Humiliation and Immobility in Apuleius' Metamorphoses

Introduction

Men (and women) of Mediterranean classical cultures, like other face-to-face cultures, negotiated status by demonstrations of honor and inflictions of shame. They developed highly articulated systems of affront, abuse, and insult to advance agendas and to retard or dismantle perceived competitors. "Dissing"—glares, hand-gestures, verbal insult, spitting, punching and otherwise mauling peers—punctuated personal, family, and political quarrels. Modern treatments of the "poetics" of verbal violence, pushful behaviors, and physical brawling encourage new study of parallel situations in ancient social history and in classical texts.¹

This paper analyzes Apuleius' portrayal of the contemporary Roman provincial aggressive practices (ca. 160 C.E.) that circumscribe the characters of his one, sui generis novel. In extreme cases, social and physical controls, and even self-policing, shut down the limited Roman liberty of "free agents," rendering characters immobile, literally or figuratively. We document (through the novel's incidents of dishonor and immobilization and their attendant vocabulary) Apuleius' "appreciation" of the pervasive infliction of shame in second-century provincial Roman society and in his protagonist's driven life.

Traveling the well-cambered Roman roads in a world of decreasing freedom and therefore mobility, Apuleius' unheroic hero Lucius happily runs into and then becomes entrapped in many macabre culs-de-sac. At the same time he welcomes sexual and religious initiations without full—or any—awareness of their dangerous consequences. Immobility of body and mind is thus both a narrative end-game pattern and a pessimistic theme. Freely chosen and cruelly inflicted paths lead him "from the frying-pan into the fire," and Lucius finally chooses a permanent form of immobility because his social self has been damaged beyond repair. The Metamorphoses is not a salvation narrative but a first-person narrator's consistent and not flattering self-portrait of an engaging but needy and dysfunctional character.²

This paper examines first the strategies of humiliation and embarrassment shown in the novel, particularly examples of and terminology for derisive laughter. Such mirthful mockery signifies to the reader and solidifies for a group some sense of superiority and an excluded individual's dishonor. The characteristic response of victims of public shaming—inert, self-protective stupefaction —is the second topic of analysis. Third, we consider a particular form of immobility, the "death-like" stillness that darkens Apuleius' pictures of earthly communities. His frequent references to statues and other life-like but invariably immobile images expand the range of tropes of stillness and call into question the honor bestowed by Roman monumentalization. The paper next briefly analyzes various types of Roman spectacle that punctuate important episodes of the novel, including the social roles of gazers and objects of their gaze. We conclude by evaluating the central role of immobility in Apuleius' pointed satire of human vulnerability. It seems to serve isolated victims as an always ineffective last refuge, an asylum in which the victim remains a spectacle for others.

Apuleius' at least superficially salvific fiction features ridiculous matter —persons, acts, or objects of this world (plus a few gods and ghosts)—that arouses amusement, mockery, derision, and contempt among internal and external audiences. The comedy arises from absurd predicaments that befall the once-privileged, worldly hero and other "innocents" of whom he learns. His story studies primarily secular humiliation—the loss of face—again both literal and metaphorical. The labile hero takes spiritual, intellectual, and physical pratfalls. This picaresque suffering has always been recognized as an irony of identity. Lucius is physically transformed into an ass because he took the wrong magical ointment for the owl-transformation and he regularly makes an ass of himself in intellectual and sensual pursuits, but asininity may not be the ultimate insult to Lucius' human selfhood.³ Book 11's vision of spiritual improvement and honor—the conclusion of disputed meaning—is not the focus of this study, but our evidence will point to a pessimistic reading of it as another kind of affront (freely chosen) to full humanity (see below, Conclusion). This paper chiefly addresses the less remarked transitional phase before complete social annihilation in which Lucius and others are transfixed by anxiety...