Apuleius Madaurensis – serie

After more than three decades since the publication of Gwyn Griffiths’ 1975 commentary, which concentrated mainly on Egyptological aspects and represents an outdated, positivistic approach to the literary evidence on Isis, this new commentary presents a new and thorough assessment of Apuleius’ Isis Book, elucidating and interpreting the narrative in its literary, religious, archaeological and cultural context. Reflecting the recent innovative approach to the interaction of literature and religion (Literarisierung von Religion) and the important developments in the research on the Second Sophistic (e.g. ‘Self-fashioning’; Cultural Identity), the volume offers a new, detailed interpretation of the Isis Book in the easy-to-use form of a fully-fledged commentary, including Latin Text and monographic Introduction.

Adventure, sex, magic, robbery, and dramatic declamatory displays play a central role in the plot of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses III. This volume completes the prestigious Groningen Commentaries on Apuleius series, which is available in its entirety as a digital resource as well: Apuleius Online. This volume on book III presents a new text of Metamorphoses III provided with an English translation and a full commentary, which covers literary, linguistic, textual, narratological, and socio-cultural matters. The introduction casts new light on many aspects of Apuleius’ novel, including its relationship with its lost Greek model, with the Greek love novels and with other genres (epic, poetry, declamation), Apuleius’ elaborate style, the narratological features of book III and its main themes. An appendix is devoted to the manuscript transmission of the Metamorphoses: it factors in new textual evidence gathered from the first examination of several recentiores since Oudendorp (1786) and Hildebrand (1842).