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Notes
The bibliography on the contemporary project of dismantling the colonial implications and assumptions of Romanization is too vast to summarize here. Important recent contributions to this endeavour, in the specific context of North Africa, include Quinn 2003; Fentress 2006 and 2021; and Mattingly 1996, 2004 and 2023, 48-70. These recent studies pick up and update the important earlier work in this area of e.g. Benabou 1976; and Laroui 1970.
I have delivered versions of this paper at the International Classics Conference at the University of Ghana in September 2024, in the Classics Faculty in Cambridge in October 2024 and at the Institute of Classical Studies in London in March 2025. I am deeply grateful to the audiences present at all those occasions for their helpful comments and questions.
Whether or not 'Romanized' in this instance implies that Apuleius was necessarily a Roman citizen is in fact a more complex question than most scholars assume. See my discussion of Apol. 24 for a full exposition of this complexity.
For discussion of the demographic of Sabratha at this time, and the significance of its status as an assize centre where the Roman governor of Africa Proconsularis would periodically come to hear legal cases, see Bradley 1997, 203-4. For discussion of how the assize system worked in the provinces, see Burton 1975; and Marshall 1966. The trial is dated to 158/159 CE on the grounds that this was when Claudius Maximus is known to have been governor of Africa Proconsularis: see Guey 1951; and Syme 1959, 316-7 for the evidence.
The charge of witchcraft was formally made by Sicinius Pudens (the younger son of Pudentilla by her late husband, Sicinius Amicus). But being too young to represent himself in court, he was represented by his paternal uncle, Sicinius Aemilianus, whom Apuleius presents as being the mastermind behind the accusations. Tannonius Pudens (another relative, presumably on Pudentilla's side) is mentioned as bringing forward a number of the preliminary charges. While Herennius Rufinus, the father-in-law of Pudentilla's older (now dead) son, Sicinius Pontianus, is likewise presented as being another figure behind the charges.
Unlike Apuleius, the civic status of the opposition as Roman citizens is made clear by their Roman nomenclature: Sicinius Pudens, Sicinius Pontianus, Sicinius Aemilianus, Tannonius Pudens, and Herennius Rufinus (as well as the late Sicinius Amicus and his widow, Aemilia Pudentilla) all wear the duo nomina, which (as Curchin 1990, 94 phrases it) served as 'the badge of Roman or Latin citizenship'. The city of Oea, from which Pudentilla and these members of her husband's family hailed, had been granted municipal status by the reign of Antoninus Pius (on which, see Gascou 1972, 82-3), enabling those residents who held magistracies in the town council to obtain Roman citizenship per honorem. It seems likely, therefore, that this family were members of the decurial elite who were citizens because one of their forefathers (or they themselves) had been elected duumvir or aedile in Oea. Apuleius describes Sicinius Pontianus as a splendidissimus eques at Apol. 62.4; while Fantham 1995, 224 identifies a number of inscriptions from Tripolitania honouring Aemilii who may have been Pudentilla's relatives: in particular, L. Aemilius Frontinus, who was proconsul of Asia a generation later. Another inscription also names a senator called L. Sicinius Pontianus, who must have been descended from her husband. But despite their rapid Roman advancement, see Bradley 2012, 45 on why the names of Aemilia Pudentilla and her family suggest local African (rather than Italian) origins.
For a fascinating overview of the flexible workings of the Roman legal system in the provinces (where Roman courts were used to administer not only Roman law but local laws too on occasion, even as non-citizens at times requested Roman law to be served in disputes between peregrine communities), see Richardson 2015. As we would expect from the Sicinii's status as Roman citizens, the charge that the Apology addresses is one of Roman law: the use of magic for malevolent purposes came under the Sullan lex Cornelia de sicariis ac ueneficis. On which see Hunink 1997 (volume 1), 12-14; and Noreña 2014, 43 for the capital penalty this law carried. See also Summers 1970 for Apuleius' familiarity with Roman law (and implicit critique of Roman 'justice' in the Metamorphoses).
As many scholars note, the Apology is our only extant forensic speech to survive from the imperial period. It also appears to be our only extant forensic speech to have been delivered at an assize hearing, although the Acta of the early Christian martyrs provide an alternative witness to trials held at assize courts in the provinces.
This is the view of Noreña 2014, who makes a strong case for the seriousness of the trial, and of the potential danger to Apuleius of being found guilty of the charges against him, arguing against a tradition of reading the Apology as an exercise in sophistic play (represented by e.g. Harrison and other essays contained in Riess 2008). My reading of the Apology attempts to build on Noreña's approach, even if in drawing on Bhabha's theory of colonial mimicry, I allow for a greater degree of mischief on Apuleius' part than Noreña focuses on. On the career of Claudius Maximus, his military and administrative service and his ties to the Antonine court, see Bradley 1997, 215-7. Bradley makes much of this figure's philosophical inclinations and the common cause that Apuleius cultivates with him in the Apology as a result of this.
Mattingly 1995, 52-3 notes the relative independence of the cities of Tripolitania from Roman intervention even after they became incorporated into Africa Proconsularis. See Bradley 2012, 41-60 on the consequences of the relative isolation of this region for the litigants in this trial: the suspicion of the Sicinii towards Apuleius stems from his status as an outsider or extrarius (Apol. 68.4) to this region, although what this means for Apuleius' identity (i.e. whether his outsider status comes from being more Romanized than them, or from coming from a different part of North Africa) remains unclear.
Bhabha 1984.
Bhabha 1984, 126. Sabnis 2014, 289 cites these very words of Bhabha in her discussion of Apuleius' colonial mimicry in Flor. 6 and 12.
See also Bhabha 1985 for a related set of reflections on the 'sly civility'
Pratt 2022, 17.
See Quinn 2003, 7-8; and Mattingly 2023, 48-57 for an overview of the history of the discourse of Romanization in the specific context of the African provinces, where the modern colonial history of the countries that map onto Roman Africa make this region an especially fertile case study for considering the colonial implications of this discourse. As these scholars (and others) highlight, the earlier model of Romanization put forward by e.g. Broughton 1929, which understood the cultural effects of Roman rule in the provinces as a one-way process of assimilation, with provincial subjects gratefully adopting Roman customs and institutions, in a barely disguised projection of western assumptions about the benefits of European colonialism for the 'progress' of colonies in Africa and Asia, generated considerable resistance after the French colonies in North Africa gained independence. Following the liberation of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia from French colonial rule, scholars from these countries (e.g. Benabou 1976; Kaddache 1971; and Laroui 1970) projected their own experience of colonialism onto the experience of provincial Africans under Rome in a series of studies describing African resistance to Roman rule. These initially provoked charges of anachronism from western proponents of Romanization, but have since been recuperated and built on by scholars (such as Quinn and Mattingly) seeking to rediscover the perspectives of ancient, indigenous Africans from this region in the spirit of the anticolonial critique articulated by Pratt 2022.
Bhabha 1994, 1-27. Cf. esp. Bhabha's appraisal of Fanon on p. 13: 'Fanon recognizes the crucial importance, for subordinated peoples, of asserting their indigenous cultural traditions and retrieving their repressed histories. But he is far too aware of the dangers of the fixity and fetishism of identities within the calcification of colonial cultures to recommend that 'roots' be struck in the celebratory romance of the past or by homogenizing the history of the present.' [Emphases are my own]. For an alternative way of parsing the entanglement of indigenous peoples with systems of global imperialism, see de la Cadena 2015, which adopts Marilyn Strathern's conception of 'partial connections' to describe the partial ways in which cultures cross – and the necessary limitations of those crossings.
See Burrus 2005, 49-50 n. 2 for a brilliant appraisal of Bhabha's theory of mimicry - and its utility for parsing imperial Greek literature. And Whitmarsh 2001 and 2013.
Sabnis 2014 draws on Bhabha's theory of colonial mimicry to offer a brilliant pair of readings of the significance of the Indian parrot in Flor. 12 and of the gymnosophists in Flor. 6. More broadly, a postcolonial analysis of the authors of Roman Africa is now well underway: see e.g. Wilhite 2007 on Tertullian; and Conybeare 2025 on Augustine.
On which, see Sallmann 1995; Sandy 1997, 131-48; Harrison 2000 and 2008; Deremetz 2004; May 2007, 73-108; Rives 2008; Riess 2008; Hunink 2008; McCreight 2008; and Fletcher 2009.
See Hunink 1997, 20 on the disruption of traditional forensic organization in the Apology, with the narratio setting out the chief charges against Apuleius delayed to chapter 66.
Noreña 2014, 35 responding to a tradition of scholarship (demonstrated by e.g. Tilg 2008, along with many of the works cited in n. 18 above) that trivializes the charges Apuleius was facing.
Cf. McCreight 1991, 29-41 for discussion of the possibility that the trial at which the Apology was ostensibly delivered may be a fiction; and Hunink 1997, 25-7 for a discussion of the full range of ways in which the Apology may relate to, and diverge from, a historical trial.
Noreña 2014.
See Hunink 1997, 26-7 on how, regardless of the relation between the published version of the Apology and its original delivery in court, the very process of publication transforms it into literature.
As Whitmarsh 2001 has shown, Bhabha's theory of mimicry holds the potential to politicise the normally aestheticising methods of the philologist's arsenal, by showing how devices like allusion and intertextuality can be marshalled in the colonial context to reinforce or deconstruct the hierarchies between cultures.
Cf. esp. Catullus 39. 17-21: nunc Celtiber es: Celtiberia in terra, / quod quisque minxit, hoc sibi solet mane / dentem atque russam defricare gingivam, / ut quo iste uester expolitior dens est, / hoc te amplius bibisse praedicet loti. ('Now you're a Celtiberian: and in the Celtiberian land early in the morning they piss and scrub their teeth and pink gums with it, so that the more polished your teeth, the more it proclaims that you've drunk your own piss.').
All Latin quotations in this article follow Hunink 1997; all translations are my own.
As well as Herodotus Hist. 2.68, Hunink 1997, 35 cites the possible influence of Aristotle HA 7. 612a20-24, Aelian NA 3.11 and Cicero ND 2.123 on Apuleius' account of the crocodile's tooth-cleaning.
Despite the distances between Madauros and Carthage from the Nile Delta, Apuleius may be playing up his audience's hazy sense of cultural and geographical distances here – distances that are themselves somewhat minimized by the narrative of Apol. 72, which tells us that Apuleius had originally stopped in Oea to break up his journey from Alexandria.
One possible further example of Apuleius' colonial mimicry of Catullus arises at Apol. 16.9, where Apuleius slights Sicinius Aemilianus by claiming that he knew nothing about him until the trial with the phrase: etiam libenter te nuper usque albus an ater esses ignoraui ('I'm glad to say that until recently, I didn't know whether you were white or black'). Bradley 2014, 27 identifies this as a possible allusion to Catullus 93, the epigram in which Catullus claims not to care knowing if Caesar is black or white: Nil nimium studeo, Caesar, tibi uelle placere, / nec scire utrum sis albus an ater homo. ('I'm not keen to wish to please you, Caesar, / nor do I want to know if you're white or black.'). As Bradley points out, a proverb used to express ignorance (through the idea of not knowing the 'shade' of someone's character) is converted in the North African context into a possible comment about race. While this is a fascinating argument (especially given Caesar's identity as Rome's most famous imperialist), I hesitate to identify Apuleius' comment as a specific allusion to Catullus, since the phrase is proverbial and arises in other contexts too (e.g. Cicero Phil. 2.41).
See Bradley 2012, 145 for the calculation that 71% of Madauros' attested civic magistrates came from families of African origin.
Syme 1958, 11; and Curchin 1990, 86.
Augustine Ep. 138.19 asserts that Apuleius never held any municipal office. If this is true, then, as Hunink 1997, 84-5 points out, by using the same term 'locus' to refer to his father's duumviral office and his own general position of prestige in the community, 'Apuleius obscures this difference between himself and his father. He must be relying on his fame as a sophist.'
Bhabha 1994, 1-12.
Bhabha 1994, 2: 'How do strategies of representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the competing claims of communities where, despite shared histories of deprivation and discrimination, the exchange of values, meanings and priorities may not always be collaborative and dialogical, but may be profoundly antagonistic, conflictual and even incommensurable?'
Mattingly 2023, 68-70. See also Mattingly 2004, 2006, 2011 and 2014.
Gellner 1969. See Mattingly 1995, 19-21; and Brett and Fentress 1996, 33 for insights as to how Gellner's model of social segmentation holds for the ancient peoples of this region.
See esp. Mattingly 1995, 20 for a helpful diagram demonstrating how this nested hierarchy is structured.
Brett and Fentress 1996, 48. See also Mattingly 2023, 115-20 for reflections on the important differences between the various Libyan peoples of this region, on the basis of their social and political organization – differences which are invariably flattened by their being designated 'tribes' by modern scholars.
Mattingly 2023, 325-35 for a critique of this model and reflections on how it underpins much of the archaeology undertaken in this region. See also Quinn 2003; and Fentress 2006 and 2021 for further discussion of pre-Roman urbanism.
Mattingly 2023, 114-54 (on archaeological evidence for the agricultural sedentarism and urbanism of the peoples of the northern Maghreb, including the Numidae) and 168-216 (on archaeological evidence for the Gaetulians' cultivation of Saharan oasis settlements in the steppe and pre-desert south).
Apuleius' explicit mention of Syphax and Massinissa dates it to precisely this historical moment.
In his description of the first peoples to inhabit this region in the Bellum Jugurthinum, for example, Sallust minimizes the differences between them, presenting the Numidians as an offshoot of the Gaetulians, born from their intermarriage with Persian immigrants, and reducing both Numidians and Gaetulians to the stereotype of the pastoralist Nomad (Sallust BJ 18): Africam initio habuere Gaetuli et Libyes, asperi incultique, quis cibus erat caro ferina atque humi pabulum uti pecoribus. Ei neque moribus neque lege aut imperio cuiusquam regebantur: uagi palantes quas nox coegerat sedes habebant... Ei paulatim per conubia Gaetulos secum miscuere, et, quia saepe temptantes agros alia,deinde alia loca petiuerant, semet ipsi Nomadas appellauere. ('Africa was at first inhabited by Gaetulians and Libyans, rough and uncivilized folk, whose food was the flesh of wild animals and fodder of the ground, like cattle’s. They were governed neither by institutions nor laws nor by anyone’s authority; aimless drifters, they had as their stopping points whatever spot night forced upon them ... Through intermarriage these people [the Persians] were gradually merged with the Gaetulians, and because they often sought out now this place and now that one in making trial of the soil, they called themselves Nomads [i.e. Numidians]'). See also Strabo 17. 3. 15 for a similar view of the Numidians' nomadic lifestyle – and the same Greek etymology for their name. Strabo agrees with Sallust about the crudeness of the Gaetulians' lifestyle, and both authors emphasise the remoteness of this people, which was, at the time of writing for both authors, outside the territory controlled by Rome.
Mattingly 2023, 131-2. See Mattingly 2023, 209-16 for further reflections on the cultural and social differences between the Numidae of the northern Maghreb and the Gaetulians of the pre-desert south.
Mattingly 2023, 385. Bradley 2012, 145 likewise emphasises the presence of Libyan languages, as well as Punic and Latin, in Madauros.
As Mattingly 2023, 34-5 points out, it is hard to isolate a Punic cultural identity from a common Libyphoenician identity in this region (perhaps aside from in the city of Carthage itself). In addition, Phoenician identity may have been largely something imposed by others, e.g. Greeks, than understood by the Phoenicians themselves, who identified more with particular cities. On this, see Quinn 2018; and Vella 2014.
Apol. 98.6-7: Cum a nobis regeretur, ad magistros itabat; ab iis nunc magna fugela in ganeum fugit... Loquitur nunquam nisi Punice et si quid adhuc a matre graecissat; enim Latine loqui neque uult neque potest.'While he [Sicinius Pudens] was under our guardianship, he used to go to school: now he has bidden a long farewell to study and is taken up with the delights of the tavern.... He never speaks any language except Punic, and though he may occasionally use a Greek word after his mother, he neither will nor can speak Latin.'
Apuleius' assault on Carthaginian culture in the Apology is, however, strongly contextual. See esp. Flor. 18 and 20 for effusive expressions of gratitude toward Carthage for the education (in Latin and Greek, admittedly) that he received there.
Ars 2. 23-5: Daedalus ut clausit conceptum crimine matris / semibouemque uirum semiuirumque bouem / "sit modus exilio,' dixit 'iustissime Minos...' ('Daedalus said, when he imprisoned the offspring of its mother’s sin, the man who was half-bull, the bull who was half-man: "Allow a path for an exile, Minos most just of men...").
See also Finkelpearl 2009 for an important discussion of Apuleius' (multiple) hybrid identities (as Roman/African, and Numidian/Gaetulian) as allegorised through his rendition of the story of Marsyas and Apollo in Flor. 3; and Mattiacci 2014, 95 who likewise looks to this line in the Apology to frame the question of Apuleius' distinctive Latinitas (which a later tradition of scholarship called Africitas, in a barely veiled racial slur) in light of his hybridised identities and multilingualism.
Seneca Con. 2.12.2: Declamabat autem Naso raro controuersias et non nisi ethicas. libentius dicebat suasorias. molesta illi erat omnis argumentatio. uerbis minime licenter usus est, non (ut) in carminibus, in quibus non ignorauit vitia sua sed amauit. manifestum potest esse (ex eo), quod rogatus aliquando ab amicis suis, ut tolleret tres uersus, inuicem petit, ut ipse tres exciperet, in quos nihil illis liceret. aequa lex uisa est: scripserunt illi quos tolli uellent secreto, hic quos tutos esse uellet. in utrisque codicillis idem uersus erant, ex quibus primum fuisse narrabat Albinovanus Pedo, qui inter arbitros fuit: semibouemque uirum semiuirumque bouem... ex quo apparet summi ingenii uiro non iudicium defuisse ad compescendam licentiam carminum suorum sed animum. aiebat interim decentiorem faciem esse, in qua aliquis naeuos fuisset. ('But Ovid rarely declaimed controversiae, and only practised those that centred on character. He more willingly composed suasoriae: for he found all argumentation tiresome. He did not take liberties in his use of language except in his poetry, where he was well aware of his faults—and enjoyed them. What can make this clear is the fact that once, when he was asked by his friends to suppress three of his lines, he asked in return to be allowed to make an exception of three over which they should have no rights. This seemed a fair condition. They wrote in private the lines they wanted removed, while he wrote the ones he wanted saved. The sheets of both contained the same verses. Albinovanus Pedo, who was among those present, tells that the first of them was: “Half-bull man and half-man bull”... It is clear from this that the great man lacked not the judgement but the will to restrain the licence of his poetry. He used sometimes to say that a face is the more beautiful for having some blemish.').
See Shaw 2024, 601-3 on the significance of Madauros as an educational centre, which is marked by the fact that Augustine was sent here to attend school in his teens, as we hear in Confessions 2.3.5 and in Epp. 15 and 16 (letters exchanged with an aged grammarian, Maximus of Madauros, who had once been Augustine's teacher in the town).
See Hollis 1977, 129-30 on Ars 1.607-8, where Ovid offers his first condemnation of rusticitas, applying it to the idea of Pudor as a pejorative slur: fuge rustice longe / hinc Pudor ('Flee far from here, rustic Chastity!'). See also Watson 1982, 243 for Ovid's inversion throughout the Ars Amatoria of the normal Roman estimation of the rustic simplicity of the past, with his pervasive disdain for rusticitas.
Bradley 2012, 45. Birley 1988; and Mattingly 1995, 58-9; and 2023, 385-9 cover the variety of ways in which Punic and Libyan names might be Romanized. These include translation (e.g. Punic Muttunbaal, 'Gift of God', might be converted into Donatus or Diodorus), as well as assonance (e.g. Himilis might be converted into Aemilius). As Bradley 2012, 45 also notes, Aemilia Pudentilla might therefore have come from a Punic family whose members originally bore the name Himilis. Or, alternatively, because they owed their gift of citizenship to the triumvir M. Aemilius Lepidus, or to another influential Roman Aemilius.
Cf. esp. Apol. 69: Eo scrupulo liberata cum a principibus uiris in matrimonium peteretur, decreuit sibi diutius in uiduitate non permanendum. Quippe ut solitudinis taedium perpeti posset, tamen aegritudine<m> corporis ferre non poterat. Mulier sancte pudica, tot annis uiduitatis sine culpa, sine fabula, assuetudine coniugis torpens et diutino situ uiscerum saucia, uitiatis intimis uteri saepe ad extremum uitae discrimen doloribus obortis exanimabatur. Medici cum obstetricibus consentiebant penuria matrimonii morbum quaesitum, malum in dies augeri, aegritudinem ingravescere; dum aetatis aliquid supersit, nubtiis valetudinem medicandum. ('Now freed from all embarrassment, she was sought in marriage by many influential suitors, and determined not to remain a widow any longer. For while she might have tolerated the boredom of her solitary life, she could not bear her physical infirmity. This chaste and saintly lady, after so many years of blameless widowhood, without attracting a word of scandal, owing to her long absence from a husband, began to suffer internal pains so severe that they brought her to the brink of the grave. Doctors and wise women agreed that the disease had its origin in her long widowhood, that it was growing daily, and that her sickness was becoming ever more grave. And that the remedy for this illness was that she should marry while the last vestige of youth remained.').
See Finkelpearl 1998, 115-48 for a comparable discussion of the influence of Virgil's Dido story on Apuleius' account of Charite in book 8 of The Golden Ass, and the significance of an African author like Apuleius reclaiming this story, if only by way of allusion. Finkelpearl contextualises her discussion with reference to the 're-Punicization' of Carthage at the time of Apuleius' writing, on which see also Rives 1995, 162-9.
See Hunink 1997, 57-8 for discussion of the possibilities, esp. the connection between mirrors and magic.
Bhabha 1984, 131, citing Lacan 1977, 99.
Lacan 2006.
While a number of scholars have posited connections between Apuleius' thought and that of the Christian apologists, they have tended to focus on the Metamorphoses as the prime expression of Apuleius' religious insights (see e.g. Ramelli 2013; and Smith 2023, 75-87). For some Christian apologists, Apuleius was a pagan magician to be contrasted with a worker of Christian miracles (e.g. Christ). See e.g. Gaisser 2008, 37-9 on the reception of Apuleius by the Christian apologist, Lactantius. But see Bradley 2014, 24 for discussion of how the forensic situation of the Apology resembles that experienced by the early Christian martyrs, as recorded in their various Acta. And Hunink 2012 for further ideas about connections between the Apology and the tradition of Christian Apologetics, with the fascinating suggestion that Apuleius' text may be a parody of the Christian Martyr Acts.
As Hunink 1997 (vol. 1), 11 n. 1 points out, Apuleius himself was not responsible for naming his speech the Apology, a title that does not seem to predate the first printed editions of the text. But whoever did so clearly regarded it as modelled in some way on Plato's Apology, which likewise takes the form of a forensic speech but is transformed by the process of publication into a vehicle for philosophical discourse (on the model of his other more explicitly dialogic dialogues). Apuleius' Apology is similarly transformed by publication into a different kind of trial for the reader.
Bhabha 1994, 1-27 (and esp. p. 13), discussed in n. 15 above.
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