Appearances Can Be Deceiving: Costume and Identity in Apuleius's Metamorphoses, Florida, and Apology

In Book 11 of Apuleius's Metamorphoses, a stark naked Lucius, having eaten the prescribed roses from the hands of a priest of Isis, gradually appears where before there had only been his asinine form.¹ Almost immediately, a member of the Isiac procession steps forward, clothing the naked man in the linen tunic off of his own back: the first physical mark of the last major metamorphosis of the novel, that of man to priest (11.14). This Apuleian moment can be compared to the same scene of transformation in the Onos, in all likelihood an epitome of Apuleius's Greek source text, in which Loukios, after eating roses in the middle of the amphitheater, returns to his human form.² Unlike Lucius in the Metamorphoses, in the Onos, Loukios remains naked as he begs the provincial governor for his life and his "re-clothing" goes unmentioned.³

These two scenes—especially in regard to the role of clothing—offer a useful paradigm for interpreting the nuanced divergences between these works.⁴ In an article illuminating the subversiveness of the Onos, Edith Hall demonstrates the importance of nudity throughout that text, describing it as having a "socially levelling effect" (1995.55). In contrast to the Onos's emphasis on nudity, scholars have noted Apuleius's particular attention to the alterable aspects of physical appearance such as clothing, accouterments, and comportment. Keith Bradley, in his analysis of the significance of physical appearance in Apuleius's Apology, briefly addresses the role of clothing in the Metamorphoses and in Roman society more generally, stating that "it is an important element of categorization [for the novel's characters]: to a large degree individuals are identifiable from their clothing and deportment, what Apuleius himself neatly calls habitus et habitudo (Met. 1.20)" (2012.148). While acknowledging the deceptive and transformative possibilities of clothing in the novel, Bradley finds Apuleius's representation "unexceptional" and declares that "the Metamorphoses illustrates the code-like capacity of dress and demeanour, and expresses through its realistic base assumptions about personal appearance that its author must have taken to be widely shared among his readers, not only in Rome, say, but also in the extra-urban, provincial world in which the story of Lucius is set" (2012.151). This reading of the Metamorphoses is consistent with the scholarly view that in the lived experience of residents of the Roman empire, the connection between physical form and socio-political identity was especially significant because bodily adornment was a primary vehicle through which status was communicated (e.g., Sebesta and Bonfante 1994, Cleland et al. 2005, Upson-Saia 2011). In this respect, then, the Onos and Metamorphoses are like opposite sides of the same coin: if the Onos can be understood as a rumination on the flattening effect of nudity, the Metamorphoses emphasizes Roman society's reliance on clothing as a locus of status and identity.

In this paper I go beyond the argument that the depiction of personal appearance in Apuleius's novel accords with the widely held cultural notion that clothing and comportment are trustworthy indicators of identity. Instead, as I will argue, the Metamorphoses should be read as a challenge to that idea. Although appearances are the primary way in which individuals in the Roman world are understood at a glance—a cultural norm built on the tacit assumption that appearances are the most reliable means to classify individuals—Apuleius focuses instead on how the reliance on this system of variable symbols facilitates misapprehension and misrepresentation with potentially grave consequences. By repeatedly illustrating the deceptive nature of clothing, comportment, and even bodily form, Apuleius portrays physical appearance as a deeply flawed communicative system—a polemical attitude apparent not only in the Metamorphoses but also in his rhetorical works the Florida and Apology. Furthermore, as several examples will show, by undermining the reliability of Roman society's symbolic code of clothing, Apuleius is posing questions about social, religious, human, and even political identity.⁵

IDENTITY

Building on recent critical approaches to the representations of character, self...