BMCR 2009.06.33: Kirichenko on Frangoulidis, Witches, Isis and Narrative: Approaches to Magic in Apuleius' Metamorphoses. Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes; 2

Stavros Frangoulidis, Witches, Isis and Narrative: Approaches to Magic
in Apuleius' Metamorphoses. Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes;
2.  Berlin/New York:  Walter de Gruyter, 2008.  Pp. xii, 255.  ISBN
9783110205947.  $98.00.

Reviewed by Alexander Kirichenko, Universitaet Trier, Germany
([email protected])
Word count:  2690 words
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In the Simpsons episode Thank God it's Doomsday, Homer, Bart, and Lisa
watch a movie called Left Below. In this film, an atheist husband
refuses to accompany his pious wife to church, despite the fact that
she cites indubitable signs of the approaching Rapture. Instead he has
a rendezvous with what appears to be his secretary. While they are
exchanging passionate kisses in the backseat of his limo, their driver
suddenly disappears leaving only his empty uniform behind. "Where did
my Christian limo driver go?" wonders the perplexed adulterer, as the
car crashes into a lamppost. When the two sinners get out of the badly
damaged limo, they encounter other people mystified by similar
disappearances. "My pious husband is missing," exclaims an elderly
lady; "The baby I chose to have baptized is gone," screams a young
mother of twins. "It's the Rapture," the protagonist of the movie
explains to his mistress, "the pious have gone to Heaven, and the rest
of us have been... left below...". Amidst thickening clouds and
torrential rain, we see other sinners being washed away by the waters
of the apocalyptic flood -- a Buddhist monk ("I thought all religions
were a path to God -- I was wrong!"), a woman desperately holding on to
her TV ("why did I put my faith in science and technology?"), and a
well-groomed young man ("why did I choose to be gay?!").

The Manichaean clarity with which this movie portrays the conflict
between good and evil provides a fairly accurate idea of how Stavros
Frangoulidis reads Apuleius' Golden Ass. According to Frangoulidis, the
novel's plot unfolds along the lines of a clear-cut dualism -- from the
unbridled sinful sensuality in Books 1-10 to the spiritual life of
sexual abstinence in the Isis Book. This contrast is further emphasized
by the difference between two kinds of magic depicted in the novel --
the debased, deceptive, and ultimately wrong magic of the Thessalian
witches and the elevated, enlightening, and true magic of Isis. When
Lucius becomes romantically involved with a witch's maid, Photis,
Thessalian magic virtually turns into a synonym for despicable sexual
pleasure. His metamorphosis into an ass -- an embodiment of exaggerated
sexuality par excellence -- can thus be regarded as a highly fitting
outward manifestation of his corrupt nature. Towards the end of his
adventures as an ass, Lucius undergoes another metamorphosis, however.
By running away from the Corinthian arena, where he is supposed to
perform a public sex act with a convict woman, he "refuses to behave in
a bestial manner and renounces sexuality, thus saving his life and
foreshadowing his celibate life as a human priest" (p. 40). Under the
aegis of Isis, Lucius not only regains his human appearance but also
"views himself as a reborn character whose sexuality is replaced with
abstinence and whose foolishness becomes wisdom" (p.7). "Thereafter
Lucius spends the rest of his life in Rome fulfilling his religious and
civic duties and earning both fame and material wealth" (p. 147). In
other words, as a reformed sinner he begins to live an ideal religious
life that combines, as it were, Catholic (or Orthodox) monastic
celibacy with Protestant business ethics.

The most significant difference between the Simpsons movie and
Frangoulidis's version of Apuleius' Golden Ass is not so much their
respective theological implications (the rational selectivity of the
Rapture vs. the boundless grace of the pagan deity) as the fact that
the former is obviously a parody (of the popular Christian thriller
Left Behind by Tim LaHay and Jerry B. Jenkins), whereas the latter is
quite as obviously serious. Despite a great number of recent studies
pointing to comic or satiric aspects of the Golden Ass,[[1]] there is
of course nothing essentially wrong with reading it as a morally
edifying text. As a matter of fact, there has never been a dearth of
interpretations of Apuleius' novel as a moralistic fable. Most of these
interpretations, however, rely on a complex learned apparatus of proof
deriving either from Platonic philosophy or from what can be inferred
about   Isiac initiation lore.[[2]] By contrast, Frangoulidis chooses
for the most part to analyze the text from within ('intratextually', as
he calls it). Even his most original thesis (to wit, his rather
eccentric idea of the Golden Ass as an ode to celibacy) is not
supported by any substantial references to the novel's cultural,
literary, religious, or philosophical context. Frangoulidis's
conspicuous reluctance to take advantage of relevant comparative
materials (his Index of Passages is less than two pages long, half of
which is taken up by Apuleius' Metamorphoses) greatly contributes to
undermining the persuasiveness of his reading.

Another fundamental methodological weakness of Frangoulidis's approach
is that he purports to read the narrative "from Lucius' point of view"
(p.8). In the twenty-four years that have passed since the publication
of J.J. Winkler's Auctor & Actor (see note1), the inextricable
complexity of the narrator's voice has become one of the central axioms
of Apuleian scholarship. Lucius, as Winkler argues, "is not just a
character about whom books can be written, he is in essence a multiple
ego whose parts are writer, narrator, and actor. <...> Lucius has a
booklike self: the episodes of his life define not a life (in a sense
that could apply to Caesar or ourselves) but a book. Lucius is never
simply a person, he is always a writer, behind a narrator, behind an
actor" (Winkler, p. 159). When as a post-Winkler scholar one reads
about 'Lucius' point of view', one is inevitably bound to ask, 'whose
point of view do you really mean?' As one reads on, it becomes apparent
that what Frangoulidis has in mind is most likely the point of view of
Lucius the actor, and it would indeed be impossible to deny that the
moralistic scenario that Frangoulidis extracts from the narrative does
find some support in what happens to this component of Lucius' multiple
ego. What seems completely to escape Frangoulidis's notice, however,
are the multilayered ironies that Apuleius constantly creates by
collapsing incompatible perspectives adopted by the split personality
of his narrator -- ironies that make any straightforward moralistic
reading appear rather naive.

In this book, Lucius is thus not so much a narratologically complex
fictional entity as a human being 'like Caesar or ourselves', whose
moral progress Frangoulidis traces from a number of different
perspectives. In Chapter 1 ("The Onos versus Apuleius' Metamorphoses"),
Frangoulidis claims that numerous differences between the Ps.-Lucianic
Onos and Apuleius' novel serve to emphasize moral edification as the
sole purpose of the latter: "[I]n the Onos the sexuality of the ass
fits well with the exclusively Milesian character of the narrative,
whereas in the Metamorphoses the author goes beyond this to multiply
the misfortunes suffered by the poor beast, and thus bring out the
didactic aspect of his narrative" (p. 29). A few things strike one as
rather bizarre in this chapter. To begin with, Frangoulidis takes for
granted the nature of fabula Milesia as "a story of love and
adventure," which allows him to claim that "the Latin novel goes beyond
the bounds of the genre in placing greater emphasis on Lucius'
sufferings" (p. 13). Quite surprisingly, Frangoulidis raises this claim
without either mentioning how ill-defined the bounds of this virtually
lost genre are or referring to any recent scholarship on this topic
(e.g., to Gottskalk Jensson's 2004 book on Petronius' Satyricon as
Milesian fiction;[[3]] even though some of Jensson's conclusions are
highly debatable, his idea that the most prominent characteristic of
the genre of Milesian tales is a particular kind of structure rather
than content casts doubt on any subsequent uncritical use of the term).
Furthermore, the way in which Frangoulidis purports to demonstrate
Apuleius' straightforwardly didactic intentions (both here and in the
subsequent chapters) might occasionally strike one as somewhat awkward.
His method may be summed up as persistent reduction to a simple
moralistic platitude of whatever is funny, ambiguous, or unsettling in
Apuleius' narrative. To give only one typical example, Frangoulidis
attempts at length (pp. 20-22) to disprove the communis opinio that
Lucius' former fellow student Pythias is a comic character (he is a
local aedile 'helping' Lucius to take revenge on the merchant, who has
sold him overpriced fish, by ordering his attendant to trample on that
fish, without, however, doing anything to reimburse Lucius' expenses
(Apul. Met. 1.25)). This is how he tries to prove this thesis (p. 22):
"Pythias may not then be viewed as a comic or satiric figure, as he
does not trample on Lucius' fish himself, but asks one of the lictors
to do so. In a strange city then, Lucius has a rare fortune of meeting
an old friend who can offer protection from fraud. Nonetheless, he
fails to understand the import of Pythias' intervention -- which may
have saved him from food poisoning -- and instead dwells on the fact
that he has lost his money and supper."

In the seven subsequent, more or less strictly 'intratextual' chapters,
Frangoulidis largely relies on the same method. In Chapter 2 ("Lucius
versus Socrates and Aristomenes"), he argues that the soteriological
thrust of Apuleius' primary narrative becomes particularly obvious by
comparison with Aristomenes' tale in Book 1: "Like Socrates and
Aristomenes, Lucius too is punished for dabbling with magic, but the
nature of his metamorphosis allows him to move from one place to
another until he reaches Cenchreae, where he is released from his
troubles through earnest prayer for help" (p. 68). In Chapter 3
("Lucius' and Milo's Tales of Diophanes and Asinius' Prophecy: Internal
Readers and the Author"), Frangoulidis stresses the pious character of
Apuleius' narrative by comparing Lucius' reactions to Milo's tale about
the astrologer Diophanes in Book 2 on the one hand and to the Isiac
priest Asinius' prophecy in Book 11 on the other. Frangoulidis
particularly stresses the significance of the fact that in the latter
episode Lucius is referred to as coming from Apuleius' hometown of
Madauros: "this blurring of the roles does not occur in the prophecy of
the false seer Diophanes, but only in Asinius' prophecy, as if to lend
divine authority to the extratextual author through the novel's first
person narrator" (p. 83). Chapter 4 ("Lucius versus Thelyphron")
discusses the significance of Thelyphron's tale as a foil for the
narrative of Lucius' salvation. The fact that Lucius is eventually
saved by Isis "can be explained by the fact that [he] has involved
himself with an inexperienced sorcerer's apprentice rather than with
skilled witches, as happens with Thelyphron" (p. 107). In Chapter 5
("The Tale of Cupid and Psyche as a Mythic Variant of the Novel"),
Frangoulidis compares to each other Psyche's and Lucius' adventures and
comes to the conclusion that "the tale functions as a mythic retelling
of the novel's larger story, pointing the non-romance frame in a
direction that goes beyond comedy to divine salvation" (p. 128-129). In
Chapter 6 ("'War' in Magic and Lovemaking"), Frangoulidis focuses on
the novel's military imagery and seems to be genuinely surprised by the
fact that "[t]he violence that characterized Lucius' involvement with
the witch slave girl Photis is counterbalanced by the remarkable
absence of the theme in Lucius' encounter with Isis in the novel's
final Book" (p. 144). The main thesis of Chapter 7 ("Lucius'
Metamorphosis into an Ass as a Narrative Device") is that there is
nothing accidental about the fact that Apuleius chooses the ass as the
animal into which to transform his protagonist. Frangoulidis summarizes
previous scholarship on the image of the ass in classical literature
and Egyptian mythology, on connections between Apuleius' novel and
Aesopic fable, and on Apuleius' use of popular proverbs featuring the
ass, and concludes that "[t]he specific metamorphosis allows the author
to evoke features of the ass well known in antiquity, notably
sexuality, foolishness and lustfulness, and thus to highlight certain
traits of his character that are not immediately obvious in the first
place" (p. 174). The goal of Chapter 8 ("Rewriting Metamorphoses 1-10:
The Isis Book") is to draw parallels between the novel's conclusion and
its first ten books. Frangoulidis's analysis yields the following
result: "The comparison reveals illuminating antitheses between Lucius'
experience as Isis' initiate, and as victim of the Hypatans and Photis.
<...> These antitheses takes the form of a sustained narrative device:
the negative nature of Lucius' experiences at Cenchreae [sic!
Frangoulidis probably means Corinth] and Hypata accounts for why he
gladly accepts Mithras' advice to enter into the civilized community of
Isis, but refuses to accept the offer of the Hypatan magistrates to be
integrated into that cruel community" (pp. 202-203).

The final chapter (Chapter 9: "Transforming the Genre: Apuleius'
Metamorphoses") is the only sustained attempt that Frangoulidis
undertakes in his book to contextualize Apuleius' Golden Ass. Of the
numerous available 'extratextual' perspectives -- religious,
philosophical, and literary -- that could shed light on Apuleius'
narrative, Frangoulidis chooses to compare it to what he calls
'standard romance' (p. 204), i.e. to the basic plotlines of the five
surviving Greek love novels. Even though the reason for this particular
choice remains rather unclear, Frangoulidis's individual observations
as to similarities and differences between the two, many of which
follow in the footsteps of Sandy's magisterial study on the
subject,[[4]] are for the most part too obvious to cause any
significant objections. What one may find somewhat surprising, however,
is the fact that Frangoulidis takes for granted the premise that
Apuleius' narrative somehow belongs to the genre of romance, i.e. that
he "both follows and alters the standard pattern of the idealistic
novel" (p. 204). Here one could ask whether it is really possible to
consider this alleged generic commonality without taking issue with
Sandy's influential conclusion that "it is appropriate to extend to
Apuleius and the Greek love-romances the substance of [Rohde's] verdict
<...> that between Petronius and the Greek love-novelists there is no
connection" (Sandy, 1570). And, more generally, given the fact that
there is no Greek or Latin term corresponding to our 'novel', that the
five Greek romances represent only one of the many known varieties of
ancient narrative fiction, and that Apuleius has recently been shown to
play with all manner of generic conventions (from epic and tragedy to
comedy and elegy[[5]]), would it not be legitimate to pose the question
of what justifies the treatment of 'standard romance' as Apuleius'
preferred intertext? Unfortunately, Frangoulidis displays no
perceptible awareness of this complexity -- either intertextual or
generic -- of Apuleius' text.

In addition to such fundamental flaws, Frangoulidis's book is marred by
various minor errors. For instance, on p. 13 Frangoulidis refers to
fabula Milesia as milesiaca - the Greek adjective, to my knowledge, is
not attested in Latin; at least it's not in the OLD. On p. 23,
Frangoulidis states that "Pythias <...> reveals that the fish Lucius
buys in the market is rotten" and then constructs an entire theory
about how Pythias' intervention may have saved Lucius from food
poisoning. For the life of me, I can't find in the text any indication
pointing in this direction: in Apuleius, Pythias is only enraged by the
fact that the fish are too expensive for their size, and calls them
quisquiliae (1.24), nugamenta, and pisces frivoli (1.25), none of which
can in my opinion suggest the idea of 'rottenness'. Finally, I was
particularly surprised to learn on p. 28 that "the young Thelyphron
comes to Thessaly to watch the Olympic Games." When I looked at the
Latin text, however, I was pleased to find a reassuring testimony of
Apuleius' superior knowledge of Greek geography: what he really says
there (2.21) is that as a young man Thelyphron traveled from Miletus to
see the Olympic games (pupillus ego Mileto profectus ad spectaculum
Olympicum), that he then wanted to see this area (i.e. Thessaly) of the
renowned province (i.e. Achaea) as well (etiam), and that after
wandering through the whole of Thessaly he finally reached Larissa (cum
haec etiam loca provinciae famigerabilis adire cuperem, peragrata
cuncta Thessalia fuscis avibus Larissam accessi). The list could go on.

To sum up, this book doubtless possesses certain protreptic qualities.
Its value as an original scholarly contribution is unfortunately more
limited.


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Notes:


1.   E.g., Winkler, J.J. Auctor & Actor: A Narratological Reading of
Apuleius's Golden Ass. Berkeley, 1985; Harrison, S.J. Apuleius the
Latin Sophist. Oxford, 2002.

2.   E.g., Merkelbach, R. Roman und Mysterium in der Antike. Munich,
1962; Schlam, C. The Metamorphoses of Apuleius: On Making an Ass of
Oneself. Chapel Hill, 1992.

3.   Jensson, G. The Recollections of Petronius. The Satyrica of
Petronius as Milesian Fiction. Groningen, 2004.

4.   Sandy, G. "Apuleius' 'Metamorphoses' and the Ancient Novel." ANRW
II.34.2, 1994, 1511-1574.

5.   E.g., Finkelpearl, E.D. Metamorphosis of Language in Apuleius: A
Study of the Novel. Ann Arbor, 1998; May, R. Apuleius and Drama: The
Ass on Stage. Oxford 2006; Hindermann, J. Der elegische Esel: Apuleius'
Metamorphosen und Ovids Ars Amatoria. Frankfurt am Main 2009.