On Apuleius’ Hermagoras

The lost work of Apuleius entitled Hermagoras is known only by the following fragments:

1. 1. Visus est et adulescens honesta forma quasi ad nuptias exornatus trahere se in penitiorem partem domus¹ (“It seemed that a young man of handsome appearance, dressed up as though for a wedding, was dragging her into the inner part of the house”).

2. 2. Verum infirma scamillorum obice fultae fores² (“but the doors were secured by the flimsy obstacle of scamilli”).

3. 3. Aspera hiems erat, omnia ningue canebant³ (“It was a harsh winter: everything was white with snow”).

4. 4. Et cibatum, quem iucundum esse nobis animaduerterant, eum adposiuerunt⁴ (“and, having noticed that we found him agreeable, they set him down to eat”).

5. 5. Pollincto eius funere domuitionem paramus⁵ (“His corpse having been made ready for the funeral, we prepare to return home”).

6. 6. Priscian, in Hertz (1885) 2: 135, 17: ‘saucio saucius,’ ‘scio scius’ sic Apuleius in primo Hermagorae et Pacuuius in Teucro:

Postquam defessus † perrogitando aduenasDe gnatis neque . . . quemquam inuenit scium

Afterwards, being wearied by interrogating the strangers, they didn’t discover anyone among the sons who knew.

All that we can safely infer from this is that Apuleius used scius or a word of similar formation; it is unlikely that Priscian is citing the verses as from both authors.

The early editors of Apuleius supposed that the Hermagoras was a dialogue;⁶ but in more recent times it has been generally [263|264] regarded as a romance.⁷ Schanz takes this point of view, and rightly I think, although he devotes only three lines to the subject apart from his references to the ancient citations. With similar brevity Teuffel and Schwabe declare that the Hermagoras was a romance, and probably of somewhat the same type as the Metamorphoses.⁸ This is as much information on the subject as will be found in the handbooks and in the editions of Apuleius’ works; but if we assume that the Hermagoras was a romance, there are some further inferences to be drawn from the fragments which, though conjectural, are nevertheless worth considering. In short, I suspect that the lost Hermagoras was very much like the Satyricon of Petronius. The scenes are suggestive of the same kind of surroundings (cf. nos. 1, 2, and 4); the book may have been written in a mixture of prose and verse (cf. no. 3); the narrative was evidently told in the first person (cf. nos. 4 and 5); and the principals are apparently two or more in number (cf. nos. 4 and 5), as in Petronius, and may have included a rhetorician, Hermagoras, analogous to Encolpius.

The name Hermagoras, which constitutes the title, was presumably that of the leading character; and since this name was well known in antiquity as belonging to several rhetoricians,⁹ it may be reasonably inferred that Apuleius chose this name because he thought it appropriate to a protagonist whom he was representing as a professional rhetorician. That he should have chosen the name of a respected rhetorician as that of his pro-[264|265]tagonist is not surprising; for he has a certain romantic fondness for the famous names of the literary world which tends to overbalance the nicer feelings of propriety.^* This is shown in the Metamorphoses, where Plutarch and Sextus are enrolled in the family of Lucius, and where the author even identifies himself at times with the ass. Moreover, the name Hermagoras is especially appropriate to a work of this kind, since it is suggestive of the market-place and of low life (cf. Lucian, JTr. 33). In thus putting a realistic or burlesque narrative into the mouth of a rhetorician, Apuleius would be following the outstanding example of Petronius, whose work must have been the chief representative in Roman literature of this type of romance, and could scarcely have been unknown to him.¹⁰ Petronius had made his romance serve as a framework for the insertion of all kinds of artistic digressions, and these were the more easily motivated owing to the literary character of the principal actor. Is it not likely, therefore, that...