THE GOLDEN ASS, OR METAMORPHOSES

NOTES

BOOK I

1.1 this Milesian discourse: see Introduction, §1.

amusing: this renders lepidus, from lepos, a word connoting charm, grace, wit. Lucius repeatedly uses this adjective to characterize the stories he hears and  tells. Their true significance and their relevance to his own case invariably escape him.

an Egyptian book: papyrus came from Egypt. It is only in book 11 that the story takes on an explicitly Egyptian colouring. However, the fact that it is an ass into which Lucius is transformed then takes on its full significance. See Introduction, §9.

with the sharpness of a pen from the Nile:  the pen, of Nile reed, is both literally and metaphorically 'sharp', a hint that the book may after all prove to be something more than the 'amusing gossip' promised here.

Attic Hymettus, the Isthmus of Corinth, and Spartan Taenarus: Mount Hymettus stands for Athens, where Lucius had been a student (1,24). Corinth, as later emerges (2.12), was his native place. Taenarus figures only as one of the traditional entrances to the Underworld (6.18); there may be an allusion to the symbolic Catabasis (descent to Hell) which formed part of the ritual of Isiac  initiation (11, 23).

mastered the Latin language: Apuleius himself had learned Latin as a boy in North Africa; this is Lucius speaking. At the end of the story he will be abruptly elbowed aside by his creator (11.27 and note), who is very far from being 'an unpractised speaker' (11.28) However, see also 9.39 and note.

the trick ... of changing literary horses at the gallop: a graphic image of the kaleidoscopic variety of content, models, tone and treatment in this unique novel, but referring more particularly to the author's linguistic versatility, See Introduction, §1.

a Grecian story: see Introduction, §§1, 4.

1.2 Plutarch and his nephew Sextus: the connection is alluded to again by Byrrhena (2,3). The implication is that Lucius ought to know better: his unenlightened curiosity and degrading involvement in sensual pleasures with Photis are a betrayal of his philosophical heritage. It is only towards the end of the novel that this is brought home to him in the words of the priest of lsis. The attentive reader is supposed to be equipped and alert to grasp the significance of such apparently casual allusions. Sextus was tutor to Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. Descent, real or fictitious, from Plutarch was something for a philosopher to boast of (C. P, Jones, Plutarch, and Rome, Oxford, 1971, pp. 11-12}. On  Plutarchan elements in the novel see Introduction, §9.

a pure white animal: later to take on a symbolic significance (11.20).

thirsting as always for novelty: inopportune curiosity will be his, and Psyche's, undoing. The well-informed reader would remember that Plutarch had written a treatise De curiositate, in which there is much that is relevant to Lucius and his behaviour (Introduction, §9).

1.3 milked of her dew: it was believed that dew was produced by the moon.

1.4 the Painted Porch: the Stoa Poikile, a portico decorated with paintings by famous artists and the meeting-place of the sect called after it, the Stoics. The  contrast of the setting, with its stern philosophical associations, and the speciously miraculous nature of the spectacle with which Lucius couples it, again hints at his wilful neglect of his advantages. He should have been in the Porch imbibing  wisdom, not gawping at mountebanks outside.

twining sinuously round it: Aesculapius (Greek Asklepios) was the son of Apollo and god of medicine. His emblem was a ragged stAff and a serpent, symbolizing renewal.

1.5 Aristomenes, from Aegium: a rather grand name for a commercial traveller (aristos, 'best', menos, 'might'), borne by, among others, the addressee of one of  Pindar's victory odes (Pythians, 8). See below on Socrates. Aegium was a city  of some importance on the south shore of the Gulf of Corinth.

on the wrong foot: proverbial for doing something inauspicious at the outset of a journey or undertaking, left being as now the unlucky side.

Lupus: 'wolf'. See next note.

1.6 Socrates: the bearer of this name turns out to be no more distinguished for wisdom than Aristomenes for courage. Such 'speaking' names were a feature of epic, and Apuleius employs them freely.

1.7 a gang of bandits: brigandage plays a prominent part in the plot of Apuleius' novel, as it does in the Greek romances. It appears to have been a feature of  life in the remoter provinces; but Lucius' world is in general a lawless place.  See Introduction, §6.

Meroe: there was a famous temple of Isis on the island of Meroe in the upper Nile, but it is perhaps more likely that her name puns on merum, 'neat wine'.

1.8 bring down the sky ... illuminate Hell itself: a typical catalogue of the feats commonly attributed to witches, and precisely the kind of phenomena discredited by Aristomenes' sceptical companion.

both lots: 'the Aethiopians, that last race of men, whose dispersion across the world's end is so broad that some of them can see the Sun-God rise while  others see him set' (Homer, Odyssey, 1. 23 -4, trans. T. E. Lawrence).

the Antipodeans: the idea of men 'with feet opposite' (antipus) on the other side of a spherical world is first attested in Plato's Timaeus (63a). 

1.9 biting off their balls: they were supposed to be aware that it was for the sake  of a medicinal oil (castoreum) extracted from their testicles that they were hunted  (Pliny, Natural History, 8. 109, 32. 26-31).

as if it was an elephant: the period of gestation for elephants was popularly supposed to be ten years (in fact, just under two).

1.10 Medea: the witch par excellence. When her husband Jason proposed to take a new wife she contrived the destruction of the bride and her father Creon,  king of Corinth, by the gift of a poisoned robe and a self-igniting crown. The  story was familiar from Euripides' classic treatment in his play Medea.

into a trench: like Odysseus (Ulysses) summoning the ghosts from Hades (Homer, Odyssey, 11. 35 -6). According to Heliodorus this was a common  necromantic practice in Egypt (Ethiopica, 6. 14.2).

1.12 Panthia: 'all-divine'.

Endymion: a beautiful shepherd with whom the Moon (Artemis, Diana} fell in love. At his own request Zeus (Jupiter) granted him eternal life, eternal youth, and eternal sleep.

Ganymede: a beautiful Trojan boy, abducted by Zeus to be his cupbearer and bedfellow.

his wily Ulysses: Calypso was the nymph with whom Odysseus (Ulysses) spent seven years of the ten that it took him to get back home from Troy (Homer,  Odyssey, 5. 1-269}. In the later tradition, Homer's 'man of many resources'  (ibid., I. 1) became a byword for unscrupulous cunning.

1.13 like Bacchantes: who tore wild animals apart in their frenzy.

1.15 Cerberus: the three-headed dog that guarded the entrance to Hades; see 6.19.

1.16 Now, now ... my dearest bed: with the substitution of grabatule, 'bed', for frater, 'brother', the opening words of this prayer are identical with an apostrophe put into the mouth of the Numidian Adherbal by Sallust in his Jugurthine War  (14. 22) This paratragedic appeal to a broken-down bedstead forms an ironic contrast to the real prayers addressed by Lucius to Isis later in the novel. 

with which it was strung: the mattress rested on a network of cords stretched  across the frame, as in an Indian charpoy.

1.19 waxy pale: literally 'with the pallor of boxwood', a recurring poetic comparison.

1.20 delightful lepidus (see 1.1 and note).

1.21 Milo: the name of (1) a famous Greek wrestler of the sixth century BC; (2) a Roman politician defended by Cicero in a famous speech, the Pro Milone, on charges of political violence. In this case there seems to be no particular relevance to Milo's character, which is that of a miser.

his ruling passion: there seems to be a pun on the literal and transferred senses of aerugo, 'verdigris' and 'canker of the mind'. Horace writes of avarice as 'this craze for coppers, this verdigris ... on our hearts' (Art of Poetry, trans. Niall Rudd, 330-31).

Demeas: the name of the severe brother in Terence's play Adelphoe; again it is difficult to see any significance in the choice.

1.22 his wife sitting: the old custom by which men reclined at table and women and children sat had become obsolete, at least as regarded women, at Rome nearly two centuries before Apuleius' time. If this passage (which reproduces the Onos) is reliable evidence it survived much longer in the provinces.

1.23 old Hecale's frugal hospitality: Theseus, on his way to fight the Bull of Marathon, took shelter from the rain in the cottage of an old woman called  Hecale. The episode was the subject of a famous and influential short epic  poem by Callimachus of which only fragments survive: see Callimachus, Hecale,  ed. A. S. Hollis (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990)

Photis: her name derives from Greek phos, 'light', as Lucius' does from Latin lux. In this sense she is an ignis fatuus, beckoning him away from the true light, who is Isis, with the allurements of purely sensual pleasure. See 3.22 and note.

1.24 for our supper: i.e. for himself and his slaves, whose presence is taken for granted (2.15 and note). Insouciance about such details is an Apuleian hallmark.

pytheas: Apuleius' manuscripts and modern editors and translators spell him Pythias, which is a woman's name. Again the choice of name seems to have no special significance.

Lucius: here first identified by name.

Clytius: a name borne by several characters from myth and legend; klutos in Greek means 'famous'. However, the name here is a conjectural restoration of the manuscript reading adstio.

an aedile: aediles were magistrates in charge of various aspects of public order, including supervision of the markets.

1.25 completely bemused: as well he might be; the episode has perplexed scholars too. Rather than a gratuitous stroke of satire at the expense of municipal officialdom, always admittedly fair game (Schlam, 1992, p. 33), it seems more likely that it carries some symbolic implication. The fish was an important symbol both in the cult of Atargatis, whose discreditable priests Lucius will later encounter (8.24) and note), and for the early Christians (see OCD s.v. fish, sacred), and there is evidence for an Isiac ritual intended to avert inimical influences which involved trampling fish underfoot (Schlam, ibid.).  For the possibility that it is Christianity which is glanced at here, see 9.14 and note.  The immediate outcome is that at the end of his first day in Thessaly Lucius goes to bed tired out, hungry and bewildered; and it may be that Apuleius inserted the episode, which was almost certainly not in his original, or provide the end of the first book of his novel with an effective conclusion.  If that was his intention, the effect remains elusive.

BOOK 2

2.1 a new day: and a new book, as with books 3, 7 and 8. This is characteristic of epic narrative, as is the ending of a book with the hero's retiring to rest (1,  2, 10; similarly book 4 ends with Psyche in a deep sleep). It is also in the epic manner to ring artful literary changes on the theme of daybreak.

the cradle of magic arts and spells: the reputation of Thessaly as mother of witches goes back at least to Aristophanes (Clouds, 749-50).

2.2 Salvia: the name for a medicinal herb (Pliny, Natural History, 22. 147), but probably chosen here for its etymological connection with salus, 'safety', 'life', 'salvation'; it is Lucius' salvation that, as the reader eventually discovers, the  book is all about, and his mother's name is another reminder of the advantages he had enjoyed which ought to have helped him to avoid the pitfalls into which his curiosity is to lead him. The hint is reconfirmed by Byrrhena's allusion to the family connection with Plutarch.'

eyes grey: the word used here, caesius, is variously rendered 'grey', 'blue-grey' and' green'; the precise meaning of terms of colour in Greek and Latin is often  open to argument. Though this was the colour of Minerva's (Athene's) eyes,  it was evidently not as a rule admired in people; in Lucretius' famous catalogue  of lovers' euphemisms a man with a grey-eyed girlfriend is advised to pass her  off as 'a miniature Pallas [Athene]' (De rerum natura, 4. 1161).

2.3 Byrrhena: perhaps 'Ginger', burrus being the Latin spelling of Greek purrhos, 'red-haired'. It has, however, been ingeniously suggested that the allusion is to Greek bursa, 'leather', and that her reference to rearing Lucius with her own hands implies that she was a strict disciplinarian; if so, he evidently failed to profit from her attentions. Dickensians will remember Pip's rueful reflections in Great Expectations on his upbringing 'by hand'.

2.4 There was a magnificent entrance-hall: set-piece descriptions, of which this is the first example in the novel, were a stock feature of poetry and oratory, and Apuleius clearly enjoyed the opportunities that they offered for virtuosic writing.  Some of those in The Golden Ass have no other justification, as is admitted in the case of the robbers' lair (4.6 and note). This example, however, as will appear, is a significant exception.

a statue of Victory: these statues, so precariously poised, hint perhaps that Lucius' eventual victory over Fortune (11.15) will not be easily won.

Actaeon: while out hunting he came on Diana bathing with her nymphs and was turned by her into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds. As a symbolic warning against inopportune curiosity the message could hardly be clearer, and it is immediately reinforced by the ironical implications of  Byrrhena's formal words of welcome, 'everything you see is yours' (ch. 5), and her adjuration by Diana, who is also the underworld goddess Hecate and the Moon, both avatars of Isis (11.2, 5). The story of Actaeon would have been familiar to any educated Roman from Ovid's Metamorphoses (3. 138-52), and the subject was favoured by artists.

2.5 by Diana there: as Hecate she was goddess of witchcraft and magic.

Pamphile: 'all-loving'; another Meroe. However, in the event it is the involvement with Photis that is Lucius' undoing.

2.7 to vote with my feet: the usual phrase when the Senate divided on a motion, which they did by walking to one side or the other of the Senate House.

a succulent stew: there follows another dish, but the text is hopelessly garbled.

stood in amazement ... stood to attention: Apuleius spices his naughty joke by echoing the words used by Virgil to describe Aeneas' consternation at the apparition of Creusa: 'I was paralysed. My hair stood on end' (Aeneid, 2. 774,  trans. David West).

witty: lepida (see 1.1 and note).

2.8 this preference: there is more to this than a personal obsession. This description of Photis' hair is picked up in the epiphany of Isis (11.3), lending weight to the suggestion that Photis is a sort of anti or false Isis: see the notes on 1.23, 3.22.

her cestus: the love-charm lent by Aphrodite (Venus) to Hera (Juno) in a famous passage of Homer (Iliad, 14. 211-23); probably a breast-band rather than a girdle or belt.

her Vulcan: the Latin is nicely ambiguous: suo, 'her own', need mean no more than 'her dear', but some translators take it as 'husband', as he is in Homer and the classical poets. However, later on (5.30) Venus by her own account turns out to be married en secondes noces to Mars (Ares), who in the usual version of events was her lover. Apuleius may well have known the pre-classical genealogy in which Ares was Aphrodite's husband (Hesiod, Theogony, 933-4). 

2.10 a bittersweet morsel: a literary stereotype deriving from Sappho's famous description of Eros as 'a bittersweet irresistible creature', but again irony is at work. Photis' light-hearted prophecy will turn out to be all too accurate.

2.11 Venus' supporter and squire: an allusion to the proverbial sentiment, first met with in Terence's play Eunuchus (732), that 'Without food and wine Venus lacks warmth'; but the word translated by 'squire', armiger, contributes to the warlike imagery which Apuleius substitutes for the wrestling metaphors of the original in the subsequent description of their amatory encounter.

plenty of oil in the lamp: '... moving blind spoils love-making; In love it's the eyes that lead'; so Propertius (2.15. 11-12, trans. A. G. Lee), expressing a traditional view. Aristophanes' play Ecclesiazusae begins with a famous address to the lamp as the accomplice and confidant of lovers, and the theme constantly recurs in the poets. See 5.22 and note.

the bottomless pit: in the Latin, Lake Avernus in the Bay of Naples, traditionally one of the entrances to the Underworld; another is Taenarus (6.18 and note).

2.12 sharing consciousness with it: Lucius trivializes the Stoic identification of God (Nature, Fate, Providence) with fire.

a Chaldean: the Chaldeans (Babylonians) were famous for their skill in astronomy and astrology. By Apuleius' time 'Chaldean' often simply meant 'astrologer'.

a legend, an incredible romance in several volumes: the Latin says historiam ... et fabulam et libros me futurum, i.e. I shall be the Metamorphoses, the book now in the reader's hands. This is an early hint of the forthcoming identification at the end of the novel of Lucius as 'a man from Madaura' (11.27), the revelation, that is, that this narrative is in some sense confessional and autobiographical.  Apuleius peeps out again from behind the persona of Lucius at 4.32 and 8.1 (see  notes). 

2.13 Diophanes: 'god-revealing'.

Cerdo: 'profiteer'.

2.14 both her rudders: ships were steered by two oars, one on each side of the stern.

Arignotus: 'well-known'.

2.15 irrelevant anecdotes: another warning obtusely ignored: if Diophanes cannot foresee his own future accurately, why should his prediction of Lucius' be any more reliable? True, it is correct as far as it goes, but it leaves much unforetold. 

the slaves: Lucius'; Photis was the only servant in Milo's household. This is one of the numerous loose ends in Apuleius' conduct of the story; we hear  again (11.20) of 'the servants' left behind at Hypata, but elsewhere (2.31, 3.27, 7.2) only one is mentioned. See Introduction, §5.

only waiting to be diluted: wine was generally drunk mixed with water, sometimes, as here, warm.

2.16 garlanded me: garlands, it has been observed, were the ancient equivalent of evening dress. Roses were especially associated with Venus, but their appearance here will prove ironic.

without any diplomatic overtures: in the Latin 'without waiting for the Fetiales to do their stuff'. The Fetiales were a college of priests responsible for the formalities of making treaties and declaring war. Not a very plausible witticism in the mouth of a native Greek, but one of many such specifically Roman and often anachronistic allusions in the novel. See below, 2.18 and note.

2.17 to protect her modesty: there was a famous painting by Apelles of Venus rising from the sea (Venus Anadyomene), of which Apuleius could have seen a copy at Rome. However, the pose provocatively and self-consciously adopted by Photis recalls rather Praxiteles' equally famous and much-copied statue of the Cnidian Aphrodite (M. Robertson, A History of Greek Art, Cambridge, 1975, I. 391-4, II. Plate 127).

2.18 take the auspices: the practice of taking the auspices before battle had fallen into disuse long before Apuleius' time. By alluding to Photis' decision in these terms Lucius implicitly accords her divine status.

2.20 Thelyphron: 'womanheart'.

amusing: lepidi (see I.I and note).

2.21 like a man making a formal speech: gesture was an important part of rhetorical technique; the various deployments of fingers and thumb to suit what is being said are elaborately analysed by Quintilian in the Institutio Oratoria ( I I. 3. 92 106) .

2.23 Harpies: monsters with a bird's body and a woman's head.

Lynceus or Argus: Lynceus was one of the Argonauts renowned for his keen sight; Argus had a hundred eyes. Thelyphron forgets or has never learned that  both came to an untimely end, Lynceus killed by Pollux in a brawl about some rustled cattle, and Argus by Mercury, who lulled him to sleep while he was guarding Io (Ovid, Metamorphoses, I. 713-23).

2.26 Philodespotus: 'master-loving'.

Pentheus or Orpheus: in the Latin pretentiously paraphrased as 'the proud Aonian (i.e. Theban) young man' and 'the Pipleian (i.e. Pierian, dear to the  Muses) bard'. Both were torn to pieces by Bacchantes (1.13), Pentheus for defying the power of Dionysus (Bacchus), Orpheus for shunning the love of women. Neither illustration is particularly apposite; Thelyphron likes showing off his schoolroom acquaintance with classical literature, in this case Euripides' Bacchae and Ovid's Metamorphoses (11.1 -66) respectively.

2.28 divine Providence: on the part played in the novel by Providence see Introduction, §11; and on Fortune see 7.2 and note.

Zatchlas: a unique and exotic name, variously interpreted by scholars; it may or may not have been correctly transmitted in the manuscripts. The episode is generally seen as a demonstration of the beneficent power of Isis as contrasted with the malevolence of the witches and as a further warning to Lucius, disregarded like all the others, not to meddle ignorantly with magic. However, it should be noted that the Isiac priest in Heliodorus' Ethiopica specifically rejects necromancy as corrupt and unclean: 'the prophetic powers of priests proceed from legitimate sacrifices and pure prayer' (6. 14,7; see also 3. 16,3). It looks  as if Apuleius got carried away, perhaps by reminiscence of one of the most famous necromantic scenes in Latin literature, the performance of the witch Erichtho in Lucan's Pharsalia (6. 507-830). On Apuleius' reliability as a witness  to the details of Isiac cult, see 11.16 and note.

with his head shaved bare: as Lucius' will eventually be (11.28, 30).

Coptos ... Memphis ... Pharos: centres of Isiac worship.

the risings of Nile: always in antiquity and indeed down to modern times a subject of wonder and speculation. See, for instance, the elaborate exposition by Kalasiris, priest of Memphis, in Heliodorus' Ethiopica (2.28).

sistrums: rattles used in Isiac ceremonies; see the description at 11, 4.

2.31 the god of Laughter: apparently invented by Apuleius, along with his festival, as the peg on which to hang another cautionary episode.

some suitably lavish adornment: literally 'some material that the great god could flowingly wear', a rather laboured play on the two senses of materia, 'literary  material' and 'fabric. Lucius thinks that he is being invited to write an ode or speech in honour of Laughter; in fact he himself will be the material for the jest, and his (for everybody but himself) mirth-provoking speech will be in his own defence, Byrrhena's words 'provide some witty diversion' turn out to be highly ironic.

2.32 Geryon: a giant with three bodies; Lucius implicitly equates himself with Hercules, who killed Geryon as one of his twelve Labours.

BOOK 3

3.1 Rosy-fingered Dawn: Apuleius exploits a Homeric cliche. On his epicizing descriptions of daybreak, see 2.1 and note.

3.2 at the bar of the court: on the relationship, or lack of it, between this trial and that at 10.7-12 to contemporary legal realities, see Introduction, §6.

the coffering of the ceiling: the details of Apuleius' descriptions are sometimes hard to pin down. He evidently envisages a theatre on the Roman pattern with a roofed stage backed by a high wall elaborately embellished with columns, pedimented niches, and statuary.

the orchestra: the space, circular in Greek theatres, semicircular in Roman, between the stage and the front row of seats.

3.3 ran off drop by drop: the water-clock (clepsydra) was a familiar device; it is typical of Apuleius to provide this careful description of it, not so clear what he thought was the point of doing so.

3.7 secondfather: the word used, parens, is often used to describe relationships other than the strictly paternal (compare French parent); Hanson renders 'uncle', Walsh 'patron'. At 7.3 Lucius refers to his alleged crime against Milo as parricide (see note).

3.8 by torture: the evidence of slaves was routinely taken under torture in the classical period. Roman citizens were legally exempt from torture, but by Apuleius' time this rule was not infrequently breached (J. A. Crook, Law and Life of Rome, 1967, pp. 274-5). The point here, however, is that by his conduct Lucius has degraded himself to the level of a slave and this treatment is no more than he deserves. This is clear to the thoughtful reader and ought to be clear to Lucius himself; the townspeople of Hypata are intent only on their sadistic fun.

3.9 Greek-style: the wheel was a characteristically Greek instrument of torture; it crops up again at 10.10. The victim was stretched on it while the fire or the scourge was applied.

Proserpine ... Orcus: Proserpine (Greek Persephone) was queen of the Underworld, Orcus (Greek Hades, Pluto) its king.

3.11 author and actor: Lucius has been both plot and protagonist of the play.

among its patrons: in the real world a patron was a sort of ambassador, a man of substance and influence appointed to watch over the city's interests at Rome.  Lucius' appointment, like the statue which he tactfully declines, is purely honorific. Apuleius records that he himself received similar honours from mor  than one city (Florida, 16).

3.13 resulted in your humiliation: Photis is not made to explain the sequel to her part of the story; the reader is left to infer that the subsequent performance must have been set up by Milo when he discovered what had happened. This  is typical of Apuleius' often cavalier way with the details of his narrative.

3.15 initiated in, several cults: nothing more is heard of these previous initiations, but Apuleius himself had indeed been initiated in more than one Greek cult (Apology, 5S).This is another hint of the eventual quasi-identification of Lucius with his creator.

3.17 plaques inscribed with mysterious characters: i.e. spells and curses. Many examples of such lead tablets have survived; Pamphile's would no doubt mostly be intended to bind her love-victims.

3.18 like another Ajax: enraged by the award of the arms of the dead Achilles to Ulysses instead of himself, he set out to kill him, but being driven mad by Ulysses' protector Athene slaughtered a flock of sheep instead. The story was familiar from Sophocles' play Ajax.

an utricide: uter = 'a skin bag'.

3.19 even with women of my own class: the Latin is matronalium amplexuum, 'the embraces of matrons'. A young bachelor of good family in search of sexual satisfaction had, for practical reasons, to choose between resorting to household slaves or prostitutes or intriguing with married women. Though Augustus' Lex  Iulia de adulteriis had made adultery a criminal offence, married women, as in  most ages, frequently took lovers. Lucius had hitherto high-mindedly set his face against yielding to sensuality even to the extent of what was generally condoned by society. His total enslavement to Photis, herself a slave, represents abrupt and catastrophic moral degradation, as the priest of Isis eventually tells him (11.15).

3.20 offered herself to me like a boy: the idea of this as a stimulating extra is evidently borrowed from Martial: 'All night long I enjoyed a wanton girl, whose naughtinesses no man can exhaust. Tired by a thousand different modes, I asked for the boy routine; before I begged or started to beg, she gave it in full ' (9. 67. 1-4, trans. Shackleton Bailey).

3.21 an owl: Bubo, the eagle-owl, proverbially a bird of ill omen. It was a common belief (like the more modern fantasy about broomsticks) that witches transformed themselves into birds.

3.22 a boon that I can never repay: irremunerabili beneficio, the identical phrase later used by Lucius to characterize the 'unspeakable pleasure' with which as an initiate he contemplates the image of Isis; another hint of Photis' role as anti- or false Isis (1.23 and note).

the local wolf-pack: lupula means both 'she-wolf' and 'whore'.

3.25 an ass: as in English, so to the ancients 'ass' connoted stupidity; so Lucius at 10.13, 'I was not such a fool or an actual ass ...' But asses have also always been proverbial for their obstinacy; and Lucius continues to be as resolutely deaf to admonition after his metamorphosis as he was before it. The moral of the tale of Cupid and Psyche, for instance, is completely lost on him.

3.26 this vile and infamous creature: this, apart from a handful of maledictions in passing (7.14, 9.15, 11.20); is the last we hear of her. Though her role in the story is, strictly speaking, symbolic, Apuleius has gone out of his way, building it is true on her original, Palaystra, to depict her by no means unsympathetically; her affection for Lucius is genuine enough and without ulterior motives. This can be seen to lend force to the argument: false pleasure does not immediately proclaim its falsity.

the red-carpet treatment: in the Latin a technical term for the entertainment accorded to ambassadors.

3.27 Epona: goddess of beasts of burden, worshipped by their drivers.

'How long, for God's sake': Quo usque tandem, the famous opening words of Cicero's denunciation of Catiline in his first Catilinarian oration; see 8.23 and note. This is the first of several abortive attempts on Lucius' part to eat roses  (3.29, 4. -2, 7.15) and also the occasion of the first of the many merciless beatings he endures. The whole episode is a foretaste of the long series of privations, frustrations and torments which the violent entry of the robbers is about to set in motion. As usual, Apuleius handles the details cavalierly, ignoring the problems which he set himself when he decided to graft this episode on to his Greek original; the reader is left to wonder where the groom was when Lucius was introduced into the stable and why, never having set eyes on him before, he talks as if he were an old offender.

3.28 Suddenly: nec mora, cum; a favourite phrase of Apuleius', here heralding the first of the many violent and more often than not unmotivated peripeties on which the narrative hinges. On the part played by brigandage in the novel, see 1.7 and note.

they were not checkmated: this renders a technical term from a board-game, possibly that called luaus latrunculorum, 'Bandits'.

BOOK 4

4.2 that festive flower: the rose, as now, was associated with love and pleasure; Achilles Tatius calls it 'Aphrodite's go-between' (2.1.3).

Success: Bonus Eventus, 'Prosperous Outcome', was one of the many abstractions forming the subject of Roman cults; Lucius does not finally encounter him until 11.28. His counterpart, 'Ill Success', appears at 4.19.

laurel-roses: oleanders.

4.4 a discharge on medical grounds: Apuleius uses the technical military term, missio causaria.

4.5 threw him still breathing off the edge of the cliff: this was still the way in which donkeys that had met with an accident or had otherwise outlived their usefulness were disposed of in the Spanish village where Gerald Brenan lived in the 1920s  (South from Granada, Harmondsworth, 1963, pp. 114-15).

4.6 The subject and the occasion itself demand: a stock formula used by historians, orators and poets to underline the significance of a topographical description.  Unlike the passage on Byrrhena's house (2.4 and note), this elaborate treatment of the robbers' cave, on the narrator's own admission, serves no purpose except to display his descriptive talents. As often in Apuleius, the details are not always  easy to visualize precisely; it is the general effect that is impressive.

as I later discovered: as will appear, he does not have very long to become acquainted with the robbers' routine. See 9.41 and note.

4.8 the Lapiths and Centaurs all over again: another display of rather superficial erudition. The Lapiths were a Thessalian people. At the wedding of their king Pirithous to Hippodamia, to which the Centaurs were invited as the bride's kinsmen, one of them tried to carry her off and a bloody battle ensued. Ovid had told the story in the Metamorphoses (12. 210-535), and the subject was much favoured by poets and artists.

Lamachus: one of the generals in command of the Athenian expedition to Sicily in 415 BC, killed in action. The name means 'Fighter for the people'.

4.9 seven-gated Thebes: the Homeric epithet lends mock dignity to his exordium.

Chryseros: 'lovegold:.

the expense of public office: wealthy citizens were expected, and might be compelled, to take on offices which entailed considerable expenditure on games and other entertainments. Demochares (4.13) and Thiasus (10.1) are cases in  point.

4.10 into the keyhole: we are not well enough informed about the locking mechanisms of Roman doors to assess the plausibility of Lamachus' attempt; the likelihood is that Apuleius, as often, was more interested in creating a dramatic denouement than in technical detail. The episode was later gruesomely exploited by Charles Reade in ch. 33 of The Cloister and the Hearth. See 9.37 and note.

the safety of them all: Chryseros was indeed crafty; an alarm of fire in a crowded city was the surest way to bring everybody out on to the street to help, whereas the prospect of encountering armed robbers would have been a deterrent.

4.11 a whole element as his tomb: this resounding flourish is designed to recall the words attributed by Thucydides (2.43) to Perides: 'the whole earth is the  sepulchre of famous men'. Thebes is only some fifteen miles from the sea, so that the necessary detour is not perhaps as glaringly implausible as some commentators make out; the real oddity is the choice of the sea as a hero's grave. Burial for the ancients meant burial on land; the idea of being abandoned to the fishes to devour was regarded with horror.

4.12 Alcimus: 'stalwart'. Text and interpretation of this sentence are uncertain.

His rib-cage ... from deep inside him: these details are lifted from epic descriptions of the deaths of warriors in battle; though Alcimus' end is ignominious he dies with some literary dignity.

4.13 Demochares: 'people-pleaser'.

an elaborate timber structure: the text is too uncertain to allow a clear idea, if he had one himself; of what exactly Apuleius is describing. Compare the elaborate staging of the pantomime at Corinth (10.30, 34).

4.14 Envy: Fortune in another guise.

Eubulus: 'good counsellor'.

4.15 Thrasyleon: 'lionheart'.

4.18 our appointment with plunder: Apuleius is fond of playing with the legal term uadimonium, a promise to appear in court. Isis uses the same terminology when pledging Lucius to her service (11.6 and note). Here the bandits' proceedings are dignified by this veneer of legal language and the preceding reference to professional practice, disciplina sectae.

4.19 Ill Success: Scaevus Eventus, 'Unlucky Outcome', the opposite of Bonus Eventus (4.2 and note). Fortune in yet another guise.

4.21 his life ... his glory: the conceit, repeated and varied at the end of the chapter, can be paralleled from actual gravestones; the form of the expression is redolent of the declamatory exercises on which Apuleius would have cut his rhetorical teeth.

gone to live among the spirits of the dead: a variation on a theme which goes back at least to Hesiod, who laments that Shame and Righteous Indignation will quit the earth in disgust to dwell among the gods (Works and Days, 199- 200). In picturing Good Faith (Fides) as taking refuge in hell rather than heaven Apuleius had been anticipated by Petronius (Satyricon, 124. 249 53).

mourning the loss of three comrades: another epic touch, an echo of the Homeric formula 'We sailed on grieving at heart, glad to have escaped death, but having lost our dear comrades' (Odyssey, 9.62-3, al.).

4.22 a real Salian banquet: the lavish repasts of the College of Saliares, priests of Mars, were famous.

4.26 a Son of the People: filium publicum; the official conferment of such titles is attested in inscriptions.

Attis and Protesilaus: she too has had a classical education. Attis was a vegetation god associated with Cybele about whom many legends clustered; Apuleius appears to be referring to one said by Pausanias (7. 17. 5) to be the best known,  in which he went mad and castrated himself at his wedding. The newly-married  Protesilaus was the first Greek hero to be killed at Troy; his wife Laodamia is  the writer of the eighth of Ovid's Letters of Heroines (Heroides). Unless the allusion is to aversion of the story in which the marriage was not consummated, it does not seem especially apt.

4.27 the opposite of what actually happens: so Artemidorus (Onirocritica, 2. 49-51), and still conventional wisdom.

pretty: lepidus (see I.I and note). Lucius predictably receives the story in this spirit (6.25 and note).

4.28 putting right thumb and forefinger to their lips: a ritual gesture of adoration.

drops from heaven: a delicate allusion to the story of her birth told explicitly by Hesiod (Theogony, 176-200): Cronus, having castrated his father Uranus (Heaven), threw his genitals into the sea, where they engendered Aphrodite (Venus), while from the drops of blood which fell on the earth there sprang the race of Giants and other superhuman creatures. The story has already been  discreetly hinted at (2.8) and when Venus visits Olympus, Heaven, her father, opens to receive her (6.6). For another version of her parentage see 6.7 and  note.

4.29 Paphos ... Cnidos ... Cythera: important centres of her cult.

4.30 nurturer of the whole world: she characterizes herself in terms which recall the Lucretian Venus, the great originating principle of the universe. The rhetoric and tone of her speech, however, recall Virgil's Juno and her implacable persecution of Aeneas and the Trojans (Aeneid, 7. 308-10). Her words also  foreshadow the epiphany of Isis, who is the true, celestial, Venus (caelestis Venus,  11.2; cf. 11.5). This Venus, at least at this stage, is firmly earthbound. See Introduction, §9.

the shepherd: Paris, ordered by Jupiter to adjudicate the prize of beauty claimed by Venus, Juno and Minerva. The episode will be depicted in the pantomime elaborately described at 10.30-32. The reference to his 'impartial fairness' is ironical; all the goddesses tried to bribe him, and Venus won because her bribe, marriage to Helen, was the most attractive.

that winged son of hers: Cupid (Eros, Love) makes his first appearance in his familiar literary guise as a mischievous boy, irresponsibly using his arrows and his fire to vex gods and mortals alike. He is not named until Psyche finally sees  him, to her undoing (5.22 and note).

4.31 the honeyed burns: a typically Apuleian variation on the age-old idea of love as bittersweet (2.10 and note).

open-mouthed and closely pressed: like those of Photis (2.10) and those promised as the reward for informing on Psyche (6.8). This is very definitely not Venus caelestis.

her enemy the Sun: she had three reasons for disliking him: (1) ladies in antiquity, let alone the goddess of love herself, did not cultivate sun-tan; (2) fire and water (her native element) were incompatible; (3) it was the all-seeing Sun (1.5) who had given away her affair with Mars (Homer, Odyssey, 8.302; Ovid,  Ars amatoria, 2. 573-4, Metamorphoses, 4.171-4, 190-92).

the retinue that escorted Venus: this description is heavily indebted to literary models, especially Homer (Iliad, 18. 39-4,Virgil (Aeneid, 5. 240-42, 823-4),  and the Hellenistic poet Moschus (Europa, 115-24). Nereus was father of the sea-nymphs; Portunus was the god of harbours (portus); Salacia was an old Roman marine goddess connected by etymologists with salum, 'sea' ; Palaemon, often depicted by artists astride a dolphin, as here, was originally Melicertes, changed into a sea-god by Neptune (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 4. 531-42); Tritons, human above the waist, piscine below, were Neptune's traditional escort.

4.32 replied in Latin: Apulcius goes out of his way to shatter the dramatic illusion with this arch reference to the literary character of his story (I.I and note) and the fact that, though purporting to be told by a native Greek speaker, it is written in Latin. As well as being in the wrong language, the god's reply is in  the wrong metre, elegiac couplets; Apollo always answered in hexameters.  Apuleius is not alone in this last delinquency; in Heliodorus the Pythia similarly delivers herself in elegiacs (Ethiopica, 2.26.5, 2.35.5); See also 9.8 and note.  It was generally considered a breach of literary decorum to mix Greek and Latin in the same book, at least if it had pretensions to literary status; Apuleius indicates his respect for this 'rule' at 9.39, where he translates the soldier's Greek. He allows himself once to use a Greek technical term in an Isiac ritual (11,17). He has no such inhibitions in the Apology, which is full of Greek quotations.

4.33 For funeral wedlock: the punishment of Psyche's involuntary offence is to be exposed on a rock for a monster to carry her off. This recalls the fate of Andromeda, made to atone in the same way for her mother's boasting of her own beauty. The story was popular; it was the subject of a lost tragedy by Euripides and would have been familiar to Roman readers from Ovid (Metamorphoses, 4. 670-739). The detail that Andromeda was dressed as a bride had been exploited by Manilius (Astronomica, 5. 545 -8); and Achilles Tatius  describes a picture of her 'in a wedding dress like a bride adorned for Death'  (3.7.5). In what follows Apuleius goes on to exploit the conceit in terms of a favourite paradox of Hellenistic epigram, the bride who dies on her wedding day.

regards with fear: no ancient reader could have been in doubt for a moment over the identity of this 'monster'. Its attributes, wings, fire (torches) and steel (arrows) have already been alluded to (4.30) and Love was the only power in the mythological universe of whom all the other gods, the river Styx included, went in dread.

4.34 herself encouraged them: Psyche's speech is that of a tragic heroine such as Iphigenia or Macaria or Polyxena, doomed to be sacrificed for the people. A similar disregard for superficial plausibility (aside from the fact that this story is supposed to be told by a presumably illiterate old woman) is evident in her elaborate prayers to Ceres and Juno (6.2, 4).

my spirit rather: the idea of a shared soul is most familiar in the context of erotic love, but Euripides had used it of family ties (Alcestis, 882-4) and Ovid of the love of husband and wife (Metamorphoses, II. 388). Compare Charite's speech at 8.12. In the first of several plays on Psyche's name Apuleius exploits the ambiguity of spiritus, meaning both 'breath (of life)' and 'soul'.

4.35 Zephyr: the West Wind, harbinger of spring and so apt for the service of the son of Venus; in some genealogies he was Eros' father. Winds were in the business of abducting girls, and Ovid had cast Zephyrus in this role (Fasti, 5.  201-4). Perseus was airborne when he rescued Andromeda.

BOOK 5

5.1 What she now saw: the description of this divine stately home belongs to a literary tradition which goes back to Homer's depiction of the palace and gardens of Alcinous (Odyssey, 7. 84-132) and which is represented in the novel by the  gardens which figure in Longus (Daphnis and Chloe, 2.3.3-4, 4.2-3) and Achilles  Tatius (1.1, 1.15). Apuleius also borrows from Ovid's bravura description of the  palace of the Sun (Metamorphoses, 2.1-18). In real life, description of fine houses almost constituted a genre in its own right, as in the Silvae of Statius (1.3, 1.5, 2.2) and in Pliny's letters about his villas (Epistles, 2.17, 5.6).

5.2 there is nothing that was not there: the Latin can also mean 'what was not there is nothing', i.e. does not exist, an allusive reminder that Love, in its true and  highest form, is universal and all-sufficient. Psyche does not learn this truth until it is almost too late.

All of it is yours: an ominous echo of the words of Byrrhena to Lucius (2.4 and note) in an identical setting, the wondering examination of a marvellous house. Like Lucius, Psyche will be the victim of ignoble curiosity.

5.4 her unknown husband: this is the primary meaning of ignobilis, but it also not uncommonly means 'humble', 'base', an ironical allusion to the outcast wretch to whom Cupid had been ordered to marry her (4.31). By this time it will have become clear to any moderately perceptive reader that he has flatly disobeyed those orders.

5.6 obey the ruinous demands of your heart: the animus (Greek thumos) which she is resignedly told to obey is the appetitive part of the soul (anima, Greek psuche); the expression recalls Plato's description of the man 'who is ruled by desire'  (Phaedrus, 238e). The image of enslavement to the passions occurs in Apuleius' description in the Apology of Venus Vulgaria as 'binding the bodies of all living things in servile bondage' (12). Lucius, who is listening intently to this story, of course fails to take the point.

impious curiosity: the first overt reference to the failing which, along with her naivety (5.11), is to be her undoing.

whoever you are: under the surface irony of this speech a deeper and fundamental layer can be detected. Psyche has yet to learn, the hard way, what Love really is. What she thinks she loves is not Love itself but physical pleasure.

5.9 the blindness ... of Fortune: see 7.2 and note.

shut up with bolts and bars: in contrast to the palace inhabited by Psyche (5.2), but in this context it sounds as if she is complaining at being kept locked up, whereas it is clear that she can come and go freely. The style of these complaints stereotypes the sisters as middle-class housewives such as those figuring in the series of inserted stories later in the novel rather than royal consorts. Nor is the tone of Venus' haranguing of Cupid quite what one would expect of a goddess (5.29 and note).

5.11 you will not see it: i.e. he will disappear, but the paradox has a deeper significance: she will not recognize him, i.e. even when face to face with Love itself she will not comprehend its true nature. See 5.6 whoever you are and note.

he will be mortal: this son will turn out to be a daughter (6.24). If this is simple carelessness on Apuleius' part, he almost goes out of his way to draw attention to it by making Cupid refer in the next chapter to 'this little son of ours'. If it  is a 'deliberate mistake' it is difficult to see the point of it. For down-to-earth common sense it would be hard to beat the explanation of Louis purser: 'Cupid did not necessarily know the future in every respect. Parents always assume that their first-born will be a boy; and when the sex is unknown, it is allowable to use the masculine.'

5.12 the Sirens: half women, half birds, they lured sailors to destruction by their song.

5.17 an immense serpent: for the details of this horrific description Apuleius is heavily indebted to Virgil (Georgics, 3.425-39; Aeneid, 2.204-8). Psyche of course knows from experience that in the dark her husband's shape is human; the unspoken premiss of the plot is that it is only by day that he is a serpent.  When the sisters instruct Psyche to do the murder in the light they evidently expect an instant transformation; and this suggests that, though they themselves refer to their story as a fabrication (fallacias, 5.16), they believe it to be true.  The scenario as a whole more or less hangs together and the narrative moves so quickly that the reader is not given time to think about the details, which, as often in Apuleius, do, not stand close scrutiny.

the Pythian oracle: it was the one at Miletus (4.32), but in this context the cult-title 'Pythian' is appropriate. The Python was the dragon which guarded the Delphic oracle until Apollo killed it and took over.

5.20 Take a very sharp blade ... cut them apart: in the Latin a single long and continuously flowing sentence; the instructions are framed by the instrument, nouaculam, and the act, abscide, 'cut'.

5.21 the savage Furies who harried her; the irresolute heroine, agonizingly poised between equally dire alternative courses of action, is a familiar literary figure; Apuleius' chief indebtedness is to Ovid's portrayals in the Metamorphoses of such women as Procne, Althaea, Byblis and Myrrha.

5.22 cruel Fate: as not infrequently, the distinction between Fate and Fortune, the usual instrument of malignant supernatural intervention in the novel, is blurred.

was gladdened and flared up: because it could now fulfil its traditional role, of which it had hitherto been cheated, of confidant and voyeur: see 2.11 and note, 5.23, 8.10.

dripping with ambrosia: here a perfume, at 6.23 a drink (see note).

the gracious weapons of the great god: what at his first appearance had been depicted as the toys of a naughty unbiddable child and what his mother later claims as her 'gear' (5.29) are now transformed into the awe-inspiring attributes of a mighty god. It is this Cupid, Amor I (Introduction, §9), who from now on controls the action.

5.25 to scorch even water: Apuleius may well have in mind Ovid's catalogue of amorous rivers at Amores, 3.6.23ff.

Pan: as a country god and a veteran of many amorous exploits he is naturally an expert on love; when Philetas instructs Daphnis and Chloe in the art of love it is Pan on whom he calls for help (Longus, Daphnis and Chloe, 2. 7. 6). With  his list of symptoms compare that at 10.2; such inventories were a commonplace of poetry and romance from Sappho onwards.

aware no matter how; clearly briefed by Cupid (Amor I); the first hint that he is at work behind the scenes.

5.26 take your chattels with you ... in due form: another intrusion of specifically Roman references, particularly jarring in this timeless fairy tale. Psyche reports Cupid as using the technical legal technology of divorce and marriage, the latter in its most ancient and solemn form, confarreatio, virtually obsolete long before Apuleius' time. See also 5.29 and note.

5.27 fell to a similar death: attempts have been made to invest the deaths of the sisters with symbolic significance, but the perfunctory manner in which the episode is handled suggests that Apuleius' principal preoccupation was to get them out of the way once they had served their turn and to gratify the normal human wish to see villains come to a sticky end. He makes no effort to mitigate the inconsistency in characterization by which the naive and credulous Psyche suddenly and briefly becomes as crafty and vindictive as her wicked sisters.

5.30 your father's estate: more legal language (5.26 and note), suggesting a divorce or judicial separation from her husband; see below on 5.30.

expose ... abuse ... battering me: he behaves like a typical spoilt child, but the words also imply that he turns his weapons on her and 'strips' her (the word is denudas), i.e. leaves her defenceless by constantly making her fall in love.  Venus was usually depicted naked by artists. This tirade is indebted to Aphrodite's complaints about Eros in Apollonius' Argonautica (3.91-9). See also 5.31 and note.

your stepfather: her husband was Vulcan (Hephaestus), Mars (Ares) her lover, at least in the version most generally familiar. The idea that she had somehow disposed of Vulcan and remarried seems to have been borrowed from Ovid, who is the only other writer to refer to Mars as Cupid's stepfather (Amores,  1.2. 24, 2.9. 48; Remedia amoris, 27).

his infidelities: they were many and various.

groomed with nectar from my own breasts: sense uncertain.

5.31 Ceres and Juno: the following scene is loosely modelled on the episode in Apollonius' Argonautica in which Hera and Athene approach Aphrodite to enlist the aid of Eros in their schemes (see above on ch. 30). Hera there assures Aphrodite that his behaviour will improve.

BOOK 6

6.2 There is Venus in her rage: though in her funeral speech Psyche had implied that she was the victim of Venus' jealousy, this is the first explicit revelation of the fact vouchsafed to her.

an elaborate prayer: too elaborate and learned, like that to Juno, to be plausible in Psyche's mouth. The allusions (see next note) to the rape and rescue of  Proserpine foreshadow her own Catabasis (6.16 and note) and the symbolic death and resurrection of Lucius in the first of his three initiations (11.23 and note).

the furrows of the Sicilian fields ... conceals in silence: Ceres' (Demeter's) daughter Proserpine (Persephone) was carried of from Henna in Sicily down to the Underworld by Pluto (Dis, Hades). Ceres secured her return by preventing the crops from growing, but as Proserpine had eaten some pomegranate seeds (the number varies) during her imprisonment, she was obliged to spend a part of every year underground. In this ancient nature-myth Proserpine represents the regenerative power of the seed-corn, which must be buried each year and lie in darkness during the winter, to be reborn each spring. Ceres' most famous cult-centre was at Eleusis near Athens, where every year the story was symbolically re-enacted for initiates in conditions, supposedly, of strict religious secrecy. Apuleius probably expected his readers to remember Ovid's treatment of the story (Metamorphoses, 5.341-571), in which it is at Venus' instigation that Pluto is shot by Cupid and so inspired with love for Proserpine. Ceres therefore has good reason to be wary of crossing this pair.

6.3 a thoroughly good sort: after the lofty tone of Psyche's invocation, Ceres' reply is chillingly matter-of-fact. Venus is a relative and a crony, and Ceres must keep on her right side. Juno's reply is similarly prosaic (6.4 and note).

6.4 Samos ... Carthage ... Argos: a good example of syncretism, the fusing of originally distinct deities and their cults. Juno is identified with Hera, whose chief cult centres were at Samos and Argos, and also with the Carthaginian Tanit, represented as riding on a lion. Psyche artfully associates these places with the chronology of the goddess's life as child, young girl, and wife and mother. The form of her prayer reflects actual usage.

Zygia ... Lucina: Zygia, 'Yoker' renders in Greek her Latin title Juga or Iugalis (iugum, 'yoke'), symbolizing her role as goddess of marriage; Lucina is more usually identified with Diana (Artemis) as goddess of childbirth because, according to the ancient etymology, she brought the new-born to" light (lux). It is appropriate that the pregnant Psyche should invoke Juno in this capacity.

prevented by the laws: by this anachronistic reference to specifically Roman legislation Juno, like Ceres, brings matters down to earth with a bump. 

6.6 Heaven ... Aether: her father and grandfather. On Uranus and the circumstances of her birth see 4.28 and note.

6.7 the loud-voiced god: so called as herald of the gods, now impressed as town-crier (6.8 and note).

Arcadian brother: he was born on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. Venus' greeting presupposes an alternative genealogy in which she was daughter of Jupiter and Dione. Mercury's (Hermes') mythological character is that of, among other  things, an accomplished liar, which makes him an appropriate assistant in amatory intrigue.

6.8 Passing far and wide among the peoples: a discreetly learned allusion, playing on the Stoic identification of Mercury as the divine logos (word) and on the  etymology of his Latin name as medius currens, 'because speech (sermo) runs  about among men' (Varro, Antiquities, fragment 250). This is the sort of ploy which helps to tell against the assumption that the ancient novel had a mass  readership:

made proclamation: it is clearly modelled on a well-known poem by the Hellenistic poet Moschus, 'Love the runaway', in which the reward is promised  by Venus herself (1-5); but the form of the announcement, beginning with the formula si quis ..., 'If any man ...', is taken from such advertisements in real life, as surviving inscriptions show.

the South turning-point of the Circus: where the shrine of Venus Murcia was situated. Another anachronistic allusion, in this case, however, far from  gratuitous. The Circus Maximus was a notorious haunt of prostitutes; and the  description of the promised reward implicitly reduces Venus (Venus II: see  Introduction, §9) to precisely that level, the level of Photis and the servile pleasures to which Lucius succumbs.

Habit: Consuetudo; that love was a creature of habit was a traditional idea (Lucretius, De rerum natura, 4. 1283; Ovid, Ars amatoria, 2. 345, Remedia amoris,  503; Chariton, 5.9.9; Achilles Tatius, 1.9. 5). Psyche herself had experienced the truth of it (5.4), as Thrasyllus will (8.2),

6.9 laughed shrilly: ironical; her Homeric epithet was 'laughter-loving'.

it will be born a bastard: more anachronistic legalism, possibly embodying a sly allusion to Apuleius' own brush with the law; it was one of the charges against him that his marriage to Pudentilla took place in the country, in uilla (Apology,  67, 88), These words are picked up by Jupiter at 6.23.

6.10 the great god's bedfellow: this is the first overt indication that it is indeed Cupid who is helping Psyche behind the scenes.

6.12 source of sweet music: because used to make the panpipes.

6.13 Styx ... Cocytus: Underworld rivers. Venus' house, it seems, is not, as one would expect, on Olympus, but somewhere in the Peloponnese, within easy reach of Taenarus (6.18 and note). It is not clear what she wants with this water. Its traditional role was that of a lie-detector: it was the Styx by which the gods took their oaths (6.15), and the consequences of perjury were dire (Hesiod, Theogony, 793-804).

6.15 the Phrygian cupbearer: Ganymede (see 1.12 and note).

6.16 to the Underworld: in the last of Psyche's ordeals Apuleius exploits a familiar literary theme, the Catabasis or Descent to Hades. Homer (Odyssey, II. 568-  635), Aristophanes (Frogs; see next note), Virgil (Georgics, 4. 467-84, Aeneid,  6. 268-899) and Ovid (Metamorphoses, 4. 432-80) had all been there before  him; it is Ayneas' visit to the Underworld in Aeneid, VI which he chiefly lays  under contribution. 

6.17 for a certain lofty tower: the idea that jumping off a tower is the most convenient route to Hades can only have been suggested to Apuleius by Heracles' sarcastic advice to Dionysus in Aristophanes' play Frogs (127-33).  Visitors to Hell need a guide, Circe in Homer, Heracles in Aristophanes, the Sibyl in Virgil; a tower in this role -- Cupid's other intermediaries are all living things -- gives a new and unexpected turn to this old theme.

6.18 Taenarus: Cape Matapan, the southernmost point of the Peloponnese and one of the traditional entrances to Hades; another was Lake Avernus (2.11 and  note).

a lame donkey ... with a lame driver: the significance of this encounter, which sounds as if it should in some way relate to the adventures of Lucius-as-ass, has  never been satisfactorily explained. See also 11.8 and note for a similarly enigmatic pair.

to haul him aboard: this 'temptation' was evidently suggested by the episode in the Virgilian Catabasis in which the dead Palinurus begs Aeneas for a lift across the Styx and is refused, because as an unburied corpse he is ineligible to enter (Aeneid, 6. 337-83).

6.19 some old women weavers: this reverses a common theme; such old women were apt to turn out to be goddesses in disguise, to whom it was advisable to be helpful.

a huge dog: Cerberus.

the empty house of Dis: an allusion to Virgil's 'empty halls of Dis and his desolate kingdom' (Aeneid, 6. 269, trans. David West), 'a world of phantom dwellings, homes of hollow men' (R. G. Austin).

ask for some coarse bread: considering the fate of Proserpine herself (6.2 and note), one would expect a total prohibition of eating.

6.20 in private: necessarily so, since she could not be allowed to see the trap that was being set for her. The theme of the message which is the death-warrant of the bearer is familiar from the stories of Bellerophon (Homer, Iliad, 6. 166- 95), Uriah the Hittite (2 Samuel 11:14-27), and Hamlet; but how is Proserpine or whoever fills the box supposed to know Venus' real wishes? This is another of the numerous loose ends in Apuleius' rapid narrative.

6.22 became himself again: Cupid is now abruptly transformed from all-powerful god to ailing apprehensive child, Amor I reverting to his first appearance as Amor II. Given the need to end the story on a light-hearted note -- it is meant  to cheer the captive Charite up -- it is appropriate that the last scene should be played as high comedy in the setting of a traditional Olympus, but this denouement inevitably compromises the fundamental symbolic function of the tale as an allegory of the human soul in quest of love in its highest, divine, guise which of course makes it all the easier for Lucius to miss its application to his own case. 

the Lex Julia: passed in 18 BC, it made adultery a criminal offence.

into ... base shapes: this catalogue draws on Ovid's list of Jupiter's disguises in the Metamorphoses (6.103-14).

you are bound to pay me back: perhaps to be read as an aside; Jupiter is not only incorrigible but unrepentant.

6.23 to summon all the gods ... to assembly: the Council of the gods is a stock feature of epic from Homer onwards and a favourite subject of burlesque. The idea of making the gods follow the procedures of the Roman Senate seems to have been first hit on by the satirist Lucilius (second century BC) and was further exploited by Seneca in his Apocolocyntosis and by Ovid in the Metamorphoses (1. 161-76).

in accordance with the civil law: see 6.9 and note. A prosaic conclusion to a reassurance which had begun on a lofty note with a reminiscence of his great speech to Venus at the beginning of the Aeneid (1.257-8).

brought by Mercury: now in his role, here reversed, of conductor of souls to the Underworld (Psychopompus).

a cup of ambrosia: more usually a food, but occasionally a drink, as here, or a perfume (5.22 and note). At the banquet they drink nectar, as one would expect.

6.24 Liber ... Vulcan:  Bacchus pours himself out in the shape of wine, Vulcan cooks the dinner in the shape of fire, an example of the common figure of  speech called metonymy.

whom we call Pleasure: Apuleius springs a surprise (5.11 and note). The idea is a leitmotiv of the novel. In its immediate context the  birth of this divine child can be read both as an encouragement to Charite to hope, "for a happy outcome to her own sufferings and as a restoration to the world of the true pleasure of love of which it was deprived by the joint secession of Venus and Cupid (5.28). In the larger context of the book as a whole it foreshadows the 'inexpressible pleasure' which Lucius is to experience in contemplating the  image of Isis after his initiation (11.24), which effaces and replaces the false 'servile pleasures' offered by Photis (11.15). In the writer's syncretistic vision of Venus Isis can also be detected the lineaments of Lucretius' Venus (4.30  and note), identified by him in the first line of the De rerum natura as 'pleasure of gods and men', the Epicurean hedone.

6.25 such a pretty story: bellam, a variation on lepidus (see 1.1 and note), the old woman's description (4.27 and note); Lucius of course takes the story at (her) face value. The author puts in a momentary appearance to remind us that the  story will eventually indeed be written down -- for it now has been. See also 6.29 an note.

6.27 Dirce: she was tied to a wild bull by Zethus and Amphion as a punishment for her cruel treatment of their mother Aptiope. The story had been dramatized by Euripides in his lost play Antiope.

6.29 immortalized in the pages of the learned: another reminder (2.12, 6.25 and notes) of the off-stage presence of the author.

Phrixus ... Arion ... Europa: Phrixus escaped across the Hellespont from his stepmother Ino on the back of the ram with the golden fleece; Arion was rescued from his murderers by a dolphin; Europa was abducted by Zeus (Jupiter) in the shape of a bull.

apportionment of the road: another of Apuleius' legal pleasantries, using technical language; compare the miller at 9.27.

6.30 Pegasus: the winged horse born from drops of blood from the head of the Gorgon Medusa, cut off by Perseus; ridden by Bellerophon when he killed the Chimaera. Compare 7.26, 8.16 and notes.

from a branch of a tall cypress tree: not the obvious choice of tree for this particular purpose (see 8.18 and note), but the cypress was a symbol of death.

6.31 burned alive ... thrown to the beasts ... crucified: all, ironically, punishments prescribed for banditry.

aiding and abetting: in the Latin more technical terminology, sequestro ministroque, 'trustee and agent'.

BOOK 7

7.2 his slave: see 2.15 and note.

portrayed Fortune as totally blind: the blindness of Fortune was proverbial (5.9, 8.24), but the idea is especially significant in The Golden Ass, where she is the antitype of provident and beneficent Isis, identified by her priest with 'a Fortune that can see' (11.15). On Fortune and Providence see Introduction, §11.

7.3 parricide: the contemporary legal definition of parricide embraced murder of a kinsman or even a patron (3.7 and note).

7.5 Haemus: a mountain range in Thrace, perhaps recalling poetic comparisons of warriors to mountains (Homer, Iliad, 13. 754; Virgil, Aeneid, 12.701-3), perhaps also suggesting Greek haima, 'blood'.

Theron: 'hunter'.

7.6 a two-hundred-thousand man: on the various types of post held by procuratores, see OCD s.v. procurator. They were ranked in terms of their pay: 200,000 sesterces per annum was the second highest grade.

Plotina: possibly intended to recall the exemplary wife of the emperor Trajan; Apuleius might have seen her commemorated on the coinage and she had a temple at Rome.

Zacynthus: modern Zante, an island off the north-west Peloponnese; islands were often used as places of exile, as being easier to keep under surveillance.

7.7 Actium: a promontory on the coast of Acarnania, made famous as the place of Octavian's victory over Antony and Cleopatra in 31 BC.

7.8 a mere donkey-woman: rather conspicuously dressed for the part, one would think.

7.10 Treasury Pleader: the office of advocatus fisci, according to the evidence, for what it is worth, of the Historia Augusta (Life of Hadrian, 20. 6) had been established by Hadrian; the fiscus was the Imperial, as distinguished from the State, Treasury.

7.11 whoever he is: this apparently gratuitous qualification ironically hints at Lucius' ignorance of what will shortly be revealed, Haemus' true identity.

7.12 Tlepolemus: 'hardy warrior', the name of the commander of the Rhodian contingent at Troy, a son of Heracles (Homer, Iliad, 2. 653).

Charite: 'grace'.

7.13 manfully: the idiomatic sense of the phrase pro uirili parte is 'to the best of  my ability', but here the literal sense of uirilis is also felt; Lucius displays human awareness of the occasion.

7. 16 deeds of valour at home and abroad: this has the ring of a quotation or parody of an official citation, but exact parallels for such a formula are lacking.

the king of Thrace: Diomedes; Heracles' eighth Labour was to capture these horses. In the most familiar version of the legend they were mares, but that would have spoiled the comparison.

7.20 this salamander of an ass: text and interpretation uncertain. The salamander (actually a completely harmless amphibian) was reputed to be poisonous and invulnerable to fire.

7.21 while Venus looks away in horror: auersa Venere, a play on words which resists translation; the phrase can also mean 'in the reverse position', which would naturally be that attempted by an ass.

7.23 the next market: they were held at fixed intervals, usually of eight days; the delay is plausibly motivated.

a lover's ... his manhood: the words used are ironically appropriate to the man hidden within the ass. Compare 7.25, 'the butchery of my virility.'

7.26 My Bellerophon: Lucius as Pegasus again (6.30 and note).

7.27 antisocial behaviour: the principle to which she appeals, boni mores, 'honest behaviour', did in fact have some legal standing (A. Berger, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law, Philadelphia; 1953, p. 374).

7.28 Meleager ... Althaea: he was fated to die when a particular piece of wood was burnt. His mother Althaea, enraged by his killing of her brothers in the quarrel after the hunting of the Calydonian Boar thrust it into the fire and destroyed him. This is another story familiar to Roman readers from Ovid  (Metamorphoses, 8. 445-525).

BOOK 8

8.1 the gift of literary style: another authorial intrusion into Lucius' narrative; see 2.12, 6.29 and notes. The implication is not merely that the tale itself is remarkable but that Apuleius has taken especial pains in combining, elaborating,  and embellishing his several literary models.

Thrasyllus: 'Rashman'; see 8.8.

8.4 the nets: they would have been set up round the edge of the thicket to catch the game flushed by the hounds; Apuleius does not bother in this instance (contrast the water-clock at 3. 3) to elaborate a detail which would have been familiar to most of his readers.

8.6 like a Bacchante: the whole scene is pervaded with Virgilian echoes. Dido, when fame brings the news that Aeneas is preparing to depart, 'raged and raved round the whole city like a Bacchant' (Aeneid, 4, 298 303); and Amata, maddened by the Fury Allecto, 'ran through the middle of the cities ... [and] flew into the forests' (7.383-7) (trans. David West). 

8.7 nobody is immune: this was the commonest of the standard consolatory common places, exploited to great effect by, for instance, Lucretius (De rerum natura, 13. 1024-52). Thrasyllus is ostensibly behaving exactly as a friend in these circumstances was supposed to.

as the god Liber: the Latin equivalent of Bacchus/Dionysus. This reflects a real custom, alluded to by, for example, Statius (Silvae, 2. 7. 124-5, 5.1. 231-6).  Apuleius may also have had in mind the story of Laodamia, who cherished a portrait of her dead husband Protesilaus (4.26 and note); he would have read of this in Ovidi (Heroides, 13. 151-8). Bacchus is chosen as young and ideally beautiful.

8.8 his unspeakable treachery: his pretence of disinterested friendship; she learns of the murder from Tlepolemus' ghost.

8.10 my nurse: from Homer onwards a stock character, confidante and go-between.

8.11 to lay him to rest: the verb used, sepeliuit, literally 'buried', anticipates Thrasyllus' fate.

8.12 that shed my blood: see 4.34 and note.

Your matrons of honour shall be the avenging Furies: an echo of the ill-omened marriage of Dido and Aeneas, conveyed through a conflation of allusions to Virgil and Ovid: Juno as pronuba, matron of honour (Aeneid, 4. 166), and a chorus of Furies (Heroides, 7.95-6).

8.16 the fire-breathing Chimaera: a tripartite monster, a lion in front, a goat in the middle, and a dragon behind, with three heads to correspond, killed by Bellerophon (6.30 and note).

8.17 not so much memorable as miserable: non tam ... memorandum quam miserandum; the alliteration and assonance underline Apuleius' literary versatility. Encounters with fierce dogs are a recurring feature of his narrative (4.3,4.19-20,9.36-7); the changes that he rings on this theme recall the analogous treatment by  istorians of stock battle motifs (P. G. Walsh, Livy: his Historical Aims and  Methods, Cambridge, 1967, pp, 197-208); and for the idea of a battle or its aftermath as a spectacle one may compare, for instance, the scene in which the Carthaginians view the battlefield of Cannae (Livy, 22. 51. 5-9) or Vitellius' visit to Bedriacum, described as 'a loathsome and dreadful spectacle' (Tacitus, Histories, 2. 70).

8.18 from the top of a cypress: like Cupid reproving Psyche (5.24). It is difficult to see any significance in the choice of a cypress; almost any other tree would be easier to climb. See 6.30 and note.

8.20 by your Fortunes and your Guardian Spirits: per Fortunas uestrosque Genios, an apparently unique combination in appeals of this kind. The idea of a Fortune peculiar to an individual recurs at 8.24, 11.15. The genius, a word which resists translation, is 'the entirety of the traits united in a begotten being' (OCD s.v. genius).

8.21 a monstrous serpent: though the reader is expected to accept witchcraft and transformations such as Lucius' as part of an ostensibly realistic depiction of contemporary life, serpents or dragons such as this are fabulous creatures (cf. 11.24), an intrusion from the fairy tale world of Cupid and Psyche.

8.22 to put it on record: the inserted stories in the earlier part of the book were cautionary, warnings to Lucius not to persist in his degraded conduct. Those after his metamorphosis point the moral by way of commentary on what his folly has brought him to (Introduction, §§2, 4, 6). The suspension of disbelief required from the reader as to how Lucius-as-ass is supposed to have learned all the details that he recounts is for the most part taken for granted; the mock apology at 9.30 really explains nothing.

his consort: conseruam coniugam, 'fellow-slave-wife'; slaves could not legally marry but were often allowed to form near-conjugal connections. In what follows Apuleius uses the terms maritus (husband) and uxor (wife) without qualification.

8.2.3 a certain large and famous city: identified in the Onos as Beroea in Macedonia. Apuleius is studiously vague about Lucius' itinerary between Hypata, where he is transformed, and Corinth, where he makes his last and successful bid for freedom.

How long ...: another allusion to the famous exordium of Cicero's first oration against Catiline (3.27 and note).

a sieve on four legs: compare 3.29; but the conceit is here elaborated in an obscure and untranslatable pun on the word ruderarius, which occurs nowhere else. It is formed from rudus, 'rubble', but is perhaps also meant to suggest rudo, 'bray'. For once a translator may resort to paraphrase.

8.24 the Syrian Goddess: Atargatis-Derceto, a type of Near Eastern mother and fertility-goddess represented also by Aphrodite Astarte and Rhea-Cybele. Their cults had many features in common, including that exploited in Apuleius' description of eunuch priests and devotees. See OCD s.v. Atargatis. His  unflattering account of the conduct of her priests follows that in the Onos quite closely but adds a number of picturesque details; the comment at the end of ch. 27 in particular may suggest that he is portraying the goddess as an anti-Isis:  see the commentary of Hijmans et al, on book 8, appendices III and IV. On an earlier possible symbolic allusion to Atargatis see 1.25 and note. His treatment of the episode also plays up to the traditional Roman distaste for passive male homosexuals.

a genuine Cappadocian: Cappadocians were proverbially strong and virile.

his tax return: the information required at the census included the citizen's age.

the Cornelian law: such an act was undoubtedly illegal, but this law appears to be a jocular figment. Of course this is precisely what the auctioneer is unwittingly doing; the irony is discreetly underscored by the human overtones of 'good and deserving servant' (bonum et frugi mancipium) and 'at home and abroad' (et foris et domi).

8.25 the extent of his patience: the ass's equipment is large enough to satisfy any demands likely to be made on it by his new masters; the 'patience' (passivity) will, however, be on their part.

Sabadius ... Bellona ... the Idaean Mother ... Venus with her Adonis; Sabadius, or Sabazius, was another fertility deity; Bellona was the Roman goddess of war; the Idaean Mother is Cybele; Adonis was a god of vegetation and fertility, in myth a beautiful young hunter beloved of Venus and tragically killed by a boar.  See on all these OCD s.vv. The variety of deities invoked is typical of the syncretism of such cults; it is even more strikingly in evidence in Lucius' prayer to Isis and her epiphany ( I 1.2, 5).

its unfortunate guardian: here, as in his address to the 'girls' in the next chapter, he uses the feminine gender.

Philebus: 'lover of youth'. Exceptionally, a character's name is retained from the Onos.

8.26 a hind substituting for a maiden: to secure a favourable wind for the Greek fleet bound for Troy, withheld by the offended Artemis, Agamemnon was forced to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia; in one version of the legend Artemis substituted a hind in her place. The phrase was apparently proverbial, but happens to be particularly appropriate here.

8.27 with lowered heads: had Dickens read The Golden Ass? 'Suddenly they stopped again, paused, struck out the time afresh, formed into lines the width of the public way, and, with their heads low down and their hands high up, swooped screaming off' (A Tale of Two Cities, book III , ch. 5). Of this description of the Carmagnole George Orwell singled out 'that touch, "with their heads low down and their hands high up"' for 'the evil vision it conveys' (Critical Essays, 1946, p. 16).

8.29 Romans) to the rescue: Porro Quirites, an old formula of appeal to the people. In the Onos (38), 'O Zeus!'; compare 3.29.

8.30 a certain important city: see 8.23 and note.

BOOK 9

9.1 Fortune ... divine Providence: here, confusingly, identified, or at any rate apparently for once cooperating. See 9.31 and note.

9.2 Myrtilus ... Hephaestio ... Hypnophilus ... Apollonius: humorous 'speaking' names. Myrtilus was Pelops' charioteer; Hephaestio, after Hephaestus, god of fire, is as obviously apt for a cook (6.24 and note) as Apollonius, after Apollo, god of medicine, is for a doctor; and Hypnophilus ('sleep-lover') is, as far as the sense goes, a plausible restoration of what the manuscripts offer (hypatafium), though it lacks the literary resonances of the other names.

9.3 recorded in the ancient authorities: true, and clinically accurate.

9.4 amusing: lepidus (see I.I and note). The manner of its introduction is calculated to draw attention to the fact that the story has little if any ostensible relevance to the main narrative; see 8.22 and note.

9.5 her dashing blade of a lover: temerarius adulter, an Ovidian tag (Fasti, 2. 335); it is used again of Philesitherus at 9.22.

with your hands in your pockets: in the Latin 'with your hands in your bosom', i.e. in the fold of the tunic which served for a pocket.

9.8 one all-purpose oracle: in iambic senarii, not the usual hexameters (4;32 and .note). However, this metre too is occasionally attested (e.g. Herodotus, I. 174;  Cicero, De divinatione, I. 81).

9.10 the local Clink: in the Latin the Tullianum, the state prison at Rome, a noisome place with a very sinister reputation. The name of the Clink, a prison in London, has passed into the language as a word for prisons in general. So Kipling: 'And I'm here in the Clink for a thundering drink and blacking the Corporal's eye'.

9.11 blindfolded: this was commonly done to prevent vertigo; see 9.15 and note.

wandering but never deviating: Apuleius relentlessly milks the paradox that all this walking never gets the walker anywhere.

had often seen ... in operation: and had, as ass, operated it (7. 15), as the narrator of the Onos (42) explicitly acknowledges. Unless he is simply being careless,  Apuleius appears to go out of his way to underline the asininity of Lucius' behaviour.

9.12 with a kind of pleasure: because of the artistic opportunity it afforded for the pathetic description that follows.

the furnaces: the miller, as often, was also a baker.

sprinkle themselves with dust: for a better grip. This alludes to the pancratium, a combination of boxing and all-in wrestling, rather than boxing proper, in which holding was not allowed.

9.13 a consummately wise man: Odysseus (Ulysses), so characterized by Homer in the opening lines of the Odyssey.

no wiser, I must admit: a rueful gloss by Lucius, recollecting his experiences in tranquillity, on his failure at the time to draw any conclusions from them bearing on his own case.

9.14 a prettily polished production: fabulam ... suaue comptam, a variation on lepidus (see 1.1 and note).

the One and Only God: whether this identifies her as a Jew or a Christian is debatable; see the commentary of Hijmans et al, on book IX, appendix IV. For the latter possibility, see the episode of the trampling of the fish (1.25 and note).

9.15 enabled me to follow everything that was happening: though blindfolded while at work (9.11 and note). Another sop to the sceptical reader (8.22 and note); see also 9.22.

9.16 Philesitherus: 'love-hunter'.

9.17 Arete: 'virtue'.

Myrmex: 'ant'.

busy with her woolwork: spinning was the traditional occupation of the dutiful Roman housewife.

to the baths: as is clear from the frequent mention of them in the novel, public baths were an indispensable feature of urban life under the Empire; as a rule only very grand houses would have had their own. They afforded obvious opportunities for intrigue, as Ovid notes in the Ars amatoria (3.639-40).

9.18 will force open even gates of steer: the thought is proverbial, the expression pointedly recalls Horace on Jupiter's finding his way into Danae's tower in the shape of a shower of gold: 'gold can pass through the midst of attendants and break through stone with greater power than a thunderbolt' (Odes, 3. 16. 9-11).

9.19 his purpose driven this way and that: like a distraught heroine (5.21 and note).

like all women: the Latin is ambiguous: genuina can mean, and is so taken by some translators, 'natural to her', sc. individually. However, the notion that frailty is endemic in the female sex was old and persistent (compare the jaundiced view taken by Lucius at 7.10); the old woman who is telling the story naturally takes the cynical view. There is a similar ambiguity at 9.23.

9.20 Love the Raw Recruit: Amori Rudi; though each is individually experienced in love, they are recruits in a new service so far as this relationship is concerned.  For the military metaphor, compare 2.10, 2.15-17.

9.21 in the baths: the theft of clothes from bathers was a common crime, so Philesitherus' inspiration is not implausible.

9.22 the dashing adulterer: the phrase is repeated from 9.5 (see note), but with ironic effect. Apuleius seems to go out of his way to draw attention to the fact that in combining two originally distinct stories into one, with the same protagonist, he expects the reader to accept without demur Philesitherus' metamorphosis from a man of the world, equal to coping with the formidable Barbarus, to a pretty boy who needs (as the old woman's speech indicates) a good deal of encouragement to come to the scratch and is then thrown into total panic by the arrival of the wronged husband. See below, 9.27 and note.

9.23 the cunning of her sex: ingenita ... astutia, the same ambiguity as at 9.19 (see note).

by holy Ceres over there: a mill-cum-bakery would naturally house a shrine of Ceres, as a stable would one of Epona (3.27).

9.25 bless you: he would have said salue, 'be well'; sneezing could be lucky or unlucky as it came from the right or left respectively.

9.27 I'm no barbarian: non sum barbarus, also meaning 'I'm not Barbarus'; nor is this Philesitherus (above, 9.22 and note).

I shan't sue: more legal pleasantries (6.29 and note).

9.30 let me tell you: a tease; he never does so. See 8.22 and note.

9.31 her stepmother's crimes: only now do we learn that she is typecast in this archetypally malevolent role.

Fortune: here again (9.1 and note) implicitly identified with divine Providence, who set this chain of events in motion by providing Lucius with the opportunity to avenge his master (9.27).

9.32 the subject demands: see 4.6 and note.

9.37 leaving his body balanced in mid-air: a specifically epic touch (Ovid, Metamor phoses, 5.126-7, 12. 330-31; Lucan, Pharsalia, 3.  601-2, 7. 624); compare the fate of Alcimus (4.12 and note). This and other details of the fighting invest a sordid brawl with literary dignity.

9.38 you will always have a neighbour: a proverbial idea, but hardly calculated to crush this aggressor.

9.39 the vine-staff: the centurion's emblem of rank.

couldn't understand what he was saying: how could Lucius? in taking over this episode from the Onos (44) Apuleius seems to have overlooked the fact that it was only later that he learned Latin (I.I and note).

calling him 'mate': commilito, 'fellow soldier'.

9.41 as I learned later: we are not told how; compare 4.6 and note.

a sacrilegious breach: because the oath was sworn by the Emperor or, as here (see below), by his genius.

9.42 the common proverb: in fact an Apuleian conflation of two proverbs. 'The peeping ass' put his head into a potter's shop and broke the pots; the potter sued his owner. 'The ass's shadow' is a story supposedly invented by Demosthenes to shame an inattentive jury: a man hired an ass and took a nap in its shadow, and the owner sued him because he had only rented out the beast and not its shadow. Both stories in different ways satirize frivolous behaviour.

BOOK 10

10.2 the sock ... the buskin: the low shoe (soccus) and high boot (cothurnus) worn by comic and tragic actors respectively. This is an Apuleian tease: the story of the stepmother who falls in love with her stepson was familiar in particular from Euripides' play Hippolytus, but here it turns out to have a happy ending.  The literary texture is enriched by echoes of Virgil, Ovid and Seneca.

Alas, th' unknowing minds of -- doctors: an adapted quotation from Virgil's comment on Dido's attempts to invoke the blessing of the gods on her ill-starred love for Aeneas (Aeneid, 4. 65); in the original, 'of seers'. Compare these symptoms with those at 5.25.

10.3 It is his likeness: lifted from Seneca's play Phaedra (646-7).

hasn't happened: this has a proverbial ring: 'What's hid's unknown, and what's unknown's unsought' (Ovid, Ars amatoria, 3. 397, trans. A. D. Melville). Compare Psyche's sister: 'You aren't really rich if nobody knows that you are' (5.10).

10.5 buried before his eyes: to be predeceased by one's children, more especially by a son, was looked on as a terrible misfortune; the theme had been eloquently exploited by Juvenal in his tenth Satire (250ff).

10.6 a parricide: see 3.7 and note. So at 5.11 the sisters' plot against Psyche is described in the Latin as parricide.

10.7 the council: in this case the court apparently consists of the town councillors (patres) acting as a jury, with the magistrates presiding. See Introduction, §6:

the court of the Areopagus: this very ancient court was still in being in Apuleius, time; that these prohibitions were still in force in provincial courts may be antiquarian fantasy.

I don't know and am in no position to report to you: after his report of the stepmother's ipsissima verba, a belated concession to plausibility. Apuleius may have felt, reasonably enough, that another pair of full-dress forensic speeches after those at 3.3-6 would, even by his standards, be overdoing things. He has, however, no compunction in reporting the doctor's speech verbatim.

with a show of nervousness: this, in terms of transcriptional probability, is a more convincing correction of the manuscript text than the reading preferred by some editors, 'without the slightest trace of nervousness'. The fact that two readings diametrically opposed in sense are from the literary point of view almost equally plausible is a salutary reminder of the difficulties that sometimes confront critics of Greek and Latin texts.

10.8 to be sewn up in the sack: another antiquarian flourish. The ancient punishment for parricides was to be enclosed in a sack with various animals and drowned. It had been abolished in the mid first century BC.

10.10 as usual in Greece: see 3.9 and note.

10.11 improper for one of my profession: as contrary to the Hippocratic Oath: 'I will not administer poison to anyone if asked, nor suggest doing so'.

mandragora: a decoction of the mandrake. Seneca records a similar incident when a slave, ordered to give his master poison to save him from death at the hands of Caesar, substituted a narcotic; there as here the story ended happily  (De beneficiis, 3. 24). The theme was also exploited by the Greek novelists Xenophon of Ephesus and Iamiblichus, and long afterwards by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet.

the extreme penalty of the law: in this case crucifixion (10.12), but a slave convicted of conspiring against his master was liable to be burned alive or thrown to the beasts.

10.12 famous, indeed fabulous: famosa atque fabulosa; in introducing the story Apuleius had announced it as 'a tragedy, no mere tale', tragoediam nonlabulam (10.2). A 'tale' is of course precisely what he has made of it.

10.13 a pastrycook ... a chef: a slave might be allowed to own and manage property or conduct a business on his own behalf. Technically the profits or savings -- the 'nest-egg' (peculium) referred to at 10.14 -- belonged to the master; in practice they were often used by the slave to purchase his freedom, as is evidently the case with the freedman mentioned at 10.17, referred to as satis peculiato, having set himself up well. See OCD s.v. peculium; J. A. Crook, Law and Life of Rome, 1967, pp. 188-9.

10.14 doing an Eteocles: Oedipus' sons Eteocles and Polynices died at each other's hands while fighting for the kingship after his death. Their conflict was the theme of Aeschylus' play The Seven against Thebes and the background to Sophocles' Antigone.

10.15 the Harpies: see 2.23 and note. They persecuted the blind Phineus by fouling and plundering his food. Apuleius' readers would have been familiar with Virgil's description (Aeneid, 3. 209-69).

10. 16 silphium: a kind of asafoetida, used for both medicinal and culinary purposes. It was a purgative and perhaps an acquired taste.

10.17 upwards for 'no' and downwards for 'yes': still the regular gestures of dissent and assent in Greece.

10.18 Thiasus: 'revel'.

the capital of the province of Achaea: and also Lucius ' native place (2. 12) , something one might have expected him to allude to. In the Onos, the scene of this last episode is Thessalonica (49). Another loose end; see also 11.18, 11.26 and notes.

the quinquennial maigstracy: as municipal censor; see OCD s.v. municipium.

10.19 Pasiphae: wife of Minos, king of Crete; she fell in love with a bull and mated with him concealed in a wooden cow made by paedalus. Their offspring was the Minotaur, half bull, half man. The story had been told with mock-revulsion by Ovid in the Ars amatoria (1. 289-326).

10.21 even the band: often shown in pictures of lovemaking as kept on.

10.23 put to death at birth: by exposure. In law the Roman father of a family (paterfamilias) had the absolute power of life and death over its members.  By Apuleius' time it was rarely exercised except on unwanted new-born infants, a practice which continued in spite of attempts to outlaw it.

10.25 many victorious battles and many notable trophies: doctors who killed their patients were a favourite target of satirists; there is a similar conceit to this in an epigram ascribed to Lucian (Greek Anthology, II. 401), in which a doctor boasts that he has sent many souls down to Hades in an adaptation of a famous line of Homer referring to the exploits of Achilles (Iliad, 1. 3). This one evidently does it on purpose.

Lifegiver ... Lifetaker: literally (but the text is uncertain) 'sacred to Health ... sacred to Proserpine'.

10.28 from a child prematurely deceased: text and interpretation uncertain.

10.29 holy matrimony: matrimonium conjarreatum; see 5.26 and note.

the very pretty sight inside: once more Apuleius indulges his love of elaborate description. However, this is not pure embellishment. The mythical Venus portrayed in the pageant, who offered Paris pleasure as the price of his Judgement, with proverbially ruinous consequences (10.33), can be seen in retrospect as an ironic contrast to the true Venus, subsumed in the all-embracing godhead of Isis (11, 2, 5), in whose service Lucius will find the high and pure pleasure which, like Psyche, he has hitherto failed to recognize. That the reference to the fatal verdict of Paris is blunted of its point by being made to form part of a general diatribe on corrupt juries can also be seen as ironic: once again Lucius fails to grasp the real significance of what he sees and of his own reactions to it. His revulsion from what awaits him in the arena is grounded, not on moral principle, but on a distaste for criminal associations and fear for his own skin.  These are the motives for his escape; he finds salvation not because he has come to deserve it but because he desperately needs it. 

a pyrrhic dance in Greek style: a war-dance, properly performed by men and boys in armour. If Apuleius knew the etymology which derived the name from pyra, 'funeral pyre', i.e. that of Patroclus, round which it was first supposed to have been danced, its performance before a re-enactment of the events which  led to the Trojan War is doubly appropriate.

10.30 the wand he carried: his herald's staff (caduceus).

with a nod: a pointed piece of mime, representing the nod with which in epic Jupiter irrevocably confirms his decisions.

10.31 her descent from heaven ... her connection with the sea: see 4.28 and note.

egg-shaped helmets with a star for crest: their mother Leda bore them to Jupiter, who had mated with her in the shape of a swan, in an egg; as the constellation Gemini (the Twins) they protected sailors.

the Ionian pipe: a quiet ladylike mode for the most ladylike of the three goddesses.

Terror and Fear: the Homeric Deimos and Phobos, Athene's (Minerva's) attendants in battle (Homer, Iliad, 4. 440).

a Dorian piper: the martial mode; Milton, Paradise Lost, I. 549-51:

Anon they move
In perfect Phalanx to the Dorian mood
Of Flutes and soft Recorders; such as rais'd
To highth of noblest temper Hero's old
Arming to Battel ...

10.32 sweet Lydian harmonies: the softest of the modes.

10.33 you gowned vultures: lawyers as a class have never been popular, and complaints about justice being sold to the highest bidder are as old as Hesiod  (Works and Days, 37-41). 'It was a widespread conviction in antiquity that all arts and artefacts must have been invented by somebody' (R. G. M. Nisbet and Margaret Hubbard, A Commentary on Horace: Odes Book I, Oxford, 1970,  p. 49); so the invention of the lamp is ascribed to a lover (5.23). Lucius credits Paris, on top of starting the Trojan War, with the additional distinction of being the first corrupt judge. He himself later on is not ashamed to boast of doing well for himself as an advocate (11.30) 

Palamedes ... Ajax: both victims of Ulysses' unprincipled cunning. Palamedes unmasked Ulysses' deception when he feigned madness to escape service in the expedition against Troy, and was subsequently framed by Ulysses and executed on a trumped-up charge of treachery. Ajax was defeated by Ulysses' sophistical rhetoric in the contest for the arms of the dead Achilles, and in his humiliation committed suicide. Both stories would have been familiar from Ovid's treatment in the Metamorphoses (13. I -398); and both are mentioned  in the speech ascribed to Socrates by Plato in the other case cited by Lucius as 'men of old who lost their lives through an unjust judgement' (Apology, 41b).  See next note.

An old man of godlike understanding: Socrates, condemned to drink hemlock on a charge of corrupting the youth of Athens.

10.34 a shower of wine mixed with saffron: spraying perfume over the stage was a standard refinement. Mixing saffron with wine is expressly recommended by Pliny (Natural History, 21. 33).

10.35 the famous colony of Corinth: it had been destroyed by Mummius in 146 BC and refounded as a Roman colonia in 44 BC.

BOOK 11

11.1 by her Providence: the divine Providence so often referred to is now identified with the goddess herself.

her light and might: luminis numinisque.

godlike Pythagoras: a reminder of the philosophical background that ought to have stood Lucius in better stead (1.2 and note). The mystic properties of the number seven were wisely venerated in Greek and Oriental cults; Venus in her anti-Isiac guise offers seven kisses as the reward for informing against Psyche (6.8 and note).

my silent prayer: Lucius throws himself on the divine mercy. The ensuing chain of events calls forth the most sustained display of Apuleius' rhetorical and descriptive powers in the novel. His invocation, like those of Psyche (6.2, 6.4 and notes), follows the traditional forms and conventions of ancient prayer and is constructed with great elaboration (see the analysis by Gwyn Griffiths,  Isis-Book, pp. 119-22). It and the following description of Isis' epiphany also reflect ancient catalogues (aretalogies) of the goddess's powers and attributes (Walsh, 1970, pp. 252-3).

11.2 Phoebus' sister: Diana (Artemis), though in classical (Homeric) myth a virgin goddess, was worshipped at Ephesus as a fertility goddess and as Lucina (Ilithyia) presided over childbirth. She was also identified with the moon, as Phoebus was with the sun.

of the fearful night-howling and triple countenance: not here the courteous hostess of Psyche, but the Underworld goddess identified with Hecate, whose coming is heralded by the howling of the dogs (Theocritus, Idylls, 2. 35-6; Virgil, Aeneid, 6, 257-8). She too is identified with the moon in the all-embracing figure of Isis.

if I may not live: van der Vliet (1897) added hominem, 'as a man', which is more logical and pointed: the escaped Lucius-as-ass is not now confronted with imminent death.

11.3 First her hair: as in the description of the sleeping Cupid (5.22) he follows the rules of classical rhetoric by starting at the top. The emphasis on hair, though brief, is pointed (see 2.8 and note).

11.4 a bronze sistrum: a rattle made of rods loosely fixed in a metal frame (two examples are depicted on the cover). See 11.10.

the blessed perfumes of Arabia: blessed as coming from Arabia Felix, Arabia the Blessed; as usual, Apuleius scouts the obvious turn of phrase.

11.5 first-born of mankind: as claimed by Herodotus (2. 2. I). Pessinus was an important provincial centre in Asia Minor.

the native Athenians: they boasted that they had always lived in Attica.

Dictynnan Diana: the Cretan goddess Dictynna was identified with Artemis/Diana.

the triple-tongued Sicilians: they are not elsewhere so described, and it is not clear what third language after Greek and Latin Apuleius may have in mind.  Elsewhere trilinguis means literally 'three-tongued', e.g. of the three-headed Cerberus, and the allusion may be to the triangular shape of Sicily, often so characterized; lingua can mean 'promontory'. Compare 'the island-dwelling Cypriots' preceding. 

Rhamnusia: i.e. as Nemesis, worshipped at Rhamnus in Attica.

both races of Ethiopians: see 1.8 and note.

11.6 that has always been so hateful to me: see Introduction, §8.

make spiteful accusations against you: similar considerations had deterred Lucius from seizing an earlier opportunity of release (3.29).

solemnly promised: she uses the technical term meaning 'legally bound over to appear'; see 4.18 and note.

that subterranean hemisphere: in the pseudo-Platonic dialogue Axiochus, and apparently nowhere else, the gods and 'those below' are described as inhabiting  he upper and lower halves of a spherical universe (371b).

beyond the bounds fixed for you by your Fate: a striking claim: the gods of the pagan literary tradition were powerless to override the decrees of Fate. Perhaps, as suggested by Gwyn Griffiths, 'fate' is used here to mean 'what the astrologers predict'.

The Terminator, directed by James Cameron

11.7 wore an air of serene enjoyment: Lucius' lyrical description recalls the Lucretian Venus, at whose coming 'the creative earth puts forth sweet flowers, the broad ocean smiles, and heaven is appeased and glows with diffused light' (De rerum natura, 1.7-9). See Introduction, §7.

11.8 Pegasus and Bellerophon: see 6.30 and note. It is tempting to see some symbolic significance in these masqueraders, especially since it is an ass that brings up the rear, but no really convincing interpretation on these lines has been offered; see 6.18 and note. As Lucius carefully distinguishes between this popular buffoonery and the goddess's procession proper, the description may be intended to throw the true significance of the following spectacle into relief by contrasting it with the uncritical and uncomprehending enjoyment of the uninitiated.

11.9 Sarapis: the Greek spelling; he is more familiar as Serapis. Here identified with Osiris.

which extended to their right ears: a periphrasis for the transverse pipe (plagiaulos, tibia obliqua). The aulos or tibia was a reed instrument, and the 'flute' of some translators and commentators gives a misleading idea of its tone, which was more calculated to excite than soothe.

11.10 the earthly stars of the great faith: these words were transposed to this position in the text by van der Vliet (1897); in the manuscripts they characterize the body of the initiates.

a copy of Mercury's caduceus: see note on Anubis at 11.11 below.

more apt to symbolize justice than the right: this interesting idea seems to be otherwise unattested and may be a flight of fancy on Apuleius' part. It is hazardous to trust him implicitly on such points; see next note.

a golden basket heaped with laurel branches: text and interpretation are disputed, but most modern versions (Butler's is an honourable exception) do violence to the Latin or the sense or both. Laurel is not elsewhere mentioned as playing a part in Isiac ritual, but see previous note. The vannus doubled in cult as a winnowing-fan and a receptacle for sacred objects.

11.11 his face now black, now gold; perhaps as symbolizing the Underworld and heaven respectively; but whether one statue with particoloured face is meant or two different statues is not clear from the description. Anubis, like Mercury, is a-shepherd of souls and shares his attributes.

the All-Mother: Isis herself, figured as a cow or with a cow's head.

11.15 a Fortune that can see: it is one of the unresolved paradoxes of the revelation finally granted to Lucius-Apuleius that it should be blind Fortune (7.2 and note) that places him in the end under the protection of a seeing Fortune in the shape of Isis. It was probably the paradox itself and the opportunity it offered for rhetorical exploitation that primarily interested Apuleius rather than  its theological implications. The priest's characterization of Lucius' persecuting Fortune owes at least as much to literary as to religious conceptions.

you will really experience the enjoyment of your liberty: an idea familiar to Anglicans in the words of the Collect for Peace: 'whose service is perfect freedom'; not found in this pointed paradoxical form in the New Testament. It goes back through the early Fathers at least to Seneca: De vita beata ('How to be happy') 15.7, 'Liberty is obedience to God'.

11.16 the reward of a blameless and pious life: the remark is prefaced with a word which Apuleius often uses as a nudge to the reader, scilicet, 'obviously' but also ironically 'no doubt'. Taken at its face value it is flatly at variance both with what the reader knows and what the priest has just said; Apuleius is slyly indicating that the idea that salvation is earned by works rather than faith is a popular misconception. See Introduction, §10.

an egg, and sulphur: though sulphur and eggs figure separately in other allusions to purificatory rituals, they are otherwise mentioned in combination only by Ovid in the Ars amatoria (2. 330). Apuleius knew his Ovid, and this may be another detail that owes more to literary reminiscence than to accurate observation. See next note.

11.17 the Pastophori: 'shrine-bearers'. Here and subsequently Apuleius writes of them as if they had priestly status, which does not appear to have been the case.  See 11.30 and note.

in Greek: ta Ploiaphesia, 'the Ship-launching'. These are the only words actually written in Greek (slightly garbled but plausibly restored) in the novel; see 4.32 and note.

11.18 in my homeland: Rumour did not in fact have far to go, or his visitors to come, for he was now only a matter of a few miles (10.35) from Corinth, where he was born. The implication that he was a long way from home is a hangover from the Greek original, in which the narrator's native city is several days' sail from the place of his restoration to human shape (Onos, 55).

11.20 some 'portions': partes, suggesting 'shares' in an enterprise of some kind, but the modern connotations of the word render its use misleading here.

after Photis' disastrous mistake had embridled me: cum me Photis malis incapistrasset erroribus, i.e. turned me into an ass, but the words can also mean 'had trapped me in my unhappy wanderings', a good example of Apuleius' linguistic versatility.  incapistro is found nowhere else and was evidently coined by him, as was a good deal of his vocabulary.

11.21 return them to a new lifespan: in this world or the next? The ambiguity reflects that of Isis' promise at 11.6. But initiation is clearly, as the case of Lucius himself shows, not reserved exclusively for those at death's door.

11.22. her own high priest Mithras: Mithras seems to have been a not uncommon personal name, but it is striking to find a high priest of Isis so called. All the mystery religions shared certain features, and it is on record that people were initiated or held priesthoods in more than one. If Apuleius is hinting at an affinity between the cults of Isis and Mithras he does not develop the point.  On Mithraism see OCD s.v. Mithras.

a divinely ordained conjunction of our stars: again a literary echo, here of Horace addressing Maecenas: 'our horoscopes agree in a marvellous manner' (Odes, 2. 17. 21-2).

unknown characters: in the hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts.

11.23 my pledged appearance: again the legal phrase connoting being bound over to appear in court (11.6 and note), almost 'to answer to my divine bail'.

the other for importunate curiosity: this phrase is a supplement added by van der Vliet (1897); curiosity is not a vice of the tongue.

that and no more I shall relate: what exactly initiates in the mystery cults experienced has been the subject of much speculation. So much is clear, that an ordeal by darkness and terror culminated in a brilliantly lit revelation of divine beneficence. The pattern has survived in the rituals enacted in The Magic Flute.

11.24 Hyperborean griffins: fabulous monsters that lived in the far north guarding stores of gold (Herodotus, 4. 13. I).

an Olympic robe: the epithet has not been convincingly explained. Olympiacam means 'Olympic', not as in the translations 'Olympian'. Perhaps a symbol of victory?

a boon I could never repay: see 3.22 and note.

11.26 my ancestral home: Corinth, just the other side of the Isthmus, an hour or so away on horseback. Lucius makes it sound as if he had a long way to go:  see 10.18, 11.18 and notes.

Isis of the Field: Isis Campensis; her temple was in the Campus Martius, the Field of Mars. Like other Isiac temples, it was notorious as a lovers' rendezvous (Ovid, Amores, 2.2.4.5, Ars amatoria, 1.77, 3. 393; Juvenal, Satires, 6. 489, 9. 22;  Martial, II. 47. 4).

11.27 the invincible Osiris: consort of Isis; he had appeared in the procession in the guise of Sarapis (11.9 and note). He is called invincible or unconquered (inuictus) because of his restoration to life by Isis (herself also so styled, 11.7) and his victory over his evil brother and murderer, Seth Typhon.

a wand tipped with ivy: the thyrsus, associated particularly with the worship of Bacchus (Dionysus).

very apt: the cognomen Asinius is derived from asinus, 'ass'.

a man from Madaura: attentive readers have been prepared for the revelation that 'Lucius' is a mask for the author himself (2.12 and note), but the way in which it is finally effected is wonderfully offhand. See Introduction, §8.

11.28 between the devil and the deep sea: in the Latin inter sacrum ... et saxum, 'between the altar and the flint-knife', sc. of the sacrificing priest. Apparently proverbial, but Apuleius almost certainly picked the expression up from Plutus, who uses very nearly the same words in his play Captivi (617).

in Latin: this is Apuleius speaking (I.I. and note).

11.30 the Pastophori: see 11.17 and note.

the order of quinquennial decurions: the term and the office belong to the world of provincial administration (10.18); the decuriones were municipal senators or town councillors. There seems to be no other firm evidence for the existence of such an office in the Isiac priesthood. See 11.10, 16 and notes.

entered joyfully on: gaudens obibam, the last words of the Latin text. The book ends as it began, with an emphasis on pleasure, but ambiguity persists to the last. The verb, in the imperfect tense, may be inceptive, as it is rendered here, 'began to perform', or continuative, 'went on performing'. The reader is left wondering how long ago all this was and what may have happened between then and the 'now' implied in the Prologue.

founded in the time of Sulla: Sulla lived from 138 to 78 BC; it is perfectly possible that an Isiac priesthood was established at Rome during this period, but there is no reason to connect it with Sulla himself. The prosaic chronological formula signals the final emergence of the hero and his story from the colourful nightmare of metaphorical metamorphosis into the light of common day and leaves the reader once more confronting contemporary reality. See Introduction, §3.

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