Mountains and Bodies in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses

This chapter reviews Apuleius' Metamorphoses , which is one of the most mountainous texts and the most ‘rocky’ text in the whole of ancient literature. Metamorphoses also includes the most extensive and most bizarre ancient depiction of a stage-set mountain. The chapter discusses two strands of mountain depiction that stand out particularly in Apuleius' account. The first is a series of strikingly rhetorical and in some cases symbolic descriptions of mountains and other kinds of landscape, which have obvious resonances with the examples of visual and figurative representations of mountains. The other strand is a much more bodily way of interacting with landscape.

Art · Depiction · Linguistics · Literal and figurative language · Literature · Rhetorical question · Classical Antiquity Studies · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · Philosophy