Witches, Isis and Narrative: Approaches to Magic in Apuleius’ Metamorphosis (review)

Apuleius’s Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass, a Latin novel composed sometime in the mid- to-late second century CE, is redolent with magic and witchcraft, as well as storytelling and folktales, eroticism, and romance. Narrated from the perspective of its protagonist, Lucius, who journeys through the countryside of Thessaly in search of magic, the work has been the subject of a plethora of literary adaptations since Boccaccio’s Decameron and Cervantes’ Don Quixote, as well as attracting the scholarly attention of some of the best Latinists of the twentieth century. In addition to Classicists, scholars of magic from literary, anthropological, sociological, and historical perspectives have found that the Metamorphosis offers a rich and diverse harvest of information.

Stavros Frangoulidis’s work promises further enlightenment in the area of literary analyses of magic—an already fulsome field of research—and aims to provide the “first” “comparative study of the various approaches Lucius and secondary characters adopt towards magic” in the novel (p. xi). The methodology for this thematic approach is largely intratextual, although Frangoulidis devotes the first chapter to an intertextual reading that involves a comparison of the Metamorphoses with the Greek epitome-narrative the Onos (The Ass), which has survived in the works of Lucian (circa 120–90 CE) but is not authenticated as being from his oeuvre. The purpose of this chapter is to elucidate Frangoulidis’s main thesis concerning the moral fiber of Apuleius’s novel (as opposed to the more intense sexual impetus of the Pseudo-Lucian text). Yet a survey of the similarities that tie the two texts together needed to be unpacked alongside the differences—a necessary approach, especially since Apuleius clearly followed the Onos.

To argue for a didactic morality as the prime focus of the author’s intent in the Metamorphoses is, as a reading of its first chapter reveals, a task that necessitates some serious massaging of the text. As Frangoulidis’s study unfolds, several key episodes in Apuleius’s work are interpreted along the lines of black magic versus white magic, with the ultimate transformation of Lucius back into human form via the powers of Isis consistently regarded as salvation. Indeed, Isis and her cult symbolize for Frangoulidis the positive light of religion, as opposed to the dastardly workings of the witches throughout the novel. This is not to deny that Lucius is saved physically and spiritually in Book Eleven, the last book of the novel and one with which scholars have traditionally struggled, owing to the contrasts it presents to the preceding books; but this is, of course, only part of the story.

The chapters defined and shaped by intratextual analysis (Chapters 2 to 8) cover the stated intention of Frangoulidis’s book, namely to discuss the various encounters Lucius and the secondary characters have with magic. Owing to the strict application of his methodology, however, Frangoulidis limits his analyses too much, and as a result there are numerous excurses on the similarities and differences between Lucius and his various encounters with the occult and those of the other main dabblers in magic. Such comparisons also tend to lead Frangoulidis into the trap of retelling sections of the novel in order to set up the similarities and differences, which makes the work a labored reading experience at times. Had Frangoulidis extended his methodology to examine Apuleius’s work within a broader context—both historically and generically—his study would have been a richer interpretive work. Apuleius as a source of commentary for Apuleius does not make for a stimulating analysis over almost two hundred pages. In the last chapter Frangoulidis does examine the Metamorphosis in terms of generic traditions, but limits his study to the romance novel so popular in Greek literature. This is an unusual decision in light of the fact that there are so many perspectives available—from philosophy, magic, religion, and anthropology—to help understand the...