ]σαι φεσι π[ερ]ὶ τρίποδος

Pamphila of Epidaurus, a polymath and Greek author of the mid-1^st cent. CE, is now best known as an early miscellanist who influenced the likes of Aulus Gellius and Apuleius (Müller-Reineke, 2006; Klotz and Oikonomopoulou, 2011). Not included by Jacoby in his magisterial Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker (even though she appeared in Müller’s older Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (Müller, 1849 vol. 3, 520-1)), Pamphila has received hardly any recognition as a historian (Cagnazzi 1997 is a notable exception).

Plato’s critique of Homer in the Republic is by and large one of emotion: poetry causes its audience to neglect sophrosyne (self-control by the rational principle) and to absorb—and later reenact through behavioral mimesis—the anger, lust, and excessive self-pity they see on literary display. Aristotle’s defense of poetry in the Poetics largely ignores this challenge, offering but one possible solution through the famously unexplained and unexemplified assertion that poetry achieves catharsis of emotion.

Tacitus’ brief narrative of the destruction of the town of Uspe of the Siraci in the Bosphorus in 49 CE (Ann. 12.16-17) provides valuable insight into the use of massacre in the exercise of Roman imperialism. It shows, inter alia, a tension, inherent in imperial rhetoric and ideology, between the ideal of clementia and the perceived necessity for exemplary violence in the context of expanding or maintaining Rome’s empire.

This talk will begin by quickly presenting the main arguments that support an identification of the (previously unidentified) Akkadian plant sikillu with Greek σκίλλα (En. “sea squill,” or “onion squill,” Scilla Maritima Linn.). These include etymology, similarity of habitat, physical characteristics and specific medical and magico-religious applications.

This paper re-examines the assessment that Roman women were barred from attendance at literary recitations, and, therefore, from participating in one of the most important avenues of intellectual life. Recent work on the education of Roman women and their production of literature (e.g., Hemelrijk (1999) and Shelton (2013)) frequently assumes, with comparatively little discussion, that conventions of feminine modesty would have prevented women from even attending recitationes, let alone presenting their work at these gatherings.

At 17.4 of his Res Gestae, Ammianus Marcellinus narrates at length how an obelisk originally removed from Egyptian Thebes is conveyed to Rome and installed in the Circus Maximus by the emperor Constantius II. This episode has received much scrutiny from scholars (e.g. Kelly 225-230, with bibliography in n. 8). Nevertheless, it is usually examined in isolation, as a historical curiosity.