Note 69 — Chapter VII · POETIC IN ANCIENT DRAMA AND NARRATIVE

Apuleius, born about 125 A.D., and probably educated at Carthage, where he passed much of his life, became a rhetor at Rome about 150, and soon thereafter published the Metamorphoses. Florida is the title given to a collection of excerpts from what we should call his lectures (see Chapter VIII, 230). Nettleship (in an essay on Nonius Marcellus, Lectures and Essays, 282) calls him “a very striking representative of his age.” Though his work is largely translation or compilation, he has caught the fancy of several English literati, and was made by Pater one of the personæ in the twentieth chapter of Marius the Epicurean. Adlington’s translation (1566) of the Metamorphoses has been reprinted with an introduction by Seccombe, and revised for the Loeb Classical Library by Gaselee. The separable Cupid and Psyche chapters (Books IV-VI), often translated, appear in the fifth chapter of Pater’s Marius, and have been again translated by Purser (London, 1910), with a suggestive introduction on Apuleius as a rhetor. Butler has translated also the Florida.