Slavish Pleasures and Profitless Curiosity: Fall and Redemption in Apuleius' Metamorphoses

Abstract

The Metamorphoses of Apuleius is now generally agreed to be much more than the collection of amusing stories in the Milesian vein that the author proclaims it. Current scholarship sees it as ‘a fable about the journey of the soul through life’, ‘the story of a soul which fell, and which suffered by reason of that fall, and which the merciful hand of Isis raised up and saved’. The eleventh book effects the metamorphosis which transforms the tales of Books 1-10 into such a fable; the kev to the interpretation of the novel in Isiac terms is seen to be the Priest's speech at 11.15, where the events leading up to Lucius' transformation (the ‘fall’ of Festugière's summary) are described as follows: Nec tibi natales ac ne dignitas quidem, vel ipsa, qua flores, usquam doctrina profuit, sed lubrico virentis aetatulae ad serviles delapsus voluptates curiositatis inprosperae sinistrum praemium reportasti.(Neither your birth, nor your position, nor even that learning you were so good at was of any help to you; instead you slipped on the green path of youth and fell into slavish pleasures, and carried off a sinister reward for your profitless curiosity.)