the acquisition of his extraordinary reputation he needed an age and an audience in which learning and literature alike were decadent, though far from forgotten. He has none of the scientific spirit. He does not really understand the authors he quotes; he has no critical spirit, and his own investigations are prompted by indiscriminate curiosity. But he has vast stores of miscellaneous knowledge such as might delight the half-educated, and as a rhetorician he possesses a strange and debased brilliance, fired by an astonishing if disorderly imagination. The verve, the humour, and above all the welter of warmth and colour that characterize the Golden Ass make us forgive the palpable degradation of the Latin language. Not less remarkable is the Apologia. There are few speeches of antiquity that give such a vivid impression of the character of the author and of the life of the society in which he moved. The style, it is true, is often bombastic and affected, many of the arguments are almost more puerile and absurd than the accusations, while the intense conceit and complacency of the author often make him ridiculous. A man of wide and varied knowledge, he has no depth of intellect. He is always half charlatan, and the reader is rarely free from the impression that he is taking liberties with the uncertain taste and ignorance of his provincial audience. But even the weaknesses of style and argument have their charm for the modern reader. For, if he never entirely fails to laugh with Apuleius, he certainly indulges in many a hearty laugh at him.

The Florida are no less superficial and bombastic, and the vanity of Apuleius is revealed even more remarkably than in the Apologia. But they are never long enough to be tedious, and contain much that is amusing, be the humour unconscious or intentional; and even if we can rarely give whole-hearted admiration to the style, we cannot but marvel at its dexterity, while its very bizarrerie is not without its charm.

This is hardly the place for a disquisition upon African Latin. It is sufficient here to say that the two main features of the style of Apuleius are its archaism and its extreme floridity. It has been asserted that this strange style is of purely African growth,[4] and that it owes much of its oriental wealth of colour to the Semitic element that must still have formed so large a proportion of the population of Africa. But there seems little really to support this view; it is probable that, allowing for the personal factor, in this case exceptionally important, and the eccentricities to which Apuleius' erudition may have led him, we are confronted with no more than an exaggerated revival of the Asiatic style of oratory. No doubt the seed fell on good ground, but it is impossible to set one's finger on any definitely African element.[5]

The style presents grave difficulties to the translator. The English language will not carry the requisite amount of bombast; the assonances and the puns are generally incapable of reproduction. Even when this allowance has been made, it is in many cases impossible to give anything approximating to a translation in natural English. I can only trust that the English of this translation has not wholly lost the colour to which Apuleius owes so much of his charm. The sacrifice is not so great in these works as it must necessarily be in any English translation of the more exotic and more brilliant-hued Metamorphoses, better known as The Golden Ass. But in any case the cooler tints and sobriety of our native language must—even in hands less unskilled than mine—fail to do justice to the fantastic Latin of the original. The vivacity of French coupled with the richness and warmth of Italian would need to be combined to produce anything approaching a really good translation, even of the least fantastic works of Apuleius.

THE APOLOGIA

1. For my part, Maximus Claudius, and you, gentlemen who sit beside him on the bench, I regarded it as a foregone conclusion that Sicinius Aemilianus would for sheer lack of any real ground for accusation cram his indictment with mere vulgar abuse; for the old rascal is notorious for his unscrupulous audacity, and, further, launched forth on his task of bringing me to trial in your court before he had given a thought to the line his prosecution should pursue. Now while the most innocent of men may be the victim of false accusation, only the criminal can have his guilt brought home to him. It is this thought that gives me special confidence, but I have further ground for self-congratulation in the fact that I have you for my judge on an occasion when it is my privilege to have the opportunity of clearing philosophy of the aspersions cast upon her by the uninstructed and of proving my own innocence. Nevertheless these false charges are on the face of them serious enough, and the suddenness with which they have been improvised makes them the more difficult to refute. For you will remember that it is only four or five days since his advocates of malice prepense attacked me with slanderous accusations, and began to charge me with practice of the black art and with the murder of my step-son Pontianus. I was at the moment totally unprepared for such a charge, and was occupied in defending an action brought by the brothers Granius against my wife, Pudentilla. I perceived that these charges were brought forward not so much in a serious spirit as to gratify my opponents' taste for wanton slander. I therefore straightway challenged them, not once only, but frequently and emphatically, to proceed with their accusation. The result was that Aemilianus, perceiving that you, Maximus, not to speak of others, were strongly moved by what had occurred, and that his words had created a serious scandal, began to be alarmed and to seek for some safe refuge from the consequences of his rashness.

2. Therefore as soon as he was compelled to set his name to the indictment, he conveniently forgot Pontianus, his own brother's son, of whose death he had been continually accusing me only a few days previously. He made absolutely no mention of the death of his young kinsman[6]; he abandoned this most serious charge, but—to avoid the appearance of having totally abandoned his mendacious accusations—he selected, as the sole support of his indictment, the charge of magic—a charge with which it is easy to create a prejudice against the accused, but which it is hard to prove. Even that he had not the courage to do openly in his own person, but a day later presented the indictment in the name of my step-son, Sicinius Pudens, a mere boy, adding that he