He was accused of having won the heart of Pudentilla by sorcery, of being a man of immoral life, and of having married his elderly bride solely for the sake of her money. The trial took place at Sabrata (Apol. 59), the modern Zowara, lying on the coast some sixty miles west of Oea. The case was tried by the proconsul himself, Claudius Maximus. The date cannot be precisely fixed. But Claudius Maximus was probably proconsul at some time between the years 155-158 A.D. (see note on Apol. 1), at any rate not later than 161 A.D., since Antoninus Pius is mentioned as the reigning princeps (died March 161 A.D.). Apuleius had no difficulty in disposing of the charges brought against him, and incidentally found an opportunity for a flamboyant display of the learning of which he was so proud. He may well on occasion have practised magic: his insatiable curiosity must assuredly have led him to experiment in this direction, and his subsequent reputation confirms these suspicions. But the specific charges of magic on this occasion were frivolous and absurd. In the first portion of the speech Apuleius plays with his accusers, mocking them from the heights of his superior learning. In the second portion, where he defends his marriage with Pudentilla and justifies his dealings with his step-sons, he clears himself in good earnest, nay does more than clear himself. For he unveils in the most merciless fashion the villany of his accusers--the base ingratitude of Pudens, and the unspeakable turpitude of Rufinus.

That Apuleius was acquitted cannot be doubted. His case speaks for itself. But it is noteworthy that we hear of him no more at Oea, where he had resided for three years at the time of the trial. This distressing family quarrel must have caused some bitterness of feeling, and Augustine (Ep. 138. 19) mentions a quarrel with the inhabitants of Oea on the question of the erection of a statue in his honour. These facts may not improbably have led him to seek residence elsewhere. Be this as it may, when we next hear of him he is in Carthage, enjoying the highest renown as philosopher, poet, and rhetorician. It was during this residence at Carthage that he delivered the flamboyant orations of which fragments have been preserved to us in the Florida. A few of these excerpts can be dated. The seventeenth is written during the proconsulate of Scipio Orfitus in 163-164 A.D. The ninth contains a panegyric of the proconsul Severianus, who must have held office some time during the joint reign of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, 161-169 A.D. (see note, p. 236). The sixteenth refers to Aemilianus Strabo, who was consul in 156 A.D. and had not yet become proconsul of Africa. As the interval between holding the consulate and the proconsulate was from ten to thirteen years, this fragment may be dated, if not before 166, at any rate before 169 A.D.

Apuleius won more than mere applause. Carthage decreed a statue in his honour (Florida 16), and conferred on him the chief-priesthood of the province. This office entitled its holder to the first place in the provincial council, and was the highest honour that the province could bestow (Florida 16). Civil office he never held (Augustine, Ep. 138. 19), perhaps never sought. His genius, it may be said with confidence, was far from fitting him for judicial or administrative functions. If we may trust Apollinaris Sidonius (Ep. II. 10. 5), Pudentilla showed herself a model wife by the passionate interest she took in her husband's work. 'Pudentilla was for Apuleius what Marcia was for Hortensius, Terentia for Cicero, Calpurnia for Piso, Rusticiana for Symmachus: these noble women held the lamp while their husbands read and meditated!' It is even possible that she bore him a son, as the second book of the de Platone is dedicated to 'my son Faustinus'. Of his death we know nothing. Testimony as to his appearance is conflicting. His accusers (Apol. 4) charge him with being a 'handsome philosopher'. He replies that his body is worn by the fatigues of study and his hair as tangled as a lump of tow!

His works were astonishingly numerous. Beside those already mentioned there have come down to us two books on the life and philosophy of Plato,[3] a highly rhetorical treatise on the 'Demon of Socrates', and a free translation of the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise 'on the Universe', though Apuleius is regrettably far from making due acknowledgement of his debt to the original. None of these works can be described as interesting, though the treatise on the 'Demon of Socrates' contains some characteristic purple passages.

[Footnote 3: He regarded Plato as his master above all others. We find Platonicus attached to him as an honorific title in the MSS.]

It would, however, scarcely be an exaggeration to say that more of Apuleius' works have perished than survived. He has told us in the Florida (20) that he has written dialogues, hymns, music, history, and satire. And we have copious references to works from his pen, that, perhaps fortunately, no longer exist. Beside the three poems which survive in the Apologia and a translation of a passage of Menander, preserved in a manuscript once at Beauvais, but now lost (Baehrens, Poet. Lat. Min. 4, p. 104), he mentions a hymn to Aesculapius, written both in Latin and Greek (Florida 18), and a panegyric in verse on the virtues of Scipio Orfitus (Florida 17). He wrote also another novel entitled Hermagoras, a collection of famous love-stories of the past, sundry 'histories', a translation of the Phaedo, and numerous scientific works, dealing with problems of mathematics, music, astronomy, medicine, botany, and zoology.

The glory won by Apuleius during his lifetime survived after his death. Augustine knows his works well. He recognizes his importance as a writer, but abhors him as a magician. Apuleius is a thaumaturge against whom the faithful need to be warned. 'The enemies of Christianity,' says Augustine (Ep. 138), 'venture to place Apuleius and Apollonius of Tyana on the same or even a higher level than Christ.' But in the same letter he speaks of him as a 'great orator' whose fame still lives among his fellow countrymen of Africa. Above all the Golden Ass has kept his name alive to our own day. Even those who know nothing of the work as a whole, or who would relegate it to obscurity for its occasional gross indecency, know and love the story of Cupid and Psyche, if not in the original at least in many a work of art, and in the pages of La Fontaine, Walter Pater, or William Morris.

As might be expected from one who left so few themes untouched, Apuleius is one of the most superficial of ancient writers. It has been well said of him by M. Paul Monceaux, 'Apulee est un de ces esprits encyclopediques, apres a la curee de toutes les connaissances, qui se rencontrent au commencement et a la fin des civilisations.' For the acquisition of his extraordinary reputation he needed an age and an audience in which learning and literature alike were decadent, though far from forgotten. He has none of the scientific spirit. He does not really understand the authors he quotes; he has no critical spirit, and his own investigations are prompted by indiscriminate curiosity. But he has vast stores of miscellaneous knowledge such as might delight the half-educated, and as a rhetorician he possesses a strange and debased brilliance, fired by an astonishing if disorderly imagination. The verve, the humour, and above all the welter of warmth and colour that characterize the Golden Ass make us forgive the palpable degradation of the Latin language. Not less remarkable is the Apologia. There are few speeches of antiquity that give such a vivid impression of the character of the author and of the life of the society in which he moved. The style, it is true, is often bombastic and affected, many of the arguments are almost more puerile and absurd than the accusations, while the intense conceit and complacency of the author often make him ridiculous. A man of wide and varied knowledge, he has no depth of intellect. He is always half charlatan, and the reader is rarely free from the impression that he is taking liberties with the uncertain taste and ignorance of his provincial audience. But even the weaknesses of style and argument have their charm for the modern reader. For, if he never entirely fails to laugh with Apuleius, he certainly indulges in many a hearty laugh at him.

The Florida are no less superficial and bombastic, and the vanity of Apuleius is revealed even more remarkably than in the Apologia. But they are never long enough to be tedious, and contain much that is amusing, be the humour unconscious or intentional; and even if we can rarely give whole-hearted admiration to the style, we cannot but marvel at its dexterity, while its very bizarrerie is not without its charm.

This is hardly the place for a disquisition upon African Latin. It is sufficient here to say that the two main features of the style of Apuleius are its archaism and its extreme floridity. It has been asserted that this strange style is of purely African growth,[4] and that it owes much of its oriental wealth of colour to the Semitic element that must still have formed so large a proportion of the population of Africa. But there seems little really to support this view; it is probable that, allowing for the personal factor, in this case exceptionally important, and the eccentricities to which Apuleius' erudition may have led him, we are confronted with no more than an exaggerated revival of the Asiatic style of oratory. No doubt the seed fell on good ground, but it is impossible to set one's finger on any definitely African element.[5]