Metamorphoses: A Master’s View of a Slave Narrative

E. Del Chrol (Marshall University)

I will consider Apuleius’ Metamorphoses not simply as an allegory for slave experience, as many have before (e.g. Lindsay 1964, Kennedy 2000), but as if it were a master’s view of a slave narrative, or, in other words, an attempt by an elite to construct the subjectivity of a non-elite. Considering the work in terms of constructed non-elite subjectivity casts new light on previous work on Metamorphoses as a journey to a religious conversion (Shumate 1996), as religious propaganda (Tatum 1979), as literary play (Winkler 1985), as philosophical argument (Schlam 1992) and as critique of the Roman social world and its practice of slavery. For example, Lindsay (1964:22) describes the baker’s scene in Book 7 as “the only passage in the whole of ancient literature which realistically looks at and examines the conditions of slave exploitation on which the whole of the ancient world rested.” But is a realistic examination the same as sympathy to slaves, religious converts or non-Italic elites? I assert that for all of Apuleius’ gritty realism regarding lower classes or lampoons of elite behaviors, his work is indeed not sympathetic to the former, let alone subversive of the latter, but rather a tool of Roman hegemony.

The argument will proceed in three stages. First, it will delineate how the characteristics and activities of Lucius as ass are coterminous with the stereotypical characteristics and activities of slaves as seen in ancient theorists of slavery like Aristotle in Politics, Xenophon in Memorabilia, Seneca in his epistles and also in Roman law. Metamorphoses plays out a drama of the life cycle of a slave along the “wheel of fortune.” Apuleius’ obsession with Lucius’ body as motivation, liability and plot device correspond to a corporeal emphasis in treatment of slaves: punishment, reward, and labor are all rooted in the body. Indeed, as slavery to his appetites impels Lucius’ transformation, his situation accords with the slaver’s ideology that moral or intellectual inferiority cause an individual’s servitude (Patterson 1991, Schiavone 2000).

Second, I will consider Lucius’ transformation into a man and priest as a critique of manumission. Under Roman law freedmen did not gain the same rights as freeborn citizen, yet did achieve legal protection, limited citizenship and an erasure of what Patterson calls “social death.” In Lucius case, though he ceases being a donkey he does not cease being an ass. The Isis book casts our protagonist as a ridiculous and contemptible character as many freed must have seemed to the free.

Third, I return to Apuleius’ Metamorphoses as if it were (to use an anachronism) a master’s view of a slave narrative. The friction between the point of view of the master and his creation of slave subjectivity provides insights into the mind of a master. When the evidence from my first section is reconsidered in terms of whether it is sympathetic to slaves, we can see how deeply co-opted Apuleius was into the hegemonic culture of the Romans: to wit, the humor of Metamorphoses deflates critique of the center by the periphery, or critiques of hierarchical, Italo-centric or Mediterranean culture, and ultimately reinforces the inequities it calls into relief.