Marsyas the Satyr and Apuleius of Madauros

Abstract

memet professus sum…seminumidam et semigaetulum (‘I publicly described my self…as half Numidian, half Gaetulian’).ApuleiusApologyApuleius…qui nobis Afris Afer est notior (‘Apuleius…who as an African is better known to us Africans’).AugustineEpistle138I pass much time in the excellent company of a Moroccan writer of the second century AD, Lucius Apuleius, a colonial of the old Roman Empire.Salman RushdieTravels with a Golden AssApuleius of Madauros was a Romano-African, a provincial from Africa Proconsularis who, most of the time, conveys the impression of being fully assimilated, more steeped in Graeco-Roman culture than his contemporaries in the cultural centre, disdainful of his countrymen who know no Latin, and even an agent of Romanisation. Yet, given the new ways of thinking about provincial identity and centre vs periphery under the Roman Empire, it may be time to revisit the complicated hybrid and fluctuating identity of someone who, on the one hand, actively imparted Roman culture to his homeland and, on the other, pronounces his allegiance to Carthage (over Athens and Rome) and who, at least in certain contexts, refuses to be ashamed of his Numidian-Gaetulian roots. Weighing both Apuleius' few explicit statements about his allegiances to his homeland (and rejection thereof) and his fictionalised portraits of cultural outsiders, this essay argues that Apuleius expresses a dual and conflicted sense of Romano-African identity. ReadingFlorida3 (Marsyas and Apollo) against the grain of current scholarship, I argue that Apuleius is not simply an Apollo, but both a Marsyas and an Apollo, with implications for a reading of what might be provincial and African in his works.