Finkelpearl- Aesopic Discourse in Apuleius

Ellen FINKELPEARL (Scripps College, Claremont CA) AESOPIC DISCOURSE IN APULEIUS In Book 5 of Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Apollonius tells a story that his mother had passed down to him about how Aesop came to be a mythologos: he was a shepherd tending his flock near a shrine of Hermes and used to go there every day praying to be granted wisdom. He offered what he could – milk from his sheep, honeycombs and humble flowers, while more wealthy worshippers brought him gold, silver and ivory. When the appointed day came for the distribution of wisdom (ἡμέραν ἐπὶ τὴν τῆς σοφίας διανομήν), Hermes, being a bit of a capitalist, gave out philosophy, astronomy, epic, etc. to the wealthy donors, but forgot to leave anything for Aesop. Then he thought of how the Horai who had raised him told him about a cow who had spoken to a human about itself and the earth (ὑπὲρ ἑαυτῆς τε καὶ τῆς γῆς) which, incidentally, inspired Hermes to steal Apollo’s cattle, and he gave Aesop the art of mythologia the “last thing left in the house of wisdom” (VA 5, 15). I mention this story so that we may confidently situate Aesop’s brand of sophia as a defined category amid the other forms of Apuleian Knowledge. For a long time, I have intended to search out and analyze the fable subtext of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. Although H. Mason covers the subject for half a page in Aspects I, gathering references from Crusius, van Thiel, Scobie and others, “fable” as a subject 250 ELLEN FINKELPEARL hardly appears in the Groningen commentaries.1 Somewhat more has been written about the possible connections of the Anonymous Life of Aesop and the Metamorphoses – J. Winkler compares the grotesque aspects of Aesop in the Life to the earthy humor of Apuleius, I compared the scene of Aesop’s acquisition of a voice in the Life to that of Lucius in Book 11, and M. Zimmerman examined the episode of the theft of the golden cup in the Life, the Onos and the Met.2 Here, I will instead focus on the fables. Fable is a genre in which animals think and act like humans (and also speak, which Lucius generally does not) and donkeys are one of the favorite characters of fable; in Philostratus (VA 5, 14), “Menippus” characterizes Aesop’s brand of sophia as “frogs and donkeys and nonsense for old women and children to chew on” (βάτραχοι καὶ ὄνοι καὶ λῆροι γραυσὶν οἷοι μασᾶσθαι καὶ παιδίοις). One would expect that fable is a fertile source for a longer donkey narrative.3 When Apuleius announces in 1, 1 varias fabulas conseram, he uses the same word that Phaedrus uses of his versified fables (e.g. Prol. 1, 7), and while “fable” is not the primary meaning of fabula in Apuleius’ Prologue, that meaning may be activated at times (see further below). Also, let us note that many of the fable references in Apuleius also appear in the Onos, so it is doubtless the author of the Greek Metamorphoseis who first incorporated fables into his longer narrative. My points are three: First, it is possible that there is less here than one might expect. Crusius, van Thiel and even Mason list many generic donkey fables that have no very direct connection to Lucius’s narrative.4 On the other hand, donkey fables may have formed a MASON 1978, p. 10 – mostly a list drawn from CRUSIUS 1889, VAN THIEL 1971, p. 179-186, and SCOBIE 1975, p. 31-33 in the context of an exploration of a variety of Greek sources. SCOBIE 1975, p. 28-33 has some useful discussion of fable and proverb in the Met. and Onos. See also the brief comments of FRANGOULIDIS 2005, p. 167-68. 2 WINKLER 1985, p. 279-291, FINKELPEARL 2003, ZIMMERMAN 2007. 3 For this paper, in addition to using the lists compiled by the aforementioned critics, I also scoured the complete fables in Perry (with the help of Gibbs’ translations) as well as Babrius and Phaedrus. 4 For example, MASON 1978 suggests that the ass of Perry 1952, n. 359 (=Babrius 125), among others, “resembles Lucius” (p. 10). In that fable, an ass frolicked on a 1 AESOPIC DISCOURSE IN APULEIUS 251 general substratum on which a more complex narrative was woven. Second, when we find fables embedded in the Metamorphoses, they have been transformed into a longer narrative where the fabulistic quality of a pithy moral point, or the juxtaposition of an imaginary and unreal situation with everyday experience, the figurative or allegorical element, is removed and the narrative is steered in an entirely different direction. At times, Apuleius seems to have aggressively removed the allegorical or moral element. What, then, are the implications for a moral reading of the whole? Third, when animal fable is at issue, Apuleius activates the complexities of Aesopic animals by setting them aside the ambiguous Lucius – and here it is important to re-think the assumption that fables are entirely about humans and not about animals at all. What is a fable and what are its characteristics? First, let me make clear that this essay treats fable and not folklore. These are not the traditional transcultural motifs explored, for example, by Scobie in his book, Apuleius and Folklore, and in his commentary on Book 1 (e.g. Chinese tales of female inkeepers and donkeys),5 but the often moralistic bytes, written down in Greek and Latin even if originally orally transmitted, collected by Perry in his Aesopica.6 tile roof and broke some tiles. When its owner beat the ass, it pointed out that the man had been delighted when a monkey did the same stunt the day before. There is nothing very similar to this anecdote in the Metamorphoses. 5 SCOBIE 1975, p. 38-41. 6 Perry’s rationale for his collection is that any fable of his, for the most part, has already been “found in a collection of Aesopic fables, whether accurately or only loosely so called, or in the fact that it is ascribed to Aesop or explicitly labeled Aesopic” (PERRY 1952, p. X). Many of these fables are found in collections from late antiquity or the Middle Ages; the “Augustana,” considered the “parent stock”, dates to the second, or perhaps first century CE, but “Recensions II and III” date from late antiquity, clearly post-Apuleius. Perry also includes “Aphthonius” from the Middle Ages (PERRY 1975, p. XI-XIX). The fable tradition and its recensions are a mess, but the rationale for including late fables is partly a matter of being inclusive, and partly due to the oral and popular nature of the material. Fables that crop up later, unattested in earlier traditions, may well have been preserved in texts now lost, or may have been preserved orally. Perry admits that there is something arbitrary about his choices, but defends them on the basis that what is termed Aesopic matters in creating the Aesopic corpus. 252 ELLEN FINKELPEARL To begin with ancient definitions, J.G.M. van Dijk, introducing a survey of ancient testimonia, concludes that 1) fables do not have to feature animals as protagonists, as only half of extant fables do; 2) “fables may differ in terms of the type of characters involved, but they share other, and more important, characteristics, notably a metaphorical element and particular (persuasive, satirical or illustrative) functions, one of which (e.g. the moral or sociological function), however, must not be proclaimed the only one.”7 The figurative-metaphorical element, often symbolic or allegorical, is fundamental to the definition of the fable and links it with the proverb, on which more below. The fable is always in need of interpretation and decoding; the mention of Aesop or the recognizable formulaic mode of fable demands a different hermeneutic from other kinds of narrative. In the service of this mode of interpretation, the world of the fable is sufficient in itself, in no need of narrative elaboration. Perry adds that the fable must purport to be a particular action that took place once through the actions of particular characters.8 It is, further, expected that certain aspects of the laws of nature do not apply; the world is not only fictive, but deliberately free of particular constraints, especially via the anthropomorphic attribution of speech and thought to non-human animals, plants and even inanimate objects, and the free interaction of species.9 Yet, at the same time, fable is more restricted than other genres inasmuch as all foxes have to be Fox and are limited to trickery and are rarely e.g. 7 VAN DIJK 1995, p. 237-238, with a full examination of testimonia in the pages following (p. 238-56). Van Dijk emphasizes the heterogeneity of the genre, not only in terms of characters, but also narratology: some are moralistic, some aetiological, some describe animal behavior in the present tense, etc. To arbitrarily eliminate a large segment of the fables that have come down in these collections, as some have done, is to “separate what the author or the tradition explicitly presents as belonging together” (p. 237). 8 PERRY 1952, p. IX. Perry’s other two criteria (must be fictitious and have a moral, paraenetic or personal point) overlap with those of van Dijk. 9 JEDRKIEWICZ 1989, p. 220 cites this lack of verisimilitude as the fundamental characteristic of Aesopic fable. AESOPIC DISCOURSE IN APULEIUS 253 good mothers or powerful allies. As Jedrkiewicz says, “sarà sempre il lupo a minacciare le pecore e non viceversa.”10 Further, fables tell brief narratives which work on multiple levels, literal and figurative which demand continual shifting back and forth. M.-L. Desclos characterizes fables as “des récits qui ‘sollicitent une transition conceptuelle entre leur énoncé particulier (décrivant une action irréelle donnée) et d’autres énoncés qui se situent dans le domaine du réel’.”11 G. Rudd situates this interpretive shifting in the realm of human-animal identities: the fable is a composite and conflated realm in which we are constantly translating back and forth from the human to the animal and back again.12 While the Tale of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse is certainly a symbolic story about the trade-offs we humans balance in choosing one lifestyle over another, it depicts mice living in walls and holes, eating grains and cheese and being chased by cats. We accept this conflation and interpret without difficulty, but only because we enter knowing the rules of the game.13 The differences from and intersections with the world of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses are obvious; while the plot depends on magic, the world otherwise functions along realistic lines. Lucius is the only thinking animal and cannot speak, but his hybridity touches some of the same confusions that fable elicits. 10 JEDRKIEWICZ 1989, p. 220. See further the several pages: “La favola come assieme coerente,” p. 219-222. 11 DESCLOS 1997, p. 397, n. 10, citing Jedrkiewicz. 12 RUDD 2006, p. 39. 13 Another feature of the fable is that it seems to originate with the working classes and is associated with slaves. The locus classicus for this discussion is Phaedrus, Prol. 3.1, claiming that slaves used fable as coded language behind their masters’ backs. KURKE 2011, p. 156 and MARCHESI 2005 note that fable is cited cautiously because of its servile associations, and absent from high genres. Fables featuring Aesop himself often challenge social hierarchies and celebrate the common sense of ordinary people over the expertise of intellectuals or soothsayers. 254 ELLEN FINKELPEARL 1. Irrelevant Donkeys I will discuss some very convincing examples of Apuleius’ adoption of fables in a moment, but first a survey of “negative instances.” The Donkey is indeed the subject of numerous fables, all of which doubtless inform us about the status of the donkey in the ancient world and its symbolic significance, but most of which do not intersect with Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. Often, that would be impossible because they involve animals speaking to each other, e.g. a frog rebuking a donkey that falls into a swamp (Perry 189),14 a dog and a donkey reading a letter about barley and hay (Perry 264) , a vulgar donkey comparing his member to a wild boar’s snout (Perry 484; Phaedrus 1, 29), a donkey and a lion hunting together (Perry 151, Phaedrus 1, 29). Or they just don’t overlap with the subject-matter of the Metamorphoses: a donkey donning a lion’s skin (Perry 188 and 358) – though perhaps there is some relevance there – donkeys provoking indignation by their presence at the scene of death – the donkey is the last to kick an old dying lion (Perry 481, Phaedrus 1.21); donkeys lead a family off-course to the edge of a cliff where the father laments that he’s dying amid donkeys (Perry 381, Life of Aesop 140). There’s a nice fable about a compassionate donkey that refuses to eat the barley that had been destined for a pig that had been sacrificed (Perry 526, Phaedrus 5, 4). As for ants, reeds, eagles, towers and sheep (in Cupid and Psyche), the ants of Cupid and Psyche are not the mean-spirited but diligent ants of fable; the two reeds we encounter in Aesop are talking to a dog and an oak tree (Perry 70, 608), and eagles most often exert power (e.g. Perry 1) rather than offering help as the eagle does for Psyche. Nonetheless, there are also many fables about donkeys carrying loads and grinding barley in a mill that will be relevant. 14 Hereafter, “Perry” with a number will denote a fable from Perry’s Aesopica (1952). AESOPIC DISCOURSE IN APULEIUS 255 2. Aesop in the “False Preface” and refusing the epimythion The one time Apuleius mentions Aesop is in the “False Preface to the DDS.”15 Apuleius responds to an apparent request that he speak ex tempore, but he worries that in aiming for this piece of praise, he will lose the reputation he has: At est hercle formido ne id mihi euenerit, quod coruo suo euenisse Aesopus fabulatur, id erit ne, dum hanc nouam laudem capto, paruam illam, quam ante peperi, cogar amittere. (DDS False Preface; Opuscules Philosophiques Fragmenta IV.108) “But, by Hercules, I am worried that what Aesop says happened to his crow may happen to me; that is, while I strive for this new prize, I may be compelled to forfeit what little glory I have already won.” (Trans. Hilton) In this fable, which Apuleius narrates at greater length than do most fabulists, a crow makes off with a morcel of food (offula) while a fox manages to trick the crow into opening his mouth to demonstrate that he actually does have a beautiful voice. Thus the crow loses the morcel. In the first place, this use of a fable will function differently from those in the Metamorphoses because, whatever this “False Preface” is, it appears to be rhetorical, perhaps a proem to an ex tempore speech, not part of a fictional narrative. Thus it seems to function in the way that students of rhetoric are trained to use fables via the early “progymnasmata” where a fable is introduced in order to illustrate a point.16 Apuleius even appends an epimythion, more a summary than a moral:17 Eandem istam fabulam in pauca cogamus, quantum fieri potest cohibiliter: coruus ut se uocalem probaret, quod solum deesse tantae eius formae uulpes simulauerat, groccire adortus praedae, quam ore gestabat, indutricem conpotiuit. (DDS False preface/ Opuscules Philosophiques Fragmenta IV.108) 15 For the controversy over the nature of this excerpt, with further bibliography, see HARRISON, HILTON and HUNINK 2001, p. 177-180. 16 See HOLZBERG 2001, p. 29-31. 17 The origins and antiquity of the pro- and epimythion are disputed. See esp. VAN DIJK 1997, p. 443-53. It is clear that by Apuleius’ time, epimythia were expected; they already were standard, though not inevitable, in Phaedrus, as well as in the Rylands papyrus and Augustana collection (VAN DIJK 1997, p. 451). See also PERRY 1940, p. 391-419 on the epimythion. 256 ELLEN FINKELPEARL “Let us summarize this fable as succinctly as possible: the crow to prove himself a singer, the one thing that the vixen had claimed his great beauty lacked, launched into a caw and made a present of the prize that he carried in his beak to his deceiver.” (Trans. Hilton) This fable is also told in Phaedrus, Babrius and in the Aesopica of Perry. For Phaedrus, the moral is: quantum ingenium ualet (1, 13); for Babrius (77) and the author of Perry 124, the punchline is spoken by the clever fox: “Crow, you do have a voice, but no brains to go with it” (φωνὴ μέν, ὦ κόραξ, προσῆν, ὁ δὲ νοῦς ἐπιλέλοιπεν, Aes. 124) and there is an added moral in the Aesopica, “If you follow your enemies’ advice, you will get hurt” (Ἐχθροῖς πειθαρχῶν ὑποστήσῃ τὴν βλάβην). Certainly, it would seem to be a fable about cleverness (Phaedrus’ conclusion) and a warning not being duped because of one’s pride or vanity (Babrius’ focus), but Apuleius instead summarizes. The traditional way to use a fable in a rhetorical context is to draw an explicit comparison between the narrative of the fable and the situation at hand. In the earliest critical discussion of the use of fables in rhetoric, Aristotle lays out two examples: (1) Steisichorus warned of the dangers of the tyrant Phalaris with the fable of the horse, the stag and the man, where the horse accepts help from the man against inroads by the stag, but then is forced to submit to the bit and bridle (Rhet. 1393b8-22); (2) Aesop in his own voice tells the story of the Fox, the Hedgehog and the Fleas (not the famous fox and hedgehog) to warn the Samians that they should stick to the leader they already have rather than being bled dry by another (Rhet. 1393b22-1394a1). In each case, the fable is followed by the formula οὕτω δὲ καὶ ὑμεῖς or ἀτὰρ καὶ ὑμᾶς and a painstakingly clear comparison, in case there was any doubt.18 This is characteristic of fables in general: the narrator tells the audience at the end explicitly the conclusion to be drawn – and so you, too...19 Apuleius’ summary is strange. Instead of using the fable in an allegorical or symbolic 18 In the case of the Samians, “Aesop” says “You in like manner, O Samians, will suffer no more harm from this man, for he is wealthy; but if you put him to death, others will come who are poor, who will steal and squander your public funds.” 19 HOLZBERG 2001, p. 20. AESOPIC DISCOURSE IN APULEIUS 257 way, he simply sets the crow’s loss of food next to his own potential loss of praise. Are we to assume that those who call for an extempore speech are trying to detract from his reputation as a speaker and take away his morcel? Presumably, but he certainly never makes it explicit at the end. In other words, and this is the important point, Apuleius seems to resist using the fable in the rhetorical way, repeating the story rather than concluding “and so, I, like the crow...” The figurative and symbolic dimension is therefore removed – even within a rhetorical context in which it would be expected. I will have more to say about the resistance to a standard epimythion or other type of fabulistic moral in the section on proverbs below. Within the Metamorphoses, Apuleius also seems intent on using fable for narrative rather than moralizing purposes. A persuasive instance occurs at Met. 8, 25, Lucius’ sale to the priests.20 The source, Perry 182,21 revolves around a moral about vulgar or naive people mistaking honor aimed at others for their own: Ὄνῳ τις ἐπιθεὶς ξόανον ἦγε· πολλοὶ δὲ προσεκύνουν τῶν συναντώντων. Ὁ δὲ ὄνος τυφωθείς, νομίζων αὐτὸν προσκυνεῖν τοὺς ἀγροίκους, σκιρτῶν ἤμελλε τὸν θεὸν ῥίψειν. Ἀλλὰ τοῦτον ξύλοις παίων ὁ δεσπότης εἶπεν· Ὄνος εἶ θεὸν φέρων, ἀλλ’ οὐ θεοῖς ὑπάρχεις ὁμότιμος. [Ὅτι] κτηνώδεις ἄνδρας, τοὺς τυφωμένους ἐπ’ ἀλλοτρίαις δόξαις ὁ μῦθος ἐλέγχει. “A man had placed a carved image on his donkey and was leading him along. Many people bowed down when they met them along the way. The donkey grew arrogant, thinking that the country folk were bowing down before him, so he began to leap and prance. As he did so, the donkey almost threw the image of the god from his back. The donkey’s master beat him with a stick and said, ‘You are a donkey carrying a god on your back, but that does not mean you deserve to be worshipped as a god.’ This fable can be used for vulgar people who attribute to themselves the honour that is paid to others.” (Trans. Gibbs) In Apuleius, the Syrian priests are contemplating purchasing Lucius to carry the goddess, but, in the course of the negotiations of his sale, the priest needs reassurance about the donkey’s gentleness: 20 There is a very abbreviated scene of sale in the Onos, perhaps cut down from an original longer scene in the Greek Met., but we do not hear about the concern over possible leaping around. 21 I am using the version in CHAMBRY 266 which is much the same. 258 ELLEN FINKELPEARL An me putas, inepte, iumento fero posse deam committere, ut turbatum repente diuinum deiciat simulacrum? ... accepto tali sermone cogitabam subito uelut lymphaticus exsilire, ut me ferocitate cernens exasperatum emptionem desineret. (8, 25, 4-5) “You fool, do you suppose I could entrust the goddess to an animal who was wild? He might suddenly upset her divine image and throw it off his back ... When I heard that, I thought of leaping around suddenly like a lunatic so that when he saw how fierce I was when roused he would give up the idea of purchase.” The case for indebtedness is strong here; this is not simply a generic donkey scene. Yet, the nature of the discourse is entirely transformed when the moral direction is removed. Apuleius here engages instead with another facet of this fable: its reference to a confusion over categories of animal, human and god. In the scene in the Met., the auctioneer who is selling Lucius repeatedly and rather tiresomely makes jokes about this ass as a Roman citizen (8, 24, 4), and speculates that there may be a “modestum hominem” hiding in the ass’s skin (8, 25, 1). Note also the word cogitabam and later cogitatum (8, 25, 6) where Lucius again characterizes donkey behavior in terms of human thought, the same word used of his proposed stratagem at 4, 4 (see below). Apuleius also transforms fable material into narrative in his apparent adoption of a skeptical fable about a soothsayer in the Diophanes inserted tale at 2, 12-14. Aesopica 161 (Perry) describes a mantis who sits in the marketplace and predicts the future. Someone suddenly appears and announces that the prophet’s house has been broken into and all his goods stolen. While he rushes off to his house, a bystander points out the irony and deception involved in the soothsayer claiming to be able to predict the future for others, but being unable to predict his own. While Diophanes’ misfortune involves a shipwreck and bandits rather than breaking and entering, the motif of the marketplace soothsayer caught out in his deception may well derive from this fable or one similar. The fable concludes with this epimythion “this is a fable for people who do a poor job of managing their own lives but who nevertheless make pronouncements about things that are none of their business” (trans. Gibbs), while Apuleius’ narration ends in laughter (clarum cachinnum 2, 14, 5). Apuleius again strips the fable of its moral and instead creates AESOPIC DISCOURSE IN APULEIUS 259 complex and ironic ambiguity over whether the sham prophet has accurately predicted Lucius’ future: nunc enim gloriam satis floridam, nunc historiam magnam et incredundam fabulam et libros me futurum (2, 12, 5) where Milo, after narrating the damaging tale, assures Lucius that tibi ... soli omnium Chaldaeus ille uera dixerit (2, 14, 6). Lucius himself has been inserted into that narrative. Winkler selects this very scene to explicate the ways Lucius is both actor and auctor: “Lucius, in becoming an ass who is the subject of this novel, becomes The Ass... Lucius has a booklike self: the episodes of his incredible history define not a life... but a book.”22 The episode, lacking in the Onos, embarks from a fable debunking soothsayers and develops elements of the narrative that both introduce a characteristically slippery attitude toward the profession and also veer off into complex narratology that is far from the original fable.23 Diophanes, further, becomes a character, rather than a type, who has a brother with a name (Arignotus) strangled by brigands.24 His predictions are recalled ironically at 3, 1, 4 when Lucius faces trial for the murder of the wineskins. S. Frangoulidis, in a paragraph surveying the presence of some Aesopic asses, argues that there is, in fact, “an implied moral that runs through all stories, namely the superiority of the positive magic of Isis over the catastrophic magic of the witches.”25 Although Frangoulidis’ 22 WINKLER 1985, p. 159. See also the discussion by Luca Graverini on “being a book” in Ovid and Horace and the importance of gloria for Lucius in GRAVERINI 2001. HARRISON 2000, p. 232 reads the narratological complexity as “typical of sophistic narrative texts in general.” See also GRAVERINI forthcoming, p. 120-134, esp. p. 124-127 for a full discussion of this much-cited episode. What is important here is simply that Apuleius has gone far beyond the simple fable. 23 This fable and Apuleius’ adoption of it also point to the tradition in Aesopic discourse of doubting authorities which is most obvious in the Life. Soothsayers (or philosophers) do not have access to specialized knowledge; common sense works better. 24 The fullness of the portrait of Diophanes, as compared with the mantis of fable puts me in mind of Th. McCreight’s paper at the 2017 SCS meeting in Toronto, “The Novelist and Philosopher as Biographer: Traces of the Biographical in Apuleius” which outlined the remarkable degree of fictive biographical portraiture in the Metamorphoses. 25 FRANGOULIDIS 2005, p. 168. 260 ELLEN FINKELPEARL reading of the whole novel as a serious moral text championing Isis is congenial to me (vs. the satiric reading), his appeal to Aesop’s assfables and their morals glosses over many complications. It is not clear to me that the “implied moral” of, for example, the ass and the gardener which he cites (Chambry 278 = Perry 172 ) has anything to do with Isis, even as it is modified in Apuleius at 9, 3, 2 (see below). Proverbs bear a resemblance to fable in their dependence on pithiness and figurative language, and are included in Perry’s Aesopica because of their appearance in earlier Aesopic collections. Van Dijk mentions that some grammarians discuss fable and proverb under one heading.26 Apuleius, when he employs proverbs, similarly confounds their purpose. At the end of Book 9, Lucius curiosus betrays the hiding-place of the gardener who had mauled the Roman soldier, by peeking his head out a window, whereby a fellow-soldier catches sight of his shadow: obliquata ceruice per quandam fenestrulam ... prospicere gestio ... unus e commilitonibus ... conlimatis oculis ad umbram meam cunctos testatur incoram... Vnde etiam de prospectu et umbra asini natum est frequens prouerbium. (9, 42, 2-4) “I wriggled my neck out through a little window and tried see … when one of the soldiers happened to look around and see my shadow... And this is the origin of the proverb about the peeping ass and his shadow.” In the Onos, Lukios similarly peeks out, is discovered and then says, “And from this time, from me first originated the saying “from the peeping of an ass” (κἀκ τότε ἐξ ἐμοῦ πρώτου ἦλθεν εἰς ἀνθρώπους ὁ λόγος οὗτος, Ἐξ ὄνου παρακύψεως, Onos 45). Apuleius has therefore added the second proverb, about the ass’s shadow, to his version.27 This section has always seemed strange to me, though the strangeness originates with Apuleius’ source: Lukios and Lucius are both narcissistically bent on claiming themselves as the sources of the sayings, but all they have done is literally peek out a window. The proverbs, as is the essence of proverbs, have more symbolic meaning 26 See VAN DIJK 1995, p. 253, section 3.2, ainos kai paroimia. See HIJMANS et al. 1995, p. 353-355 among others. Also see FREEMAN 1945, p. 3341 on the frequency of donkeys in proverbs and some discussion of this passage. 27 AESOPIC DISCOURSE IN APULEIUS 261 than this. In Perry 459, an ass pokes his head in the window of a potter’s workshop where the potter also keeps birds. The birds are frightened and fly about the shop breaking the pottery. The potter takes the ass-driver to court and when he is asked what the charge was, he says “the peeping of an ass,” παρακύψεως ὄνου. Thereafter, the phrase is used of frivolous lawsuits. In Perry 460, Demosthenes is said to have told a story about the “shadow of an ass:” two men taking a rest from travelling argue over which one has the right to lie down in the ass’s shadow. Demosthenes’ listeners get caught up in this tale when they have paid no attention to the serious matters of his oration and he rebukes them for caring so much about the “shadow of an ass.” The proverb seems to have existed already, as it appears in Aristophanes (Wasps) and Plato (Phaedrus) and to have referred to trivialities. But what is important here in Apuleius is, again, that Lucius’ comic and spurious claim to have originated this proverb makes no sense because the figurative and symbolic meaning is nowhere to be found in this literal manifestation of the shadow of an ass. And again, we find the suppression of the symbolic or allegorical which lies at the heart of fable and the substitution, instead, of narrative events. The same could be said of the proverb come to life in Books 2 and 3, the tres utres inflati (wineskins appearing to be robbers breaking into Byrrhaena’s house at 2, 32 and exposed during the trial at 3, 18). Brancaleone and Stramaglia show that the episode is based on three different proverbs: “fighting a wineskin,” meaning to be afraid for no cause, “flaying a wineskin” meaning to be senseless, and “the nature of men as inflated wineskins” as in Petronius 42, 4. The proverbs are combined and transformed into narrative action, and no longer have the force of proverbs: “tali espressioni sono contaminate e attualizzate parodicamente da Apuleio, che le rende funzionali alla narrazione con una tecnica scaltrita non aliena da qualche forzatura” (40).28 The authors do not explain what they mean by the parodic 28 BRANCALEONE & STRAMAGLIA 1993, p. 37-40 where the episode at 9, 42 is invoked as parallel. There is another potential proverbial expression at 1, 15 “cucurbitae caput” and the pumpkin also appears at 5, 9 “balder than a pumpkin”. Gibbs suggests that these may be related to Perry 560, an odd fable about a bald man and a pumpkin 262 ELLEN FINKELPEARL element, but certainly literary showmanship and humor are involved. Still, there also seems to be a pattern of a removal of the allegorical here and elsewhere. Apuleius was the author of a lost work, De Prouerbiis, about which little is known.29 But it is safe to say that the author of such a work would be well aware of the proper use and nature of proverbs. Buried in Scobie’s commentary is an important analysis of the conversion of fable to narrative, which he traces to the lost Greek Metamorphoseis or “Luciad.” He discusses the incorporation of proverbs about curiosity such as the peeping of an ass (above) and suggests that (1) the “Luciad” could have used the proverbial curiosity of the donkey as “a useful structural (and in Apuleius’ case) exemplary motif” to bind together the disparate tales, and (2) a longer and episodic donkey fable such as Aesopica 179, in which an ass is passed from one owner to the next with his lot only worsening, might suggest this use of fable. “[A]t least it is possible that such an episodic fable suggested the idea (if it was needed) of stringing together several anecdotes about donkeys.”30 This interpretation might lead us to re-think the meaning of uarias fabulas conseram (1, 1); it could be read as “I will weave together different fables.” How does other Latin literature incorporate fable?31 Horace’s Satires and Epistles, self-consciously low, incorporate perhaps the greatest density of explicit references to fable anywhere in Latin literature.32 The most famous example is the Tale of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse (Sat. 2, 6) where a brief fable is expanded into a longer narrative, with copious detail and constituting about half of Satire 2, 6. This practice does resemble Apuleius’ expansion of the gardener in which the insulted bald man cuts off the gardener’s head. But I don’t see that much can be done with this. 29 See, usefully, HARRISON 2000, p. 20-21. 30 SCOBIE 1975, p. 29-30. 31 At the conference, L. Graverini rightly asked whether the process of expanding fables isn’t simply what happens when they are subsumed in literature, and raised the Horatian Country Mouse and City Mouse as an example. The following is a response. 32 I am using the list in HOLZBERG 2001, p. 32-33, which, however, is criticized as incomplete by MARCHESI 2005. AESOPIC DISCOURSE IN APULEIUS 263 tale of the Fox and the Crow in the DDS False Preface. Yet the fable is still presented as an example, the Country Mouse a parallel to Horace himself. More often, Horace is brief and allusive; in Satire 2, 6, 314-20, Damasippus uses the fable of the Frog and the Calf in mocking Horace’s pretensions to an equal friendship with Maecenas. However large the frog puffs himself up, he will not be equal to the calf. “Haec a te non multum abludit imago,” concludes Damasippus, employing the traditional formula linking the fable to the context at hand. Other fables are referenced in a few short lines and clearly used for exemplary purposes; Sat. 2, 1, 64 alludes to the fable of the donkey in the lion’s skin (or at least something in a skin) as a way of talking about how Lucilius unmasks frauds.33 The stringing together of fables to form the basis of an expanded narrative as described by Scobie is something different and perhaps unique to the Onos and Met. I. Marchesi has analyzed the careful control of the circumstances of citation of fable in Horace and Petronius, demonstrating that a recitation of fable betrays servile origins. Horace, she argues, uses fable more and more freely from the earlier Satires to the later Epistles when he proudly announces that he is the son of a freedman. Apuleius, for a number of reasons perhaps, does not seem to be bothered by an open use of fable. He continues the practice perhaps begun in his source, if the nature of the Onos is any indication: a Greek work that is not bound by the norms of Latin literature and has been deemed a subversive work for its “double vision” providing insights into the lot of a slave or a non-elite.34 Whatever the nature of the original Ass story, Apuleius is composing a work in which a donkey-protagonist stands in for the slave, as Bradley and Fitzgerald have variously argued.35 The free introduction of fable as an undercurrent could be viewed as another way that Apuleius brings out the slave subtext – servile genre, donkey protagonist. 33 HOLZBERG 2001, p. 32; cf. PERRY 188. HALL 1995. 35 BRADLEY 2000, FITZGERALD 2000. 34 264 ELLEN FINKELPEARL 3. Activating the Animal in animal fable One of the more interesting examples of the adoption and modification of fable in the Metamorphoses appears at 4, 4, the episode involving Lucius and the doppelganger donkey. In this familiar episode, Lucius tells us he has a brilliant idea, that he will pretend to be lame and fall down exhausted, and that the robbers will inevitably take the load off him, put it on the other donkey and leave him to the wolves and vultures. But the other donkey uses the trick instead and is hamstrung and thrown off the cliff. The episode occurs in shorter but essentially identical form in Onos 19 so it is not original with Apuleius, but I will focus on his version. Several fables feature donkeys walking beside other pack animals, some of which are free of burdens and others not. This is clearly a topos of fable. In Babrius 7, a man owns a horse and an aged ass. Ἄνθρωπος ἵππον εἶχε. τοῦτον εἰώθει κενὸν παρέλκειν, ἐπετίθει δὲ τὸν φόρτον ὄνῳ γέροντι. πολλὰ τοιγαροῦν κάμνων ἐκεῖνος ἐλθὼν πρὸς τὸν ἵππον ὡμίλει. “ἤν μοι θελήσῃς συλλαβεῖν τι τοῦ φόρτου, τάχ᾿ ἂν γενοίμην σῷος· εἰ δὲ μή, θνῄσκω.” ὁ δ᾿ “οὐ προάξεις;” εἶπε, “μή μ᾿ ἐνοχλήσῃς.” εἷρπεν σιωπῶν, τῷ κόπῳ δ᾿ ἀπαυδήσας πεσὼν ἔκειτο νεκρός, ὡς προειρήκει. τὸν ἵππον οὖν παρ᾿ αὐτὸν εὐθέως στήσας ὁ δεσπότης καὶ πάντα τὸν γόμον λύων ἐπ᾿ αὐτὸν ἐτίθει τὴν σάγην τε τοῦ κτήνους, καὶ τὴν ὀνείην προσεπέθηκεν ἐκδείρας. ὁ δ᾿ ἵππος “οἴμοι τῆς κακῆς” ἔφη “γνώμης· οὗ γὰρ μετασχεῖν μικρὸν οὐκ ἐβουλήθην, τοῦτ᾿ αὐτό μοι πᾶν ἐπιτέθεικεν ἡ χρείη. (Babrius 7) “A man had a horse which he used to lead along with him free of any burden. He put the burden upon an aged ass. So the latter, worn out by much toil, went up to the horse and spoke with him about it: ‘If you are willing to share a part of my load, I may, perhaps, come through alive, but otherwise I shall die.’ ‘Go along,’ replied the horse, ‘don’t bother me.’ The ass plodded on in silence, but presently, spent with toil, he fell down and lay dead, as he had foretold. Immediately the master drew up the horse beside him and, unfastening the entire load, put upon the horse not only the packsaddle of the poor drudge, with all its burden, but in addition also, after flaying him, the ass’s skin. ‘Alas,’ said the horse, ‘how poor was my judgment; that very burden, of which I was AESOPIC DISCOURSE IN APULEIUS 265 unwilling to share even a small part, has now of necessity been put upon me in its entirety’.” (Trans. Perry) Babrius’ fable seems to speak to the need for sharing and cooperation and exposes class injustice – horse vs. donkey. A similar fable, the Donkey and the Ox (Perry 181), compounds the death-toll, with the donkey this time refusing to help the Ox, the Ox dying and the donkey taking his load and then himself dying! Here, birds feasting on the donkey’s flesh speak the epimythion: “If you had only helped the Ox...” Another (Perry 263) involves a donkey and a mule, where the donkey complains that the two animals are carrying the same load, but the mule gets to eat more, but as they trudge on, the driver does transfer the load bit by bit from the tired donkey to the mule, at which point the mule says, “see this is why I get to eat more.”36 In general, all three fables have to do with sharing, fairness, and the consequences – a variable topos with a clear message. The version in the Onos and in Apuleius, however, while it follows the pattern of two animals carrying loads and one trying to avoid it, does not have a moral, or only a vestige of a moral. Apuleius alters the focus: ...cogitabam totum memet flexis scite cruribus pronum abicere, certus atque obstinatus nullis uerberibus ad ingrediundum exsurgere... Rebar enim iam me prorsus exanimatum ac debilem mereri causariam missionem, certe latrones... dorsi mei sarcinam duobus ceteris iumentis distributuros meque in altioris uindictae uicem lupis et uulturiis praedam relicturos. Sed... namque ille alius asinus diuinato et antecapto meo cogitatu statim se mentita lassitudine... (Met. 4, 4, 3-5) “I was thinking I would skilfully bend my knees and throw myself flat to the ground, bound and determined not to get up and walk for all the beatings in the world – (...) I assumed that, since I was now totally exhausted and feeble, I would earn a medical discharge: surely the robbers, partly from intolerance of delay and partly from eagerness for a swift getaway, would distribute the load from my back between the two other pack-animals and then, in lieu of any more serious punishment, would leave me behind as prey for wolves and vultures. 36 Yet another fable features a goat that persuades a donkey to pretend to have a seizure in order to escape working in the mill; the goat comes to a bad end (PERRY 279). Clearly there is a connection with Lucius’ plan to feign exhaustion and also with resistant slave tactics. 266 ELLEN FINKELPEARL However (...) The other ass guessed and anticipated my scheme: at once he pretended exhaustion...” (Trans. Hanson) This story is no longer about sharing, though that layer is still there – the donkey that “fakes” exhaustion will die; Lucius has learned a lesson and will now be an asinus bonae frugi. But the real focus here is on the distinction, or lack thereof, between human and animal modes of thinking (cogitabam; rebar; diuinato et antecapto).37 Instead of a horse, a mule or an ox walking with a donkey, Apuleius sets two donkeys side by side, one actual ass and one human ass and confuses the distinction. (Lucius’ horse had also been stolen and could have been employed to create a scenario truer to the original fable.) While Lucius claims that he is devising a clever scheme, he is driven by his partial animal identity to think like a stubborn donkey, and simultaneously suggests that the other donkey might be thinking like a human. What was once a cautionary and exemplary tale has, first of all, been woven into a longer narrative where Lucius is no longer “The Donkey” in an un-named and symbolic sense but an individual. And the fable subtext is further transformed by Apuleius’ distraction from its moral toward that other focus of fable, the conflation of human and animal and that complex process of “translating.” But before moving on to discussion of the animal in animal fable, we should also notice that the first of these fables was about the privilege; the aristocratic horse is naturally free of burdens, but is shown to need the help of the working class. Apuleius has stripped the fable of that angle, too, by setting two donkeys side by side. So, while it would be tempting to see the introduction of fable as part of a resistant populist tendency in the Met., the specific examples might not always support such an argument. Turning back to the previous point: the focus in Apuleius is brought back to what is often less evident in beast fables: they are 37 The Onos (or rather the original Met.) deserves the credit here (Onos 19). Apuleius has merely intensified Lucius’ perception of the other ass as a thinking being. After Lukios devises his scheme, the Onos reads: ἀλλά τις δαίμων βάσκανος συνεὶς τῶν ἐμῶν βουλευμάτων ἐς τοὐναντίον περιήνεγκεν, “But a malignant deity realised my plans and turned them topsy-turvy,” (Onos 19) while Apuleius makes the other ass himself guess and anticipate his scheme. AESOPIC DISCOURSE IN APULEIUS 267 about animals. What these fables do, even if they are ultimately about the necessity of sharing and cooperation in human society and even if they are designed in some cases to exemplify a point in a rhetorical context (B. Sanders could have used this fable...), is to view this loadbearing from an animal point of view; how does the donkey feel when it sees the horse walking beside it without a burden? While the dominant view in scholarship has been that Aesopic discourse is simply coded speech about humans, new directions in animal studies have changed that.38 As N. Harel points out from a Critical Animal Studies point of view, there is much in animal fables that grounds these part-symbolic animals in the real lives of animals – in this case, the reality of the pain and exhaustion of load-bearing for the animal itself, and the exploitation of non-human animals by humans.39 In any case, what makes these fables a source for this scene in Apuleius is this animal perspective, a tradition of animals jockeying with each other and being conscious that they are carrying burdens. E. Hazelton Haight long ago pointed out that the Metamorphoses reads like a tract from the ASPCA (or now perhaps PETA).40 Two horse fables may be in the background of Lucius’ lament in the mill in Book 9. Both Phaedrus and Babrius describe an old racehorse who now runs circuits in the mill.41 38 DUBOIS 2003, p. 170-188. Also, MILES & DEMOEN 2009, p. 28-44 (fables are about humans p. 32) all take it for granted that animals are incidental. But note the excellent article, “Aesop and Animal Fable” by LEFKOWITZ 2014. Lefkowitz notes that “it continues to be taken for granted that fables have nothing to teach us about real animals” but that the field is developing and changing (LEFKOWITZ 2014, p. 7). 39 HAREL 2009 points to the manner in which many animal fables articulate not only the exploitation of powerless and voiceless humans by the powerful, but, at the more literal level, the near-universal exploitation of non-human by human animals. This mechanism is strengthened when fables are employed in Apuleius to illustrate the predicaments of a human subjected to the everyday burdens and indignities suffered by non-human animals. 40 HAIGHT 1943-1944. Also FREEMAN 1945 on the graphic description in Apuleius of the hard life of a donkey. 41 Babrius 76 is a rather similar fable about a warhorse that sinks to the level of a donkey and carries loads, but does not include the first-person lament on the part of the fallen animal. 268 ELLEN FINKELPEARL Equum e quadriga multis palmis nobilem, abegit quidam et in pistrinum uendidit. productus ad bibendum cum foret a molis, in circum aequales ire conspexit suos, ut grata ludis redderent certamina. lacrimis obortis “Ite felices” ait, “celebrate sine me cursu sollemnem diem; ego, quo scelesta furis attraxit manus, ibi sorte tristi fata deflebo mea.” (Perry 549; Phaedrus, “Perotti’s Appendix” 21) “Someone took a horse from the chariot-and-four, with which he had made a reputation by many races won, and sold him to turn a grist mill. When he was led out from the millstones to drink he caught sight of his team-mates on their way to the race-track to make their welcome contribution, as racers, to the games. The tears came to his eyes as he said: ‘Go your lucky way, celebrate without me the festive day in the race. In that place, whither the wicked hand of a thief brought me, shall I lament the destiny that cruel fortune has allotted me’.” (Trans. Perry). Γέρων ποθ᾿ ἵππος εἰς ἀλητὸν ἐπράθη, ζευχθεὶς δ᾿ ὑπὸ μύλην πᾶσαν ἑσπέρην ἤλει. καὶ δὴ στενάξας εἶπεν “ἐκ δρόμων οἵων καμπτῆρας οἵους ἀλφιτεῦσι γυρεύω.” Μὴ λίαν ἐπαίρου πρὸς τὸ τῆς ἀκμῆς γαῦρον. πολλοῖς τὸ γῆρας ἐν κόποις ἀνηλώθη. (Babrius 29) “Once a race-horse grown old was sold to grind corn and, harnessed to the mill, he ground throughout the evening. Sighing deeply then, he said: ‘Alas, what courses once I ran, and now what wretched goal-posts must I turn about to serve these millers!’ Exult not overmuch in the pride of thy youthful strength. Many a man’s old age is spent in weary toil.” Lucius has fallen from the condition of humanity to that of a beast, but the sense of loss is the same: Talis familiae funestum mihi etiam metuens exemplum, ueterisque Lucii fortunam recordatus et ad ultimam salutis metam detrusus, summisso capite maerebam. (Met. 9, 13, 3) “The funereal example of my fellow-slaves made me fear for myself. Recalling the happy Lucius I once was, now driven to the utmost degradation, I lowered my head and grieved.” (Trans. Hanson) Like Lucius in book 9, the horses lament their dreadful lives of toil, recalling their glory days. Lucius recalls his earlier fortunate self and compares it to his degraded position. Interestingly, he uses the word meta (ad ultimam salutis metam detrusus) the turning post in a AESOPIC DISCOURSE IN APULEIUS 269 race-course, just as Babrius’ washed-up horse refers figuratively to the posts of the mill as καμπτῆρας. Admittedly, Apuleius also uses this image at 4, 20 where Thrasyleon does not forget his courage even while approaching life’s finishing post (quamquam uitae metas ultimas obiret), but its use here may evoke the fable subtext. Again, fable brings us part way into the perspective of the washed-up racehorse and warhorse, but Apuleius has built in an even greater degree of pathos because we connect the animal with a human, and a specific human. In Babrius, advice is appended: “Do not exult too much in the pride of youthful strength; many a man’s old age is spent in weary toil.” There is no explicit moral in Phaedrus, and certainly not in Apuleius, where any such moral – to put up with his lot as a donkey – would be ludicrous. This lament comes in a space between his comparison of the wretched state of the animals in the mill to the human slaves (Met. 9, 12-13) and the perplexing comparison of himself to Odysseus (Met. 9, 13, 4). So, the fable subtext occurs again in a context where humananimal boundaries are questioned. Also here, Lucius refers to himself as hidden in the donkey’s skin (“me suo celatum tegmine” 9, 13, 5). I suggest that there may be a reference here to the fable that crops up several times, of the ass in the lion’s skin (Perry 188, 358), fables about not pretending to be something you are not. The phrase in Apuleius is otherwise odd and is interestingly inverted here; Lucius is clothed in the skin of something lesser. Again, Apuleius strips the fable of its symbolic intent. Fable, then, in addition to supplying elements of narrative, as outlined in the previous section, also intersects interestingly with the ambiguous hybridity of Lucius in his animal state. Lucius is complicatedly both human and animal and not simply a man in animal skin; bodies matter and are not divisible from the mind, as we see in Met. 4, 4. The animals of fable also force us to think across species lines and to consider our intersections, to sympathize with their lot and consider them thinking beings. Apollonius (according to Philostratus) praises fable for the way it makes animals nicer and worthy of respect, (χαρίεν δ᾿ αὐτοῦ τὸ καὶ τὰ ἄλογα ἡδίω ἐργάζεσθαι καὶ σπουδῆς ἄξια τοῖς ἀνθρώποις) implying that an ancient reader or listener would take fable literally (as addressing the lives of animals) 270 ELLEN FINKELPEARL as well as figuratively, and would think better of animals as a result (VA 5, 14). This is important as we consider “Animality” in Apuleius. While being a donkey is clearly an undesirable state in the Met., too little attention has been given to Apuleius’ invitation to question simplistic human-animal distinctions in favor of viewing animality as Lucius’punishment for indulgence in curiosity or other sins. S. Tilg’s book, one of the most recent to revive a moralizing reading explores again the idea of the Met. as “philosophical novel” (63-70). Tilg references Plato’s Phaedo 81e which describes the way the souls of those who have lived an unphilosophical life of sensuous pleasure (specifically gluttony, violence and drunkenness) end up in “the bodies of asses and other animals of that sort.”42 For Tilg, the Metamorphoses is about “punitive metempsychosis,” and he goes on to cite the passages important for the moralistic reading of the Met. on slavish pleasures and untimely curiosity (esp. 11, 15, 1). “The ass story, then, provides a number of figurative dimensions charged with Pythagorean and Platonic notions of the fall and salvation of the soul” (73). Without delving too deeply into refutations of this argument, I would point out that Pythagoras (whose actual writings are lost and obscure) was better known for his ideas on the kinship of all beings than for this idea of “punitive metempsychosis” which is Platonic.43 But the point is that attention has focused on the negative aspects of animality, while Apuleius also seems interested in Derrida’s “L’animal que donc je suis.”44 42 Note that other misdemeanors will result in transformation into other animals: tyrants end up as wolves. The particular details do not fit Lucius precisely. 43 I addressed these issues in my paper at ICAN Houston 2015 in the paper “Pythagoras in Met. 11, 1.” 44 J. DERRIDA 2008, The Animal that therefore I am, M.-L. Mallet (ed.), D. Wills (trans.), New York. This is an inadequate nod to the enormous recent and not so recent bibliography under the general rubric of “critical animal studies” which, generally, complicates and refigures “the question of the animal.” AESOPIC DISCOURSE IN APULEIUS 271 4. Miscellaneous There are many ambiguous or doubtful cases as well. I mentioned earlier that the ants of Cupid and Psyche have nothing to do with ants of fable, which are obsessively industrious. However, there already seems to have been a debate in antiquity about whether the ant’s industry is laudable or whether the ant is selfish and averse to supporting the arts. Babrius 140 presents an ambiguous picture: Χειμῶνος ὥρῃ σῖτον ἐκ μυχοῦ σύρων ἔψυχε μύρμηξ, ὃν θέρους σεσωρεύκει. τέττιξ δὲ τοῦτον ἱκέτευε λιμώττων δοῦναί τι καὐτῷ τῆς τροφῆς, ὅπως ζήσῃ. “τί οὖν ἐποίεις” φησί “τῷ θέρει τούτῳ;” “οὐκ ἐσχόλαζον, ἀλλὰ διετέλουν ᾄδων.” γελάσας δ' ὁ μύρμηξ τόν τε πυρὸν ἐγκλείων “χειμῶνος ὀρχοῦ” φησίν “εἰ θέρους ηὔλεις.” “An ant in the wintertime was dragging out of his hole some grain which he had stored up in the summer, in order to air it. A cicada, dying of starvation, begged him to give him some of his food, to keep him alive. ‘What were you doing last summer?’ asked the ant. ‘I was not loafing,’ said the cicada, ‘I was busy singing all the time.’ The ant laughed and barred up his grain saying, ‘Dance in the winter, since you piped in the summer’.” (Trans. Perry) The Ant here appears pitiless and ungenerous (the cicada asserts the value of the arts and is starving to death!) as it does later in La Fontaine (1, 1), where it refuses even a loan to the cicada and mockingly concludes: “Eh bien! Dansez maintenant!”. Still, there is a late epimythion which Perry brackets, which advises that it is better to think ahead about necessities than to take pleasure in fun and partying (Perry 373). Another Ant fable describes how certain men used to farm busily and, not satisfied with their own crops, stole from their neighbors. Zeus was angry and turned them into ants, which still steal grain grown by others (Perry 166).45 Turning to Apuleius, the kind and pitying ants of Met. 6, 10, 5 reject the cruelty of Venus, certa difficultatis tantae laborisque, miserta contubernalis magni dei, 45 Similarly, the epimythion to PERRY 112, “The Ant and the Dung Beetle,” which follows the same narrative except that the dung beetle is not an artist, praises those who think about the future instead of neglecting important things. “The Ant and the Fly” (Phaedrus 4, 25) also praises the ant’s industry over the fly’s empty boasting. 272 ELLEN FINKELPEARL socrusque saeuitiam execrata (“recognising the great dfficulty and toil involved, pitied the bride of the great god and abominated the cruelty of her mother-in-law,” trans. Hanson). Could this be a reference to this debate in fable? Apuleius’ ants are both industrious and generous, sorting grain unbidden. This reading is not incompatible with the view of E. and N. Plantade that those ants come from Berber folktale.46 The Cupid and Psyche episode is universally agreed to be composed of a melange of influences and levels of discourse (polytropia). At Met. 9, 1 and Onos 40-41, Lucius/Lukios is in danger of being killed so that a cook can prepare his haunch for dinner, after some dogs have made off with the intended dinner, a stag’s thigh. Understanding what is going to happen to him, he breaks the rope that holds him and dashes into the dining room, where the master is dining with the priests of the Dea Syria, knocking over tables and lamps. Babrius 129 similarly features a donkey bursting into a dining room, breaking the table and upsetting furniture, but Babrius’ fable revolves around the donkey envying a little pet dog who has his run of the inside of the house.47 Lucius simply invades the human space to save himself, not to pretend he is something else. The whole episode of the priests of the Dea Syria could have been suggested by the fables in Babrius (141) and Phaedrus (4, 1) – or others now lost since this seems to be a topos – about an abused ass in the service of priests of Cybele. When the ass dies labore atque plagis (Phaedrus 4, 1, 6), the priests make a tympanum of his hide and tell anyone who asks about their pet (delicia): putabat se post mortem securum fore:/ ecce aliae plagae congeruntur mortuo (“He thought that he would be safe after death/ but other blows were heaped on him when he was dead,” 10-11). Babrius’ fable presumably also ended this way, though it seems incomplete.48 This fable has a dark 46 PLANTADE & PLANTADE 2014, p. 188-191. SCOBIE 1975, p. 31. 48 See HIJMANS et al. 1985, p. 239, which notes the theme of the ass carrying mysteries and says, “in the fable, too, it is a well-known theme,” citing these fables. They suggest that the lewdness of the episode may have come from mime. 47 AESOPIC DISCOURSE IN APULEIUS 273 promythion pronouncing that those who are infelix in life are also followed by misfortune after death, but this detail is not pursued in Apuleius. The general exposure of the abuse of the powerless is central in this fable and resonates in the Dea Syria episode. As noted above, critics have seen other fables as a background. Babrius 83, Onos 28, and Met. 7, 15 all portray a horse or ass that grinds barley, but is deprived of it, though this does not exactly happen to Lucius. Someone ties flax to a fox’s tail and lights it on fire in Perry 283 which may be in the background of Apuleius’ depiction of the evil boy and Lucius at Met. 7, 18 and Onos 31), but perhaps this is generic. There might be a greater debt in Perry 179 which features a donkey and a gardener who works the donkey hard but gives him little food, though Lucius’ gardener-master is surprisingly kind at Met. 9, 3 ,2 even if he can only feed Lucius tired lettuce. This is the fable, however, that features a successive shift in masters (gardener to potter to tanner) that Scobie suggests might have formed a basis for some of the plot of the original Greek Met.. If nothing else, the Met. and fable treat the same quotidian social world. 5. Longer narrative fables, mime, and the possible intersection with the novel I have argued up to this point that Apuleius strips fables of their pithy morals. A non-animal fable from Babrius provides an interesting twist. The story of the young man, the miller’s wife and the miller, where the young man is made the unwilling lover of the miller himself (Met. 9, 26-28), is told in Babrius 116 in much the same, if abbreviated, form. Νυκτὸς μεσούσης ᾖδε παῖς τις εὐφώνως. γυνὴ δ᾿ ἀκούει τοῦδε, κἀξαναστᾶσα θυρίδων προκύπτει, καὶ βλέπουσα τὸν παῖδα λαμπρῆς σελήνης ἐν φάει καλὸν λίην, τὸν ἄνδρ᾿ ἑαυτῆς καταλιποῦσα κοιμᾶσθαι κάτω μελάθρων ἦλθε, καὶ θύρης ἔξω ἐλθοῦσ᾿ ἐποίει τὴν προθυμίην πλήρη. ὡνὴρ δὲ ταύτης ἐξανίστατ᾿ ἐξαίφνης ητῶν ὅποὐστί, κοὐκ ἰδὼν δόμων εἴσω μηδὲν χανών τε καὐτὸς ἦλθεν εἰς οἶμον. καὶ τῇ συνεύνῳ φησί “μηδὲν ἐκπλήσσου, 274 ELLEN FINKELPEARL τὸν παῖδα δ᾿ ἡμῶν πεῖσον ἐν δόμοις εὕδειν.” ὃν καὶ λαβὼν παρῆγεν. εἶτα κἀκεῖνος, ἄμφω θελόντων δρᾶν τι, τῇδ᾿ ἐρᾳθύμει. Τουτὶ μὲν οὕτως· ἔμφασις δὲ τοῦ μύθου, κακὸν ἐπιχαίνειν, ὅταν ἔχῃ τις ἐκτῖσαι. (Babrius 116) “A boy at midnight was sweetly singing a serenade. A wife who heard him rose from her bed and peeped out the window. Seeing in the bright moonlight a boy who was very handsome, she left her husband asleep, came downstairs, went out the door, and fulfilled her desire completely. Meanwhile her husband got up suddenly, meaning to find out where she was. Not seeing her inside the house, and not stopping to gawk, he himself went out in the open (and found her). ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he said to his mate, ‘but persuade this boy to sleep in our house.’ Then he took the boy and brought him indoors. Thereafter he in turn, whenever the two were inclined to do anything, amused himself in this way. So it happened. And the meaning of the fable is this: It’s bad for anyone to stand there gaping, when it lies within his power to avenge himself.” (Trans. Perry) In Babrius, we sense that the three of them do all end up in bed together, and perhaps on a regular basis, while Apuleius’ miller, though making noises about a ménage à trois, ends up taking the boy “solus” (9, 28, 1) and then sending him away with beatings in the morning.49 Babrius appends a very amoral moral, while Apuleius alludes to the element of revenge, but not as a moral, when he says that the miller gratissima ... uindicta perfruebatur (9, 28, 1). Here, then, Apuleius foregoes the epimythion from Babrius which appears to endorse questionable morality. (The question of priority is important and yet impossible to determine here given the uncertainty of Babrius’ dates.) For Apuleius, this is only part of the story; the miller comes to a bad end, bewitched by the machinations of the wife in revenge; the narrative is expanded and continues, as is the pattern. What do we make of the fact that Apuleius, by subjecting the miller to punishment, offers, perhaps, a different kind of moral from what fables convey in their brief epimythia? The adultery tales have often been viewed as a key to various moralistic readings of the book. The meanings of τῇδ᾿ and εἶτα and the reference in the dual are confusing. Does εἶτα have to mean “whenever” and are the “two” definitely the wife and the boy, and what more precisely is implied by “in this way”? None of this matters in terms of the issues at hand, but the ambiguities make it hard to determine how close Apuleius is to Babrius. 49 AESOPIC DISCOURSE IN APULEIUS 275 Kirichenko, for example, views Lucius’ active participation in this story, by stepping on the adulterer’s fingers (or toes), as a sign of his increased moral awareness in the later books.50 Yet, for Kirichenko this is of course only one of many ways to read the book. Lucius does indeed express moral outrage in the moments leading up to his actions in exposing the adulterer at 9, 26, 4 It has not necessarily been my aim to deny that the Met. could be read in moral terms; narrative has different ways of conveying morals from Fable. This fable is rather different from others surveyed so far, but belongs to a class that features humans rather than animals, lacks a pithy moral, and involves a more involved narrative. V. Schmidt has suggested that this motif of the “three in bed,” which he observes in Catullus, Martial, Babrius and Apuleius must have been common in adultery mimes.51 Babrius and Apuleius could therefore have adopted the story independently from mime performance. Further, the atypical epimythion in Babrius – get revenge and enjoy yourself! – could be explained in terms of mime’s notorious lasciviousness.52 Several critics point generally and suggestively to mime as a source for Apuleius.53 “The three tales of adultery in Book 9 of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses may well have been insipired by this type of plot,” 50 KIRICHENKO 2009, p. 120. After failing to see that Cupid and Psyche is more than an anilis fabula, Lucius now is transforming from a philomuthos to a philokalos. Using the tales to support a moral reading is of course one of the core readings of the Met. See, e.g. TATUM 1969. 51 SCHMIDT 1989, p. 63-73. 52 As several scholars have noted, the usual characters in an adultery mime would be the wife, the lover and the stupidus who is the clueless husband (e.g. KEHOE 1984, p. 90). It would be interesting if Apuleius, having followed this mime pattern in the previous stories (esp. the tub at 9, 5-7), now introduces a variation on the familiar mime plot by portraying the miller as someone who did not stand there gaping (ἐπιχαίνειν) like the stupidus, but took action. R. WEBB 2008, p. 106 says there is no mention of this kind of denoument in staged versions of the adultery plot and sees it as Apuleius’ own development. 53 See MAY 2006, p. 10-15. WINKLER 1985, p. 160-165 and 286-291 is mostly interested in tying possible characters such as the scholasticus and the stupidus to Lucius, and in establishing the mime actor as an inheritor of the character of the “grotesque outsider,” though he does not refer to specific mimes. Also HIJMANS et al. 1995, p. 65-66, 186, 214 and passim. 276 ELLEN FINKELPEARL argues R. Webb.54 However, the connection of both the novel and fable to mime points to the popular (or mixed) character of all of them.55 Phaedrus 3, 10 is another unusually long narrative (60 lines) of a Hippolytus sort, featuring a man, his son, and a stepmother, but here it is an evil freedman who tricks the father into killing his son, in the belief that he is an adulterer in bed with his wife. This story, too, resembles the Nouerca tale of Met. 10, 2 ff. and it is somewhat surprising to see it in the “fable” collection of Phaedrus.56 The Widow of Ephesus story, hardly a fable of the “Lion and Fox” variety, is narrated in Phaedrus (Perotti’s Appendix 15).57 There seems to be a place where fable and novel converge around a Milesian tale type of narrative, possibly with mime as the intermediary, and this would be an interesting direction to take this subject. I have so far not found a discussion of the triangulation of novel, mime and fable, though these episodes in Apuleius at 9, 26-28 and 10, 2 ff. seem indebted to both. 6. Conclusions and further speculation To sum up: One simple conclusion is that Apuleius (and before him the author of the Greek Met. and Onos) forms simple fables into complex narrative, using those basic fable scenarios to build a 54 WEBB 2008, p. 105. See p. 105-112 on the adutery mime generally, with several references to Apuleius’ tales. PANAYOTAKIS 1995 explores the influence of the adultery mime on Petronius (p. 122-135). Also see FINKELPEARL 1991 on the pantomime of the Judgment of Paris in 10, 29-34 as it relates to documented mime performance. 55 ANDREASSI 1997 also argues that mime should be credited with a higher literary status than it usually enjoys (p. 17-20). 56 KEHOE 1984, p. 104 references an article by S. Sudhaus (“Der Mimus von Oxyrhynchus”, Hermes 91, 1906, p. 262 ff.) that argues that the “Phaedra” scene in Met. 10, 2-12 derives from the mimic stage, an argument developed in WIEMKEN 1972, but criticized by ANDREASSI 1997 who points out the many differences between the Moicheutria mime and Apuleius’ tale at 10, 2-10, particularly in terms of the way social level influences behavior. See also REICH 1903, p. 589. 57 See esp. COURTNEY 2001, p. 166-67 on the question of priority vs. a common source. AESOPIC DISCOURSE IN APULEIUS 277 patchwork plot. Scobie’s decades-old suggestions about Aesopic fable offering a collection of convenient stories for the original Ass Story on which to build a narrative is very astute. At the same time, the fable subtext intersects interestingly with Lucius’ hybridity while bringing fable’s populist and servile associations into play. Also, the presence of fable contributes to picturing “animality” in ways not altogether negative. I have also emphasized that Apuleius removes the morals or epimythia and often aggressively strips fable of its symbolic and figurative qualities. This very quality of frustrated fable fits a Winklerian reading quite nicely: if we consider the Metamorphoses an extended fable (perhaps allegory fits better), we would expect a neater and more easily comprehensible conclusion. Winkler makes the analogy between Augustine’s Confessions and Apuleius’ Metamorposes and asks why Lucius does not similarly look back and offer us some clear explanation of where he went wrong and how his experience can be an example to others. Yet it is precisely the absence of this clarity that has defeated and divided critics through the years. The incorporation of fables stripped of their epimythia performs this narrative trick on a small scale multiple times before Book 11.58 58 The children’s movie, “The Emperor’s New Groove” parallels the plot of Apuleius’ novel (and I imagine was modelled on it): an enemy tries to assasinate an emperor in Peru, but gets the wrong potion and turns him into a llama. He spends a period of time as a llama and hence learns how to be human, quite clearly in the Disney mode. The movie can more readily be seen as a fable because its moral is clear, while Apuleius confounds us.