Law, Magic, and Culture in the "Apologia" of Apuleius

Bibliographic Data

ID3937117
AuthorsKeith Bradley (corresponding author)
Year1997
Volume51
Issue2
Pages203
Publication date1997-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePhoenix (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-8299 • E-ISSN: 1929-4883
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1088495
OpenAlexW2332415189
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited27

IN A.D. 158 at Tripolitanian Sabratha in Africa Proconsularis, Apuleius of Madauros, the author of the Golden Ass, was tried before the proconsul Claudius Maximus for having allegedly practised magic in order to bewitch and entice into marriage a wealthy, fortyish widow named Pudentilla. His accuser was Sicinius Aemilianus, a brother of Pudentilla's first husband, who was determined to keep control of Pudentilla's substantial fortune-acquired in large part from the dead brother and his father--within the family of the Sicinii. The outcome of the trial is unknown. But Apuleius defended himself with a speech whose rhetorical and stylistic brilliance has convinced most of its readers that he must have been acquitted. The speech, the Apologia, trivialises and demolishes the allegations so completely that the issue, it seems, cannot be in doubt: the rationality of law and the legal process must, surely, have prevailed over the irrationality of magic and the essential absurdity of the charges.1 It is with the interplay between legal rationality and magical irrationality that I am chiefly concerned in this essay, particularly as it applies to the administration of Roman justice. On its surface the Apologia evinces a stable and secure world, the world of a monolithic Roman Empire where the impartial rule of Roman law is everywhere unquestionable. But beneath the surface a different image of Roman imperial society can, I think, be glimpsed, one that is less positive and less confident, but also one that is more historically accurate. To bring that image to life, I explore here the contextual framework of Apuleius' trial from three points of view, the legal, especially in its physical setting, the magical, and the intellectual. My implicit general objective is to illustrate the importance of the Apologia as a document of social and cultural history.2 First, to reconstitute the physical circumstances in which Apuleius' trial took place is to learn something of the impact of Roman law on a remote provincial community, as also to capture something of the immediate, and intensely agonistic, character of the trial situation

Art · Astronomy · MAGIC (telescope · Physics · Political science · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classical Studies and Legal History · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · Law · Philosophy

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