Studies of religion in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses tend to focus on the role of Isis and her unexpected intervention to save the novel’s protagonist in the final book, or the portraits of Epona or Cybele and their devotees. Warren Smith’s book situates the novel in a much wider religious and cultural as well as literary environment of the period, namely contemporary Jewish and Christian religious texts, the Old and New Testaments of the Bible[1] and various Apocrypha. Smith explores the fascinating question of how a novel centred on a donkey would be read against these contradictory Pagan or Jewish and Christian backgrounds, and whether its redemption narrative might be a response to similar stories in these traditions. He therefore sets out the tapestry of literary intertexts in the novel and considers whether any portrayals of contemporary Jewish or Christian belief systems might have received a comparable treatment in it.
To set a baseline, Smith surveys donkey stories in the three monotheistic religions in contrast to the negatively charged portraits of Graeco-Roman donkeys (Chapter 1). Donkeys feature in several contemporary religious texts from the Bible to magical rituals, and their readers would bring their own experiences to their understanding of Apuleius’ tale of a young man transformed into a donkey by magic and saved by an Egyptian deity. The donkey, Smith argues, tends to be a creature of fun in pagan literature, characterised negatively as foolish, gluttonous, or immodest. Jewish, Christian and Islamic texts, however, have a friendlier view of the animal: the prophet Balaam’s famous ass (Numbers 22.21-39), who sees and obeys the angel of the Lord before her master does, and is enabled by God to speak, is a forerunner of the strong yet gentle donkeys of the Christian Gospels, like the one which carries Jesus to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday in fulfilment of various Old Testament prophecies (Matthew 21.1-10). Although Smith notes that Muhammad is said to ride on donkeys as a sign of his status as Prophet, Islam is only rarely discussed in the volume. Still, these sympathetic portraits of donkeys in all three religions contrast sharply with the negative one of pagan antiquity.
Chapter 2 focuses on the interrelations between witchcraft and religion and the ubiquity of magic in the first three books of the Metamorphoses (e.g. witchcraft in the story of Aristomenes and Socrates in Met. 1, the magical context of the Risus Festival in Met. 3). Smith’s examples of Apuleius’ well established multi-layered intertextual games show the witches’ farcical Platonic intertexts. In general, Smith favours religious interpretations of these multi-layered scenes and argues that the Metamorphoses incorporates both contemporary pagan magical beliefs and intertextual connections with Jewish and Christian literature. For example in Met. 1.25, Lucius’ friend Pythias has the fish that Lucius had just bought trampled, ostensibly to punish the greedy fishmongers for overpricing their wares. But leaving Lucius without his money and his dinner. This scene has been variously seen as Kafkaesque, satirical, comical or magical (replicating Isiac rituals). Smith stresses the incongruity between Pythias’ reassuring words to Lucius and his nonsensical actions which enact both the behaviour of a Roman magistrate and of an Isis priest. These two, and further, readings of the scene are possible, and whichever a reader might wish to foreground depends on their background, including their own religious beliefs.
Chapter 3 deals with the Fortuna/Providentia complex, where Lucius-turned-donkey is pursued by a fortune he perceives as malevolent and blind. Reversals of fortune in Apuleius and other ancient novels echo those in Acts of the Apostles, where providential appearances of angels or visions of God direct events and the travel arrangements of the Apostles, and save them from prison and shipwrecks. Providence, a concept in early Christian theology in alignment with the will of God, may also have inspired Apuleius’ claim in Met. 11 that Isis’ providence is that of an all-seeing and benevolent Fortuna. Lucius is at the lowest point in his fortunes when the appearance of Isis in a dream transforms his condition into real happiness, just as Jesus’ appearance to Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus turns the persecutor of Christians into an eternally blessed follower of Jesus’ teachings.
The brief Chapter 4 focuses on the stories of the robbers, and shows how their low cunning and lack of morality continue to set the tone of the novel even after their deaths. Like Lucius, the robbers are victims of an evil Fortune they myopically blame for their bad luck. They are hardly individualised, even though they see their deeds as epic and heroic, and they are easily overcome by civilians such as a feeble old woman.
‘Cupid and Psyche’ is discussed in Chapter 5, which sets out the ways in which the story mirrors and inverts the novel as a whole. The inset tale adds depth and lifts the novel up from the lower tone delineated in the previous chapters, through intertextuality with the higher genres epic and tragedy. Psyche’s happy ending anticipates that of Lucius, whose salvation is hardly a given after his continuously bad luck, and hints that divine intervention may have a hand in his overcoming of evil Fortune. Smith explores the contrast between Lucius’ often hellish environments and Cupid’s serene palace and between the donkey’s unappealing physique and the visually elaborate beauty of the divine protagonists Cupid, Psyche and, later, Isis. Smith focuses on Apuleius’ portrait of the power of divine love which saves Psyche from her potentially tragic fate even though she technically does not deserve it. She becomes immortal even though she had broken Cupid’s taboo in attempting to find out his true identity. Undeserved divine mercy becomes crucial to Smith’s argument.
Chapter 6 begins to pull the various arguments together to support the case for Apuleius’ interactions with Jewish and Christian texts and beliefs, as Smith explores the novel alongside the work of contemporary Christian apologists active in North Africa at the same time as Apuleius. Smith here sets out one of the most important theses of his book, namely that Apuleius, a pagan priest and Roman official, might have written the novel as a response and corrective to the expansion of Christianity during his time. Smith explores traces in Apuleius’ works that indicate inimical attitudes to Christianity, such as the promiscuous, murderous, and monotheistic Baker’s Wife in Met. 9.14, who is most likely a Christian or possibly a Jew – Apuleius does not clearly distinguish between either religion. Smith points out that the same term used here for her god in a derogatory fashion, unicus, is later used by Isis to describe herself, in an entirely positive sense, as the numen unicum, the ‘single godhead’ in Met. 11.5 – an example of the henotheistic corrective to the undesirable monotheistic belief Apuleius criticises. Apuleius’ negatively charged outsider view of Christian religious practices mirrors language and examples found in Christian apologetics. For example, Apuleius’ Baker’s Wife may be a deliberate reversal of the pagan wife turned Christian in Justin Martyr’s Second Apology: both women undermine the continuation of their marriage (in the Christian apologist for good reasons, in Apuleius because of sexual incontinence). Apuleius, so Smith, may be mocking Justin’s sympathetic portrait of a family where a wife turned Christian clashes with her pagan husband. Smith shows compellingly that there is some cultural space shared between Apuleius, the judge Urbicius he praises in Florida, and Christian writers like Justin Martyr, who describes trials of Christians under the same Urbicius. This kind of cultural exchange, even cross-fertilisation, could work in both directions. Other passages, for example Met. 10.33 (the narrator complains about the unjustified treatment of the philosopher Socrates), can be read as a reaction to similar segments in Christian and Jewish apologists who also complain about how their beliefs are judged unjustly by the Pagans. The apologists themselves co-opted Socrates and Platonism into the argumentative structure of their works and used rhetoric similar to that of contemporary Pagans. For instance, both sides sling accusations of immorality and the worship of donkeys against each other. Minucius Felix’ graphic and derisive depiction of Egyptian cults, with their human-animal-hybrid gods including some with donkey heads, contrasts with (in Smith’s opinion) Apuleian portraits of Egyptian religion. Smith concludes that these tropes found in both apologists and Apuleius indicate that Apuleius’ arguments are a parody of apologetic literature, and that Apuleius’ novel is a conversation between Paganism and Christianity, in which the former is set to be victorious over the latter. Although Christian apologists and Apuleius use similar argumentative structures and examples, Apuleius’ rhetoric can be seen as a parodic interaction with the apologists’ arguments, inverting and undermining them, while the apologists sought to refute Pagan accusations of Christian onolatry.
Chapter 7 further explores this accusation of onolatry or ‘donkey-worship’ against Christians, as demonstrated by the famous Alexamenos graffito which depicts Alexamenos worshipping a crucified man with a donkey head, and by other literary and pictorial descriptions of Christians as worshippers (or worse) of donkeys.[2]
An important test case for Smith throughout the book is the kidnapped maiden Charite and her wish in Met. 6.29 when she escapes on Lucius in his asinine form, namely that the donkey should be decked in gold as a reward for his help. Charite’s golden ambitions for her ‘saviour’ donkey might be the reason for the novel’s alternative title The Golden Ass’, and the scene itself a parody of Jesus’ entry on his donkey into Jerusalem (Preface, Chapter 1). Her guess that her donkey may even be a god in disguise carrying her (such as Jupiter might carry Europa in the guise of a bull) entertains comparisons with Egyptian theriomorphic deities (Chapter 6). With Chapter 7’ focus on onolatry, Smith returns to the passage to explore it further as a possible satiric representation of both pagan and Jewish decorations of religious artefacts with gold, possibly even including the Golden Calf (Exodus 32.4). Charite’s portrait engages comically with both attacks against and defences by Jewish and Christian writers on the nature of their religious imagery. Smith’s Charite is a humorous portrayal of a Christian devotee or even martyr, given her untimely end in Met. 8. She even embodies a humorous version of the Virgin Mary fleeing to Egypt on a donkey, because her escape, Charite suggests, should be depicted for posterity as a maiden riding a donkey. Despite the scene’s polysemous nature, Charite, so Smith, is a parody of Christian tropes readily available to Apuleius, of the donkey worship attributed to Christians, and of the arguments of Christian apologists who disputed the accusations of onolatry. Finally, the horrible deaths the robbers consider inflicting on Charite before being persuaded merely to sell her into a brothel are compared to the contemporary executions Christian martyrs had to endure.
Chapter 8 focuses on Met. 11 as a henotheistic answer to Jewish and Christian monotheism and as a portrait of the Isis cult which was a special object of scorn among contemporary Christians. Apuleius scholars passionately debate the sincerity of its apparently reverential depiction of the cult and ask whether the re-transformed Lucius’ devotion to Isis offers a serious portrait of the mystery religion or a parody consistent with the nature of the earlier parts of the novel. Smith’s answer points to the role of Lucius as a sinner who completely surrenders the rest of his life to the benevolent interference and influence of a deity. Lucius’ genuine desire for salvation makes his narrative of conversion into the cult of Isis entirely compatible with Christian accounts of conversation to Christianity. The two answers to salvation, Christ and Isis, are clear rivals whose devotees have similar experiences, and Lucius’ journey narrative, his move to Rome, the mystical experiences of the godhead, the reform of his overall behaviour for the better, his celibacy, even the mockery by others of his travails and the separation from his original friends and family all echo the experiences of St Paul in Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline Letters. These details build up to a surprisingly compatible image of early Christians like Paul and Isiac devotees like Lucius. Even though Smith dismisses arguments for the comedic interpretation of Lucius’ conversion, he acknowledges the text’s multi-layered complexity. His argument that crucially, just like Psyche’s rescue by Cupid, Lucius’ deliverance by Isis is undeserved, a gift of unearned divine grace and love, might be viewed differently by different modern branches of Christianity.
In Chapter 9, Smith turns his attention to the Jewish intertexts and possible parallels in contemporary Apocalyptic literature, which features humans, often in hopeless situations, experiencing, through the grace of God, divine visions and prophetic dreams about realities transcending their own, and even life after death. This situation maps easily onto Lucius’ relationship to Isis, whose revelation profoundly changes his experiences of reality and the nature of the divine. 2 Baruch, for example, predicts that there will be life after death for the righteous, and that false certainties such as witchcraft will be overcome on Earth.
Smith sets out eight points of comparison between Apuleius and apocalyptic texts which include, among others, the use of a formal prayer in petition to the deity, a divine epiphany, required purifications, and a major role for Rome in the divine plan. Smith argues strongly that there is a direct influence from Jewish literature, some of which itself inspired Christian thinkers, on Apuleius’ text, with its transformation of Lucius from a worthless asinine creature into Isis’ happy devotee, despite some rather crucial differences between the two approaches. There is no final judgement in Apuleius’ world, just continued religious bliss for Isis’ followers. This, according to Smith, is Apuleius’ corrective to the Jewish and Christian eschatologies he dislikes and seeks to counterbalance with his own version of divine salvation.
Chapter 10 offers a brief summary of the arguments, and an appendix on the problem of the identity of the ‘Man from Madauros’ in Met. 11.27 concludes the book with parallels from the Christian Scriptures.
Smith presents a coherent set of arguments. In places, a look at possible objections might have been illuminating. Smith might, for example, have explored declamations or rhetorical treatises outside the apologetic tradition in order to test for possible common sources; a look at the ‘fatal charades’[3] inflicted on Pagans at the same time as Christians could perhaps flush out if there was something especially Christian about any theatrical displays of torture that Apuleius might have taken aim at. The book shows clearly that Apuleius’ novel taps into the same concerns and modes of expression as contemporary Jewish and Christian texts. Not every reader will go along with the central premise of Smith’s book, but he has shown surprising, often compelling, correspondences between these texts and the Metamorphoses, and this book will form a valuable addition to our studies of Apuleius’ elusive novel.
Notes
[1] Smith refers to the Old and New Testaments rather than to the Hebrew Bible and Christian Gospels.
[2] N.B. the image descriptions of figures 7.2 and 7.3 on pp. 90-91 should be inverted. There are few editorial infelicities, although the misprint on p. 33 of ‘Isaiac’ for ‘Isiac’ may cause some confusion.
[3] Coleman’s famous term: K.M. Coleman, ‘Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments.” In: The Journal of Roman Studies (80) 1990, 44–73.