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Apuleius’ Apology. Colonial Subversion in the Provincial Courthouse and the Reader on Trial

Francesca Martelli

Résumé

In the Apology, Apuleius draws openly on canonical Greek and Latin authors, from Plato to Cicero and beyond, to defend himself against charges of witchcraft laid against him by fellow Libyans in a Roman court of law. Yet built into this tour de force of Classical erudition is an ambivalence that holds the potential to subvert the very language of power that he is at pains to display, by virtue of his outsider status. In this paper, I draw on Homi Bhabha’s theory of colonial mimicry to unpack some of the strategies that Apuleius uses in the Apology to subvert the language of Roman mastery. I consider how he mobilizes his learning to describe his own status as a ’Semi-Numidian, Semi-Gaetulian’ in terms that mimic (and mock) Roman constructions of hybridity. And I argue that the published format of this text as an unanswered defence speech poses a deliberate challenge to its readership, drawing them into a drama of complicity with the proconsular Roman judge before whom Apuleius makes his case, and holding up a mirror to their cultural biases and judgments. Apuleius’ Apology, I argue, presents a compelling example of colonial subversion – of an ancient Libyan speaking back to Rome by replicating, yet deliberately distorting, the very terms of its imperialist discursive formations.

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  • 1 The bibliography on the contemporary project of dismantling the colonial implications and assumptio (...)
  • 2 Whether or not 'Romanized' in this instance implies that Apuleius was necessarily a Roman citizen i (...)
  • 3 For discussion of the demographic of Sabratha at this time, and the significance of its status as a (...)
  • 4 The charge of witchcraft was formally made by Sicinius Pudens (the younger son of Pudentilla by her (...)
  • 5 Unlike Apuleius, the civic status of the opposition as Roman citizens is made clear by their Roman (...)
  • 6 For a fascinating overview of the flexible workings of the Roman legal system in the provinces (whe (...)
  • 7 As many scholars note, the Apology is our only extant forensic speech to survive from the imperial (...)
  • 8 This is the view of Noreña 2014, who makes a strong case for the seriousness of the trial, and of t (...)
  • 9 Mattingly 1995, 52-3 notes the relative independence of the cities of Tripolitania from Roman inter (...)

1Apuleius’ Apology poses a challenge for contemporary critics of Romanization.1 On the face of it, this text presents us with a virtuoso display of colonial replication, in which a provincial subject takes the opportunity to flaunt his indoctrination in Roman letters and Roman law and to display his appreciation for the cultural benefits of Roman imperialism. The Apology is presented to us as the transcript of a speech delivered in Latin by Apuleius, a Romanized Libyan intellectual from the province of Africa Proconsularis,2 at a trial held in the town of Sabratha before the Roman governor, Claudius Maximus, around 158 CE.3 In it, Apuleius defends himself against charges laid by the local Tripolitanian family of his wife, Aemilia Pudentilla, who contended that he had seduced her by witchcraft in order to get his hands on the money that they believed was rightfully theirs.4 The trial pits one Romanized (or Roman) provincial African (Apuleius) against another,5 their identities as provincials determined by the legal context that provides the occasion for this speech: an assize court dispensing Roman justice in the provincial territory of north Africa.6 The forensic form of the Apology, which immediately stands out because of its singular status,7 is also therefore integral to its negotiation of Libyan and Roman identities. On the surface, Apuleius uses the cultural authority of his extensive learning in Latin and Greek to appeal to the imperial and legal authority of Claudius Maximus,8 playing off his status as a confident Romanized Libyan to make the members of the prosecution a convenient target for Roman prejudice against a local population that remained relatively untouched by the ’civilizing’ cultural effects of Roman rule (whatever their nominally Roman civic status).9 Or does he?

  • 10 Bhabha 1984.
  • 11 Bhabha 1984, 126. Sabnis 2014, 289 cites these very words of Bhabha in her discussion of Apuleius' (...)
  • 12 See also Bhabha 1985 for a related set of reflections on the 'sly civility'

2In this paper, I draw on Homi Bhabha’s theory of colonial mimicry in order to suggest an alternative way of reading Apuleius’ sophistry and an alternative way of reading the play of Roman and Libyan identities in this text, one that may get us a little closer to its mischievous games with Roman cultural and imperial authority.10 Bhabha’s theory of mimicry describes a discourse of colonial subjection built around (in his words):11 ’the desire for a reformed recognizable other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.’ Which is to say that even as this discourse seeks to mould the colonial subject in the mirror image of the colonizing power – through language, education, religion and other cultural institutions – it is constructed around the recognition of an Otherness that refuses complete assimilation. This ambivalence has consequences both for the colonizing and the colonised. On the one hand, it reveals the lie at the heart of the colonial mission, in which the brutality of one culture’s licence to dominate another keeps peeping out beneath its mask of civility.12 While for the colonized subject, tasked with imitating the cultural norms handed down to them by the colonizing power, it opens up all kinds of possibilities for irony and subversion.

  • 13 Pratt 2022, 17.
  • 14 See Quinn 2003, 7-8; and Mattingly 2023, 48-57 for an overview of the history of the discourse of R (...)

3Bhabha’s theory of colonial mimicry was formulated forty years ago as part of a postcolonial discourse that sought to describe the effects of British colonial rule on the local subjects of India and Africa – a discourse that has since fallen out of favour (or, at least, out of vogue). Critics have grown dissatisfied with many of the terms and premises of postcolonial theory, arguing that it refuses to conceive of indigenous identity outside the colonial encounter and fails to reckon with the power imbalance at the heart of that encounter. As Marie-Louise Pratt puts it: ’The postcolonial project is a mutation of colonial power itself, an act of recolonization that keeps indigenous ways of knowing in a place of otherness or invisibility.’13 This dissatisfaction may be traced in the wave of critique currently assailing the concept (or concepts) of Romanization, as contemporary scholarship sloughs off the shadow of modern forms and phases of colonialism and imperialism and critically observes the modes of historical silencing that it has produced.14 Bhabha’s theory of colonial mimicry might well be viewed as one of the most egregious examples of the recolonizing effects of postcolonialism, and, in the specific context of Africa under Rome, very much like the model of cultural replication at the heart of outdated ideas of Romanization.

  • 15 Bhabha 1994, 1-27. Cf. esp. Bhabha's appraisal of Fanon on p. 13: 'Fanon recognizes the crucial imp (...)
  • 16 See Burrus 2005, 49-50 n. 2 for a brilliant appraisal of Bhabha's theory of mimicry - and its utili (...)
  • 17 Sabnis 2014 draws on Bhabha's theory of colonial mimicry to offer a brilliant pair of readings of t (...)

4Yet to write off Bhabha’s theory on these grounds is to simplify it beyond recognition and to underestimate its subversive effects. It also fails to reckon with the critique of essentialist conceptions of indigenous identity that lies at the heart of Bhabha’s understanding of cultural hybridity.15 As scholars of imperial Greek literature have shown, Bhabha’s idea of colonial mimicry deconstructs the binary of colonizer and colonized by showing how readily the colonizing discourse can turn into mockery when imposed on, and imitated by, a subject people.16 It thereby provides a suggestive framework for construing more nuanced conceptualizations of Roman and non-Roman provincial identities in the Greek-speaking East, where ’non-Romans’ are defined not only by their distance or differentiation from Rome; and where the ’Roman’ hardly possesses a singular, originary identity (and is also, furthermore, transformed by their encounter with non-Romans – and partial Romans – in the provinces). The extensive Latin literature penned by the native authors of ’Roman Africa’ between the second and fifth centuries CE presents, if anything, a more obvious field for testing out the potential for Bhabha’s theory because it is written in the language of the dominating power. In this paper, I follow Sonia Sabnis in exploring the potential that the concept of colonial mimicry offers for elucidating the manipulation of identities in Apuleius’ oeuvre, taking the Apology as my particular case study. 17If we have qualms about the recolonizing effects of this theory, then the new anti-colonial question that we may want to put to a postcolonial reading of the Apology is whether we can find the perspective of the indigene in the surplus that the colonial script generates when projected onto African provincials under Roman rule.

  • 18 On which, see Sallmann 1995; Sandy 1997, 131-48; Harrison 2000 and 2008; Deremetz 2004; May 2007, 7 (...)
  • 19 See Hunink 1997, 20 on the disruption of traditional forensic organization in the Apology, with the (...)
  • 20 Noreña 2014, 35 responding to a tradition of scholarship (demonstrated by e.g. Tilg 2008, along wit (...)
  • 21 Cf. McCreight 1991, 29-41 for discussion of the possibility that the trial at which the Apology was (...)
  • 22 Noreña 2014.

5Apuleius’ Apology is an especially suggestive text for thinking through the theory of colonial mimicry, with all its subversive possibilities: not only because of the virtuoso display it presents of the colonial subject’s assimilation of Roman culture and learning in its extensive quotation of Greek and Roman literature,18 but also because of the form that this text takes as a forensic speech delivered by a provincial in a Roman court of law. Yet the legal aspect of the speech has, until quite recently, received much less attention than it might, in part because its forensic structure does not follow formal conventions: the narratio covering the main charges of the trial is delayed until over halfway through,19 while Apuleius addresses a number of subsidiary charges that provide a barely veiled excuse to build up a deliberate portrait of himself and show off his erudition. It is for this reason that scholarship on the speech has tended to focus not on its legal side but on the epideictic first half, reading this as, ’an opportunity for Apuleius to showcase his learning and eloquence in an entertaining and light-hearted romp’,20 to the point of doubting whether the trial ever took place at all.21 More recently, Carlos Noreña, seeking to reverse this trend, has argued that the legal charges Apuleius was facing would in fact have been deadly serious, and that the two aspects of the speech work together.22 There are, in his view, two different forms of authority at work in this text: the cultural authority that Apuleius invokes by putting his erudition on display and the judicial authority of the Roman law court. And the former appears to be designed to make his case to the latter.

  • 23 See Hunink 1997, 26-7 on how, regardless of the relation between the published version of the Apolo (...)

6But Apuleius’ presentation of Greek and Latin learning is a thoroughly slippery, partial and potentially ambivalent display. It demonstrates those slippages, and forms of difference and excess that Bhabha identifies as an inevitable feature of colonial mimicry, and with these, a potential channel for mocking or subverting the imperial project of replicating Rome’s cultural institutions in the provinces. What implications does this ambivalent mode of mimicry hold for Apuleius’ appeal to the legal authority to whom this speech is addressed? And what implications does it hold for the reader who comes to occupy the position of Claudius Maximus as addressee once the speech is published and circulated as a written text?23 The main argument of this paper is that the forensic form of the Apology draws the reader into a drama of complicity, as we too are called upon to make a judgement: not about Apuleius’ innocence or guilt as a magician; but about the innocence or irony of the terms of Roman cultural authority in which he frames his appeal.

Mimicking Latin literature in Libya

  • 24 As Whitmarsh 2001 has shown, Bhabha's theory of mimicry holds the potential to politicise the norma (...)
  • 25 Cf. esp. Catullus 39. 17-21: nunc Celtiber es: Celtiberia in terra, / quod quisque minxit, hoc sibi (...)
  • 26 All Latin quotations in this article follow Hunink 1997; all translations are my own.

7Let us begin by looking at some examples of the ambivalence at work in his mimicry of Latin literature.24 The speech opens with an elaborate digression in which Apuleius prefaces his response to the main charges of his trial by addressing a range of subsidiary charges that provide him with a barely veiled excuse to reveal the extent of his education in Latin letters. And also to pose certain questions about the propriety of its acquisition by a provincial subject of Rome in North Africa. Among the first of these is the accusation that he has written a poem on the unlikely topic of dental hygiene, which gives him the perfect excuse to read out a composition that sounds strangely familiar to the reader – yet also significantly different. Modelled on Catullus 39, an iambic lampoon of the Spaniard Egnatius, whose gleaming white grin Catullus attacks as evidence of his provincial origins and, in particular, of the disgusting Spanish practice of using urine for tooth-whitening purposes,25 Apuleius’ version seems decidedly more decorous. He omits much of the overt ethnographic mud-slinging that his canonical predecessor indulges in, despite the fact that his addressee, Calpurnianus, is (as we find out later on) a member of the African prosecution and therefore a legitimate target for ethnographic mudslinging himself (Apol. 6.3):26

Calpurniane, salue properis uersibus.
Misi, ut petisti, <tibi> munditias dentium,
nitelas oris ex Arabicis frugibus,
tenuem, candificum, nobilem puluisculum,
complanatorem tumidulae gingiuulae,
conuerritorem pridianae reliquiae,
ne qua uisatur tetra labes sordium,
restrictis forte si labellis riseris.

Greetings, Calpurnianus, with these hasty lines.
I’ve sent you something to clean your teeth,
to brighten your smile with Arabian spices.
a fine, whitening, excellent powder,
something to shrink swollen gums,
to brush away yesterday’s leftovers,
so that no foul stain of dirt appears
If perchance you laugh with open lips.

8In case we missed the allusion to Catullus, and Apuleius’ refusal to dirty his own mouth by matching its low ethnographic slur, he takes pains to remind us of all of this immediately afterwards (Apol. 6.4):

Quaeso, quid habent isti uersus re aut uerbo pudendum, quid omnino quod philosophus suum nolit videri? Nisi forte in eo reprehendendus sum, quod Calpurniano puluisculum ex Arabicis frugibus miserim, quem multo aequius erat spurcissimo ritu Hiberorum, ut ait Catullus, sua sibi urina "dentem atque russam pumicare gingiuam."

I ask you, what’s shameful about these verses, either in matter or phrasing? Is there anything at all in them that a philosopher would not wish to be thought his? Unless perhaps I’m to be censured for sending Calpurnianus a powder made from “Arabian spices,” when it would have been better if he’d followed that revolting custom of the Spaniards, who, as Catullus puts it, use their own urine, "to scrape their teeth and pink gums."

9Yet far from overtly attacking his addressee’s provincial origins, Apuleius follows up on this with an ethnographic tableau that overtly betrays his own provincial status. After offering a series of reasons why it is important for philosophers to care about their dental hygiene, he writes (Apol. 8.6):

Et quid ego de homine nato diutius? Belua immanis, crocodillus ille qui in Nilo gignitur, ea quoque, ut comperior, purgandos sibi dentis innoxio hiatu praebet. Nam quod est ore amplo, set elingui et plerumque in aqua recluso, multae hiru[n]dines dentibus implectuntur. Eas illi, cum egressus in praeripia fluminis hiauit, una ex auibus fluuialibus amica auis iniecto rostro sine noxae periculo exculpit.

But why should I speak any more about humans? Even the crocodile, the vast monster born in the Nile—as I discover—opens his jaws in a harmless gape, so that his teeth may be cleaned. For his mouth being large, tongueless, and continually open in the water, a quantity of leeches gets stuck in his teeth: these, when the crocodile emerges from the river and opens his mouth, are removed by a friendly waterbird, which inserts its beak without incurring any harm.

  • 27 As well as Herodotus Hist. 2.68, Hunink 1997, 35 cites the possible influence of Aristotle HA 7. 61 (...)
  • 28 Despite the distances between Madauros and Carthage from the Nile Delta, Apuleius may be playing up (...)
  • 29 One possible further example of Apuleius' colonial mimicry of Catullus arises at Apol. 16.9, where (...)

10How do we read this reference to the tooth-cleaning habits of the crocodile? The same description of multispecies cooperation is found in Herodotus’ ethnography of Egypt, and a number of other Greek and Latin sources.27 Apuleius’ familiarity with the account serves to characterise him, on the one hand, as someone whose extensive learning has made him familiar with Herodotus’ account. But it also characterises him as someone who may be personally familiar with the practice because of easy associations that a Roman might draw between his status as an exotic foreigner and the exotic fauna of the Nile, and their common home on the same landmass.28 The crocodile exemplum serves to recontextualize the Catullan poem in light of foreign practices and ways that jar with the Roman provenance of that Latin intertext. Here is the surplus that marks the almost-but-not quite in Apuleius’ mimicking of a canonical Latin author.29 As readers, we have to judge whether this is an accidental slip on Apuleius’ part – an unwitting disclosure of his imperfect Romanitas. Or a deliberate performance designed to highlight the absurdity of repeating the colonial script in the context of North Africa.

Hybrid identities in Africa Proconsularis

11How does Apuleius identify himself in this speech? There are passages in the Apology that show us how he works his Roman cultural affiliations off against a broadly African place of origin (as the example of Catullan mimicry illustrates), and passages where he is more specific. In chapter 24, for example, Apuleius has this to say about his place of origin (Apol. 24.1-3):

De patria mea uero, quod eam sitam Numidiae et Gaetuliae in ipso confinio mei<s> scriptis ostendi scis, quibus memet professus sum, cum Lolliano Auito c.u. praesente publice dissererem, ’Seminumidam’ et ’Semigaetulum’: non uideo quid mihi sit in ea re pudendum, haud minus quam Cyro maiori, quod genere mixto fuit Semimedus ac Semipersa. Non enim ubi prognatus, sed ut moratus quisque sit spectandum, nec qua regione, sed qua ratione uitam uiuere inierit, considerandum est. 

Now, as for my native land: it lies on the very border of Numidia and Gaetulia, as you know to be shown from my writings, in which I proclaimed myself to be ’half Numidian’ and ’half Gaetulian’, when I delivered a speech in public before our distinguished senator, Lollianus Avitus. Well, I don’t see what I have to regret about that, any more than the elder Cyrus had to regret that he was of mixed birth, half Median and half Persian. What we must consider in a person isn’t his birthplace but his character, not in which land but on what principle he began the course of life.

12After proceeding to emphasise that it is not a man’s native territory that determines the nature of his soul or his morals, since his soul enters his body from without (as per Middle Platonist doctrine), Apuleius goes on to affirm his pride in the long history of Madauros, including the long period of its pre-Roman settlement (Apol. 24.7-25.4):

Nec hoc eo dixi, quo me patriae meae paeniteret, etsi adhuc Syfacis oppidum essemus. Quo tamen uicto ad Masinissam regem munere populi R. concessimus ac deinceps ueteranorum militum nouo conditu[s] splendidissima colonia sumus, in qua colonia patrem habui loco principis IIuiralem cunctis honoribus perfunctum. Cuius ego locum in illa re p., exinde ut participare curiam coepi, nequaquam degener pari, spero, honore et existimatione tueor. 

I say this not because I’m ashamed of my country, since even in the time of Syphax we were a town. When he was conquered, we were consigned by the gift of the Roman people to King Masinissa, and finally we were founded again as a brilliant colony of veteran soldiers. In this same colony, my father held the post of duumvir and became the foremost citizen of the place, after performing all the municipal offices of honour. I myself, straight after I started participating in the municipal senate, upheld my father’s position in the community, and, as I hope, do so in no inferior manner, but with the same amount of recognition and esteem.

  • 30 See Bradley 2012, 145 for the calculation that 71% of Madauros' attested civic magistrates came fro (...)
  • 31 Syme 1958, 11; and Curchin 1990, 86.
  • 32 Augustine Ep. 138.19 asserts that Apuleius never held any municipal office. If this is true, then, (...)

13This passage is central to reconstructing many aspects of Apuleius’ autobiography, not least about his family’s integration into the system of Roman provincial administration – and for what it nearly tells us (but doesn’t quite) about their and his civic status. Apuleius identifies himself here as the son of a local man of wealth and standing, who held the position of duumvir in Madauros, the highest administrative position on the town council. Was Apuleius’ father a Roman citizen prior to holding this position? Unlike in municipia and other provincial towns, where citizenship was the reward for holding this kind of administrative office, it is commonly assumed that in colonies like Madauros, the decurial elite who were eligible to be elected for the duumvirate were already citizens. This assumption does not necessarily hold, however, for colonies with a mixed population, which this very passage reveals that Madauros must have had.30 Apuleius tells us here that the town’s origins long preceded its foundation as a Roman colony – and even had an independent existence of some kind prior to being incorporated into the Numidian kingdom under King Massinissa. As Syme and others have hypothesized, in ’mixed’ towns like these it is perfectly possible that local elites who were not Roman citizens may have been appointed to administrative positions even after they became colonies, as part of a drive to Romanize the provincial population.31 Of course, having held the office of duumvir, Apuleius’ father would (presumably) have been eligible to receive Roman citizenship and to pass this privilege down to his offspring (although, if he did, this is not definitively stated). In addition, Apuleius clearly states that he himself was a decurion, and strongly implies that he succeeded to the same position as his father. Yet what exactly he means by ’position’ here is left opaque (and later sources explicitly state that Apuleius held no official position in the city’s governance).32 This passage, which reveals so much about the extent to which Apuleius’ family flourished in the Roman system, nevertheless does nothing to reveal a Roman origin, nor to definitively spell out if and when Apuleius’ family acquired the Roman civic status that they are generally assumed to have held.

14Indeed, what is perhaps most striking about this passage is that Apuleius’ Roman identity (whatever exactly we mean by this) seems to be the least significant of all the identities available to him, even as it necessarily frames and reshapes the meanings of his others. The details about his father’s rank in the Roman colonial hierarchy come after he tells us about the Libyan peoples with whom he identifies as a native son of this town, which is characterised, above all, as a place where two local Libyan communities, Numidians and Gaetulians, converge.

  • 33 Bhabha 1994, 1-12.
  • 34 Bhabha 1994, 2: 'How do strategies of representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the co (...)
  • 35 Mattingly 2023, 68-70. See also Mattingly 2004, 2006, 2011 and 2014.

15The portrait of Madauros that Apuleius delivers here as a border town between these two Libyan populations, with a Roman colony superimposed on top of them, makes it an ideal place in which to track the negotiation of cultural identity within the constraints of a Roman empire that encompassed many cultures. As Bhabha would have it, liminal spaces such as border towns provide opportunities to observe the overlapping, migratory movements of cultural and racial difference in the global division of labor, insofar as they are places that reside in-between the designations of identity, places that construct difference specifically by offering a passageway for cultural differences to cross.33 The cultural exchanges that take place within these liminal sites may be collaborative and dialogical, but they can also be profoundly antagonistic.34 And this idea of antagonism chimes with, and at some level informs, what David Mattingly refers to as the Roman Empire’s production of ’discrepant identities’, a phrase used to describe the discrepancies that emerge not just between Roman and provincial, but between the multiple local identities that Rome’s subject peoples possess, which can come into sharper focus under the pressure of imperial rule.35

16Apuleius’ description of Madauros as a border location makes it an obvious interstitial environment of the kind that Bhabha has in mind. The town is presented as a site for articulating an array of cultural differences – differences that circulate both in a collaborative, dialogic manner, as per Apuleius’ explicit description of the Numidian and Gaetulian cultures that converged there, and also in a more antagonistic mode. The antagonistic negotiation of difference is, however, barely spelled out in as many words, but left implicit in the Punic and Roman perspectives that underpin, and hover around, what Apuleius actually says.

  • 36 Gellner 1969. See Mattingly 1995, 19-21; and Brett and Fentress 1996, 33 for insights as to how Gel (...)
  • 37 See esp. Mattingly 1995, 20 for a helpful diagram demonstrating how this nested hierarchy is struct (...)
  • 38 Brett and Fentress 1996, 48. See also Mattingly 2023, 115-20 for reflections on the important diffe (...)

17Perhaps the most important example of this combination of collaborative and antagonistic forces at play is seen in Apuleius’ even account of the Numidian and Gaetulian populations that converged on Madauros, as if these two populations were equal forces in the region – which, by the time of Apuleius’ writing, they may well have been. However, this was not always the case. As a number of scholars have shown, before the arrival of the Carthaginians and the Romans, the different indigenous peoples of the northern Maghreb coexisted in tribal hierarchies that conform to Ernest Gellner’s idea of tribal segmentation.36 According to this principle, social order is maintained through a nested hierarchy of groups, with one particular tribe controlling a confederation of smaller tribes, which are subdivided into ever smaller, more discrete segmentary levels.37 Within their respective regions, both Numidians and Gaetulians held positions at the top of a tribal hierarchy, yet while the Numidian kingdom operated effectively as a state, imposing taxes on neighbouring tribes (including the Gaetulians), the Gaetulians did not – and refused to pay the tribute demanded of them by their neighbours.38 Yet this antagonistic rivalry between Numidians and Gaetulians must have been displaced by the intervention of the Roman state, which would have placed them on a similar footing as subject peoples, converting their former rivalry into something more like solidarity. The easy coexistence of these two peoples that emerges from Apuleius’ account of Madauros, which is presented as being situated (harmoniously) on the border between them, and from his own self-presentation as a hybrid product of their two cultures, belies the antagonism of their past history, which is now implicitly displaced onto the Roman superpower. This is one way in which Madauros emerges from Apuleius’ account as a liminal site in which cultural difference is negotiated in both collaborative exchanges and antagonistic ones.

  • 39 Mattingly 2023, 325-35 for a critique of this model and reflections on how it underpins much of the (...)
  • 40 Mattingly 2023, 114-54 (on archaeological evidence for the agricultural sedentarism and urbanism of (...)
  • 41 Apuleius' explicit mention of Syphax and Massinissa dates it to precisely this historical moment.

18In addition, Apuleius’ account of the indigenous Libyan populations that overlapped in Madauros both acknowledges and refuses Roman ethnographic perceptions (or constructions) of them. On the one hand, the Latinized names that he uses to identify the Numidians and Gaetulians makes them immediately familiar to the Roman reader acquainted with the Roman ethnographic tradition. On the other, his account dispels a number of stereotypes about these two peoples that Roman ethnographies promulgate – above all, the idea that the Gaetulians and Numidians were essentially desert-dwelling nomads, a Roman imperialist view that scholarship on ’Roman Africa’ initially embraced and promoted with its assumption that urbanism in the African interior was a consequence of Romanization.39 That assumption has now being effectively overturned by scholars who have shown how settled and agricultural both the Gaetulian and Numidian populations in this region were.40 Apuleius’ description of Madauros bears out this new consensus. Madauros (he tells us), a site on which both Gaetulians and Numidians converged, had existed as a town since at least the time of the second Punic War.41 Urbanism is presented here as no gift of the Romans. Rather, the Romans were annexing an urban settlement that long predated their arrival.

  • 42 In his description of the first peoples to inhabit this region in the Bellum Jugurthinum, for examp (...)
  • 43 Mattingly 2023, 131-2. See Mattingly 2023, 209-16 for further reflections on the cultural and socia (...)
  • 44 Mattingly 2023, 385. Bradley 2012, 145 likewise emphasises the presence of Libyan languages, as wel (...)

19The Roman stereotype of the Gaetulians and Numidians as desert-dwelling nomads is also one that minimizes the differences between these two peoples and reduces them to a ’non-Roman’ singularity. Apuleius, who comes from Madauros, again displays his local Libyan perspective by stressing the border that marks their difference from one another.42 And as David Mattingly points out, that difference was significant – reflecting a strong linguistic division between the Proto-Amazigh spoken by Numidians in the northern Maghreb, and the Proto-East-West Amazigh spoken in the desert regions to the south, where the Gaetulians lived.43 Mattingly even suggests that Apuleius’ emphasis on the fusion of these two cultures in his city of birth in this passage from the Apology implies that he may have come from a family where both these dialects were spoken.44 Here we see the provincial author conspicuously refusing the Roman ethnographic tendency to frame provincial identity in terms of Roman and non-Roman. And demonstrating instead that a Romanized provincial (who was even, probably, a Roman citizen) might continue to identify primarily with the local cultures of the province from where he came; that those cultures were more likely to be multiple than singular; and that that local cultural multiplicity was just as likely to inform the provincial Roman’s sense of hybridity as any Roman and non-Roman identities they combined. This is Apuleius’ answer to the Roman ethnographers.

The Punic in the Mirror of the Roman

  • 45 As Mattingly 2023, 34-5 points out, it is hard to isolate a Punic cultural identity from a common L (...)
  • 46 Apol. 98.6-7: Cum a nobis regeretur, ad magistros itabat; ab iis nunc magna fugela in ganeum fugit. (...)
  • 47 Apuleius' assault on Carthaginian culture in the Apology is, however, strongly contextual. See esp. (...)

20These are some of the ways in which Apuleius’ description of Madauros as a liminal site of collaborative cultural exchange between Numidians and Gaetulians is framed against the Roman perspective that lurks implicitly beyond or beneath it. More pressingly, perhaps, the decision to identify with the local populations who overlapped in Madauros provides Apuleius with a means of distinguishing himself from the members of the Libyan opposition, who are identified throughout as Punic. Disaggregating Punic identity from other local Libyan identities is a notoriously imprecise game,45 and Apuleius notably goes no further than calling them Punic-speaking. In a telling passage in chapter 98 of the Apology, he tells us that Pudentilla’s younger son, Sicinius Pudens, in whose name the charges against Apuleius were laid, reverted to speaking Punic as soon as he moved in with his uncle Sicinius Aemilianus, thus implying that the latter presided over a Punic-speaking household.46 And the picture that he builds of their relative illiteracy in Greek and Latin, and their boorish preoccupation with farming, is clearly designed to generate a cultural stereotype that goes hand-in-hand with their identity as speakers of Punic. By defining himself as a Numidian-Gaetulian, Apuleius pointedly differentiates himself from the opposition by marking his Libyan identity as non-Punic, setting the collaborative negotiation of difference between his indigenous identities off against his opponents’ affiliations with the settler colonial culture of Carthage.47

21What scope is there for finding ambivalence within the play of identities jostling against one another here? On the surface, Apuleius wants to draw a distinction between the Punic identity of the opposition and the Romanitas of the judge he is trying to impress. And yet: there are moments where we see that distinction slipping, and where the Punic seems to hold up a mirror to the Roman. In Apol. 10, for example, Apuleius indulges in various diatribes against Aemilianus, both of which emphasise a combination of rusticitas and seueritas (or, more specifically, austeritas), qualities that resonate with (or mimic) certain exaggerated stereotypes of Roman cultural identity (Apol. 10.6):

Sed Aemilianus, uir ultra Virgilianos opiliones et busequas rusticanus, agrestis quidem semper et barbarus, uerum longe austerior, ut putat, Serranis et Curiis et Fabriciis, negat id genus uersus Platonico philosopho competere.

But Aemilianus, a man who surpasses the shepherds and cowherds of Vergil in his rusticity, who is, in fact, and always has been a bumpkin and a barbarian, though he thinks himself far more austere than Serranus, Curius or Fabricius, denies that verse of this kind is worthy of a Platonic philosopher.

22Later in the speech, Apuleius pushes the latent comparison between the Punic and Roman further when, still emphasising his Punic opponent’s combination of rusticitas and seueritas, he explicitly compares him to the famous Roman ’Aemilianus’ – who is, paradoxically, none other than the figure responsible for conquering Carthage (Apol. 66.6-7):

Nam neque facundiae ostentatio rudi et indocto neque gloriae cupido rustico et barbaro neque inceptio patrociniorum capulari seni congruisset. Nisi forte Aemilianus pro sua seueritate exemplum dedit et ipsis maleficiis infensus accusationem istam pro morum integritate suscepit. At hoc ego Aemiliano, non huic Afro, sed illi Africano et Numantino et praeterea Censorio uix credidissem; ne huic frutici credam non modo odium peccatorum sed saltem intellectum inesse.

A display of eloquence would have been out of place for him [Aemilianus], since he’s crude and unlettered; likewise a love for renown, for he’s a bumpkin and a barbarian; and embarking on a career as an advocate would have been equally impossible for one like him, an old man with one foot in the grave. The only plausible possibility would be that he’s perhaps giving an example of the severity of his character and has launched this accusation out of hatred for wrongdoing and to assert his integrity of his own morals. But I would hardly accept such a hypothesis even in the case of a greater Aemilianus, not our African friend here, but the conqueror of Africa and Numantia, who furthermore held the office of censor at Rome. Much less will I believe that this dull blockhead not only hates sin, but can even recognize it.

23Apuleius is ostensibly drawing a contrast between these two figures on the basis of the sincerity of their respective claims to seueritas, yet in choosing a Roman with the same name as Aemilianus he cannot help but bring them into implicit comparison with each other. In this instance, the identity of Scipio Aemilianus as the conqueror of Carthage brings out the irony (or self-refuting logic) of this exercise in Punic/Roman compare and contrast, implying that each of these Aemilianii (Roman and Punic) may be as bad as each other. Both these passages draw a stereotype of Apuleius’ Punic-speaking opponent that is ostensibly designed to critique his lack of refinement, but which paradoxically makes him resemble a caricature of Romanitas, as the qualities of rusticitas and seueritas are weaponized to reflect back to Rome a distorted self-image of herself in the mirror of Aemilianus. This is the Romanized/Hellenized/(non-Punic) Libyan’s stereotype of Rome, a Rome stripped of all those external influences that make her look civilized, projected here onto Apuleius’ Punic-speaking opponent. Punic and Roman become indistinguishable in this stereotype. If we want to locate the perspective of the indigene in the surplus produced by this instance of colonial mimicry, we might draw further significance from the resemblance that the Punic and the Roman share in this region as its most recent colonizing powers.

Hybrid Stereotypes

  • 48 Ars 2. 23-5: Daedalus ut clausit conceptum crimine matris / semibouemque uirum semiuirumque bouem / (...)
  • 49 See also Finkelpearl 2009 for an important discussion of Apuleius' (multiple) hybrid identities (as (...)

24Apuleius’ pointed emphasis on his dual Numidian and Gaetulian heritage in Apol. 24 serves to define himself against both Roman and Punic cultural identities, and to conflate these identities with one another in the process. But there are further layers in this passage of self-identification – layers of cultural citation that feed into its complex performance of colonial mimicry. Apuleius’ self-identification as a semi-Numidian, semi-Gaetulian resonates strongly for the reader schooled in canonical Latin texts with a particularly freighted line from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria. In Ars 2.24, Ovid uses a repetitive pair of compound adjectival nouns, prefaced by the prefix semi-, to describe the Minotaur, the monstrous hybrid offspring of Pasiphae and a bull, as a semibouemque uir semiuirumque bouem.48 When Apuleius describes himself as a semi-Numidian semi-Gaetulian, he knowingly describes his own status as a compound hybrid of provincial identities in terms borrowed from a colonial script about hybrid monstrosity.49 How are we to read this example of allusive mimicry? As a comment on Roman perceptions of hybrid provincial identities, and a mark of how far Apuleius has internalised those perceptions? Or as a wry acknowledgement of their blindness and brutalizing ignorance?

  • 50 Seneca Con. 2.12.2: Declamabat autem Naso raro controuersias et non nisi ethicas. libentius dicebat (...)

25And how is the ambiguity of this reading complicated by the famous anecdote that subsequently comes to accompany this line? As the Elder Seneca reports it, when discussing with his friends which of the lines from his published works Ovid should remove, and which he should keep, this was the very line that his friends chose to eject while being the one that Ovid chose to retain.50 The anecdote draws out the stylistic monstrosity of the line – a style that offends the tastes of Ovid’s literary circle. In mimicking that very stylistic monstrosity, Apuleius is by the same token replicating the phraseology of one of Rome’s most celebrated poets even as he is also performing a script of monstrous bad taste, one that is designed to illustrate the stylistic effects of his self-avowed identity as a provincial hybrid. Here again, mimicking the colonial script reveals the difference that cannot help but reveal itself in the space of repetition in the colonial context. The question for the reader is how unwitting or deliberate this self-presentation is. Has Apuleius stumbled into revealing the stylistic gaucheness that entails from his jumbled fusion of provincial identities? Or is this an artful performance designed to draw out the brutalizing effects of reproducing the colonial script in a provincial context? The skill with which Apuleius marshals the Senecan commentary that comes built into this allusion to the Ars Amatoria, and makes it resonate with its novel provincial context, strongly suggests the latter.

  • 51 See Shaw 2024, 601-3 on the significance of Madauros as an educational centre, which is marked by t (...)
  • 52 See Hollis 1977, 129-30 on Ars 1.607-8, where Ovid offers his first condemnation of rusticitas, app (...)

26We might hesitate to accept this single line from the Ars Amatoria as such a loaded intertext for this passage if it stood in isolation. But the Ars is a text that resonates throughout the Apology, above all in Apuleius’ characterization of the prosecution. We have already seen how Apuleius draws attention to the city of Madauros as an identifying site or origin, and this is significant because of the city’s importance as an educational centre in the region.51 Throughout the speech, Apuleius differentiates himself from the opposition by casting them squarely as uneducated, Punic-speaking rustici. The slur rusticus is frequently used in the Ars Amatoria to describe the antitype of the kind of urbane, polished Roman whom the praeceptor amoris seeks to school in the ways of seduction.52 And this alignment of urbane seducer and boorish male guardians makes sense in light of the main charges that Apuleius is facing down in the Apology, which all have to do with the idea that he has seduced a woman in the wrong way; and that her dead husband’s male relatives still have a rightful claim to her (like the over-watchful uir in the Ars).

  • 53 Bradley 2012, 45. Birley 1988; and Mattingly 1995, 58-9; and 2023, 385-9 cover the variety of ways (...)
  • 54 Cf. esp. Apol. 69: Eo scrupulo liberata cum a principibus uiris in matrimonium peteretur, decreuit (...)
  • 55 See Finkelpearl 1998, 115-48 for a comparable discussion of the influence of Virgil's Dido story on (...)

27It is tempting too to consider how the names of the parties involved in this trial are reframed in light of this intertext: the charges laid against Apuleius are brought by various members of a family who all take the cognomen Pudens, a name that is also borne by Apuleius’ wife, Aemilia Pudentilla, by virtue of her prior marriage into that family. These names, and the associations they generate with the Roman virtue of pudicitia (or ’chastity’), mark out the identities of the people involved in this trial as the distinctive product of Roman Africa: as Keith Bradley points out, ’Punic names were primarily theophoric in origin and the Romanizing upper classes of North Africa typically assumed Latin names that retained their religious or moralistic connotations. ’Pudentilla’ and ’Pudens’ are names that fit this pattern, so that all in all an African ancestry for Pudentilla sems highly plausible.’53 How do these names read in the context of a speech that models its situation on the seduction plot of the Ars Amatoria? It makes sense, of course, for the male guardians of Pudentilla’s chastity to be called Pudens. But what about Pudentilla? And how do we read the passage in which Apuleius describes the medical causes behind her ill health as having to do with being starved of sex throughout the long, chaste years of her widowhood – his own arrival on the scene serving to bring this long run of chastity (and ill-health) to an end (in what reads like a meticulously sanitized version of the Ars Amatoria’s erotic storyline).54 Or is this actually Virgil’s Dido story that we are reading, with Pudentilla cast as a model of pudicitia, her devotion to one husband tested and overcome by the seduction of an outsider? Apuleius’ retelling of Virgil’s story transports it back from Rome to its proper context on the Libyan landmass, and produces all kinds of cultural tensions in the course of doing so, drawing out the Virgilian paradox of making a Carthaginian woman the embodiment (albeit a failing one) of such a Roman virtue.55 And there are obviously also further tensions involved in making the Ars Amatoria and the Aeneid vie with one another as competing intertexts for this story, as Apuleius overlays Rome’s most authoritative cultural script with the traces of another that stakes a very strong claim to being her most subversive. Again, we are made to question whether Apuleius’ decision to model his defence speech on this jarring combination of intertexts is a mark of his provincial ineptness. Or whether this is a highly strategic choice designed to undermine the cultural authority of a Roman education in the provinces.

Of Mimicry and Mirrors

  • 56 See Hunink 1997, 57-8 for discussion of the possibilities, esp. the connection between mirrors and (...)

28These are just a few of the many examples of mimicry that we encounter in the Apology – passages in which Apuleius displays his Romanization by emulating the canonical texts of Classical Latin; and in which he also displays the limitations of that Romanizing project by allowing its basic impropriety in his own Libyan context to slip through the cracks. The examples of this are many. But there are also passages that thematize the very idea of mimicry and, in doing so, offer further encouragement for us to consider what purchase Bhabha’s theory has for Apuleius’ mode of self-presentation in the Apology. Among the more bizarre subsidiary charges that Apuleius faces down in the first part of his speech is an accusation connected to the prosecution’s objections to his appearance and general comportment that he is in the habit of carrying a portable mirror around on his person. It is difficult to reconstruct the exact basis of the accusation here,56 but it seems to have to do with the apparent inconcinnity between Apuleius’ attachment to the mirror and his identity as a philosopher. He proceeds to justify his mirror-habit by offering a series of anecdotes about philosophers who have advocated the possession of a mirror. As he goes on to talk about the inquiries that philosophers have made into the workings of mirrors, his discussion ends with a series of further questions of his own about the possible modes of distortion mirrors can produce (Apol. 16.1-4):

Videturne uobis debere philosophia haec omnia uestigare et inquirere et cuncta specula uel uda uel suda [soli] uidere? Quibus praeter ista quae dixi etiam illa ratiocinatio necessaria est, cur in planis quidem speculis ferme pares optutus et imagines uideantur, <in> tumidis uero et globosis omnia defectiora, at contra in cauis auctiora; ubi et cur laeua cum dexteris permutentur; quando se imago eodem speculo tum recondat penitus, tum foras exerat; cur caua specula, si exaduersum soli retineantur, appositum fomitem accendant.

Don’t you think philosophy ought to investigate and consider all these things, and look into every kind of mirror, solid and liquid? On top of the things I’ve spoken about, it’s necessary to consider these things too – why is it that in flat mirrors all images and objects reflected are shown in almost precisely their original dimensions, whereas in convex and spherical mirrors everything is seen smaller, in concave mirrors on the other hand it seems larger? Why again and under what circumstances are left and right reversed? When does one and the same mirror seem now to withdraw the image into its depths, now to extrude it forth to view? Why do concave mirrors when held at right angles to the rays of the sun kindle tinder set opposite them?’

  • 57 Bhabha 1984, 131, citing Lacan 1977, 99.
  • 58 Lacan 2006.
  • 59 While a number of scholars have posited connections between Apuleius' thought and that of the Chris (...)

29This account of the distorted reflections that convex and concave mirrors produce, their confusing reversal of left and right and their capacity to ignite fire when placed opposite the sun makes us think hard about the distorted image of Romanitas that the Roman education system is destined to find reflected in its subject peoples, even in a figure like Apuleius with so much erudition to boast of. Bhabha cites as one of the influences behind his theory of mimicry Lacan’s discussion of mimicry in ’The Line and the Light’, where he addresses various kinds of optical illusion and visual distortion in which mimicry appears as a kind of camouflage.57 This discussion builds in turn on Lacan’s more famous theory of the mirror stage, which describes the forms of self-alienation that reflection can generate in a subject.58 Colonial mimicry too inscribes a mode of reversal and self-alienation both for colonizer and the colonized, watching each other reflected imperfectly in the mirror of the other, of the very kind that Apuleius describes here in his account of the workings of mirrors. Indeed, if we think about the subversive ends to which the Christian martyrs in north Africa would end up putting such Roman institutions as the amphitheatre to publicise their revolutionary message, the closing mention of using mirrors to kindle fire even speaks to the revolutionary potential that such a self-alienating encounter might ignite.59

Conclusion

  • 60 As Hunink 1997 (vol. 1), 11 n. 1 points out, Apuleius himself was not responsible for naming his sp (...)

30I have argued that the form that this text takes as a forensic speech, and the structure of its second-person address to Claudius Maximus, the Roman governor and judge in this provincial trial, has important consequences for later readers. Defence speeches are delivered to elicit a particular response from a judge or jury: innocent or guilty, yes or no. When they are written down and published, we may not hear the response of the original audience, but as readers we occupy the position of that audience, and are called upon to deliver a verdict of our own. Structurally, therefore, we inhabit the same position as Claudius Maximus, and are assimilated to his position of Roman authority, invested with the power to condemn or acquit Apuleius. But what exactly are we being invited to condemn or acquit him of? For there is more than witchcraft on trial here, as the terms of what is at stake in this speech shift between oral and written contexts.60

31And there is also the question of who is really on trial, Apuleius or us. Do we judge Apuleius for the slippages that betray his imperfect command of the idiom of Romanitas? Or are we being judged for failing to see the critique of Romanitas that is built into that very performance? Can we see the critique? Whose side are we on? Do we shrink from being interpellated as the Roman judge? Does Claudius Maximus function as a yardstick against which the reader measures their distance from, or proximity to, Roman imperium? The ambivalence of colonial mimicry accommodates (and anticipates) a spectrum of responses that ranges from complicity with the highest position of Roman cultural and legal authority to collusion with the provincial who deliberately distorts the script of that authority for his own subversive ends.

  • 61 Bhabha 1994, 1-27 (and esp. p. 13), discussed in n. 15 above.

32But this text does more than simply pose questions about the intentions behind Apuleius’ imperfect performance of Romanitas. It also exposes the reductive essentialism that lies at the heart of overly binarizing constructions of the relationship between colonizer and colonized,61 and which underpins attempts to isolate the Roman from other colonising histories and forces in the ancient Maghreb. In the Apology, Apuleius implicates his Punic opponents in the brutalizing cultural stance of the Roman imperialists, by resorting to stereotypes that point up certain telling resemblances between the Punic and the Roman. His status as a provincial who can lay claim to other Libyan cultural and ethnic identities gives him an alibi from which to complicate the Roman/non-Roman divide in this region, as his own indigenous perspectives are revealed in the act of aping the colonial script. Apuleius’ Apology thereby suggests paths of compatibility between the tools of postcolonialism and discourses of indigeneity: the distortions that undermine Roman authority in Apuleius’ mimicry of the Roman cultural script are produced not by his generic status as a non-Roman, but by his specific identity as the hybrid product of two indigenous African peoples. And the stance of cultural superiority that he displays throughout this speech belongs not just to his command of the idiom of Romanitas, but also to the status of indigenous Libyan that marks his distance from (and potential disdain for) Rome.

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Notes

1 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.

2 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.

3 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.

4 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.

5 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.

6 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).

7 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.

8 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.

9 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.

10 Bhabha 1984.

11 Bhabha 1984, 126. Sabnis 2014, 289 cites these very words of Bhabha in her discussion of Apuleius' colonial mimicry in Flor. 6 and 12.

12 See also Bhabha 1985 for a related set of reflections on the 'sly civility'

13 Pratt 2022, 17.

14 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.

15 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.

16 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.

17 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.

18 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.

19 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.

20 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.

21 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.

22 Noreña 2014.

23 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.

24 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.

25 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.').

26 All Latin quotations in this article follow Hunink 1997; all translations are my own.

27 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.

28 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.

29 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).

30 See Bradley 2012, 145 for the calculation that 71% of Madauros' attested civic magistrates came from families of African origin.

31 Syme 1958, 11; and Curchin 1990, 86.

32 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.'

33 Bhabha 1994, 1-12.

34 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?'

35 Mattingly 2023, 68-70. See also Mattingly 2004, 2006, 2011 and 2014.

36 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.

37 See esp. Mattingly 1995, 20 for a helpful diagram demonstrating how this nested hierarchy is structured.

38 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.

39 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.

40 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).

41 Apuleius' explicit mention of Syphax and Massinissa dates it to precisely this historical moment.

42 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.

43 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.

44 Mattingly 2023, 385. Bradley 2012, 145 likewise emphasises the presence of Libyan languages, as well as Punic and Latin, in Madauros.

45 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.

46 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.'

47 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.

48 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...").

49 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.

50 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.').

51 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).

52 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.

53 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.

54 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.'). 

55 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.

56 See Hunink 1997, 57-8 for discussion of the possibilities, esp. the connection between mirrors and magic.

57 Bhabha 1984, 131, citing Lacan 1977, 99.

58 Lacan 2006.

59 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.

60 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.

61 Bhabha 1994, 1-27 (and esp. p. 13), discussed in n. 15 above.

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Francesca Martelli, « Apuleius’ Apology. Colonial Subversion in the Provincial Courthouse and the Reader on Trial »Dictynna [En ligne], 22 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2025, consulté le 14 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/dictynna/4370 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15a2d

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