Marsha McCoy, Southern Methodist University
The story of Thelyphron in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (2.21-30), told as an imbedded tale within the larger narrative, has been variously analyzed as, e.g., a combination of three separate earlier tales (Perry. 1929), a story unified by the elaborate wordplay of the narrative (Murgatroyd. 2004), a tale foreshadowing the transformation of the narrator, Lucius, into as ass at Metamorphoses 3.24 (Sandy. 1973; Murgatroyd. 2001), and one of twelve tales in the Metamorphoses featuring a “spoiled marriage” (Lateiner. 2000). This paper, in a new interpretation, sets the tale within the sociological framework of “scapegoating,” and situates this interpretation within theories of the social function of ancient literature.
The story concerns a certain Thelyphron, who volunteers to guard a corpse overnight against mutilations by witches. However, he is tricked into deep slumber, and wakes at dawn in a terror at his lapse of vigilance, but the corpse is curiously intact. As the corpse is carried to its burial, the uncle of the dead man accuses the dead man’s wife of murdering him, and an Egyptian priest summons the dead man to life to testify to the truth of this charge. The dead man not only affirms its truth but also asserts that he was only spared the witches’ mutilations because Thelyphron himself was mutilated in his place, losing his nose and ears. Thelyphron belatedly realized that the witches have disguised their mischief by creating a wax nose and ears for him, and pulls off the wax to the raucous laughter of the crowd assembled for the funeral.
This tale is told as an imbedded story within the framework of a dinner party, where Thelyphron is pulled forward amid hearty laughter to retell his story to Lucius, also a dinner guest (Met. 2.20); when he finishes his story, he is again greeted with loud laughter by the dinner guests (Met. 2.31).
The sociologist Emile Durkheim first described scapegoating in a social context as a practice whereby individuals are blamed and saddled with punishments in order to regain stability and and well-being in a society experiencing death and other forms of social disintegration (Durkheim. 1912). In Thelyphron’s tale, he himself is blamed and punished for the mysterious and destructive practices of the witches. By offloading this awful consequence of death onto to an outsider like Thelyphron, who is from Miletus, the group can regain its sense of control and well-being, evidenced by the original outburst of laughter at Thelyphron at the funeral in the embedded tale, and reenacted and confirmed by the raucous laughter both before and after Thelyphron retells his tale to Lucius. The very influential collection of essays on Athenian drama discussing the social function of ancient literature (Winkler and Zeitlin. 1990), among other works on this topic, is equally relevant here. Thelyphron’s story, experienced by him as a scapegoat situation, and then told over and over in various later social settings to reenact the scapegoating, continually reinforces his ongoing social role as a scapegoat. It clearly works as an important function in the society that he is in, affirming his necessity and importance as a scapegoat to suffer and thereby contain the malevolent forces threatening the community, and thus to keep it safe and ensure its well-being.