Historical Context

Hi,

My name is Regina My I am associate professor in

language and literature in Latin at the University of Leeds.

And today I'm going to be talking to you about

apple layers and his tale of Cupid and psyche.

I'm going to start off with giving you a little bit of a

player's historical background and the literary context in which he was writing.

He was born in about 125 a. D in North Africa.

What is now Algeria called model broke near Carthage,

and he worked in the most peaceful period in the Roman Empire

under the so called good Emperors and nine Aspires and Marcus Aurelius.

In the second century under Antoninus Pius Rome

and its vast empire of a very well administered

there were no walls or if there were walls on the fringe of the Empire. So everybody

who felt they were Roman was living a very peaceful life.

And that meant there was money and time for large cultural programmes.

They were building useful things, like the water supply for Rome or theatres,

and there was generally a great flourishing of the arts.

Um, no Roman nobility could therefore focus on benefiting the local society,

and they could make their names with, uh, what it's called you.

Urgent is, um,

with doing good things for the community

rather than focusing on expansionist wars.

So Rome at the centre but also Rome's provinces, including northern Africa,

really flourished.

Apple Alias was the son of a miner elite in that province,

and he later became a high priest of the local culture.

He was one of those people who did, uh, live and experience this peaceful Rome.

What happened in the second century therefore,

was a focus on literature lesson overt politics in the period.

So Roman provincials like Apple A as in Northern Africa are no exception.

So there was a certain amount of admiration for Greek literature

and philosophy,

and there were tensions between the Roman political

rule over Greece and most of the Mediterranean.

But at best there was of subject to mild comment in Greek literature. Generally,

the best period to be alive as a Roman was the second century a. D.

The literature of the period does not focus on politics.

Um,

your perhaps used to that from reading Cicero or

Tacitus that politics is very much of the foreground,

not in the second century.

A D.

Instead,

they focus on entertainment and philosophy quite often with

a kind of whimsical look at the glorious past.

In Greece at the time,

there was a literary movement called the second Sophisticated Um,

which looked at literary forms which focused on entertainment,

entertaining speeches, fiction not on politics.

And that was meaning entertainment for the masses. Um,

you would go to a theatre was full of thousands of people listening to one of

those soffits give a declamation a speech on any kind of topic you can imagine.

Um, Greek cultural elite, um, would do that kind of entertainment.

And they looked back

very much to the period of when Greek was great.

Greece was great during Athens heyday of the fifth century B. C.

So it was a kind of intellectual nostalgia.

Apple alias, of course. He balls a Roman.

Uh, he places himself in this kind of movement he wrote in Greek and in Latin.

But we don't have his Greek speeches anymore. We only have his Latin works. Um,

and, uh, speeches like that we have of him are

his defence speech, and I'm going to say a little bit about that later,

but also speeches like those Salafists would give.

And they have topics like how to get Indian parents to speak or the

weird deaths of famous writers or the

nature of philosophies about entertaining pieces.

And he shares some of the interests of those Greeks office.

But he has adapted them to the Roman to the Latin world.

So he sees himself in many ways as of the Roman answer.

The Latin answer to those Greek second Salafists, Um,

he himself was a learned restoration.

Um, he was also a philosopher of so called Middle Platini is, um

and he was a traveller. He travelled during his early life to Greece,

to Rome

to Carthage, other places in northern Africa. He went to Turkey to Ephesus.

All these places were centres where those Greek Salafists taught and entertained,

and a polio himself wanted a little bit of that.

So he became an orator in Carthage, and he entertained and taught his audiences.

And as he lived in Rome and in Athens before, he is not some sort of provincial,

weird person.

He's actually far travelled,

and he is one of those mega stars of philosophy and speaking.

And whenever in Carthage, as of local politician needed to be praised,

our players was rolled out, so he was the local, um, superstar.

Even so, he was very famous at the time, and they were even statues erected to him.

Um, we know very little of his life.

The only data we know for certain is that he

was put on trial for his life in Northern Africa.

In Sabratha in 158159 a. D.

And we only know about this trial for witchcraft because we have his defence speech.

But some of his works, including the novel and Cupid and Psyche,

are written after the date of that speech.

We know that he won because witchcraft using magic is one of the very few things.

If you're convicted of that, that would get you killed.

You could kill somebody in Rome. They would only send you to exile.

If you use witchcraft on somebody, they execute you.

And he survived.

What has happened is that he, um on the way back from Athens when he was a student,

he fell ill in,

uh uh had to spend some time with his friend Pontianak in their house to recuperate.

Um,

Pontianak.

His mother, um, was about 15 years older than Apple is, and she fell in love with him

and she married him.

All of her family was very unhappy about going

this rich widows money going to this upstart players.

And so they decided to get rid of him,

and they accused him of using witchcraft to make her fall in love with him.

And we have his speech and self defence, and that is how we know about this.

And the strategy of defence that he uses is relevant

to what we're going to do with Cuban and psyche.

He uses literature, philosophy,

rhetoric in order to make the opposition look stupid

and to show off his own rhetorical skills.

He also was a philosopher, so he wrote works on philosophy,

and, uh, he wrote accessible books about it.

He didn't invent any new ideas, but he wanted to explain Plato to the masses.

So he was very fond of this Greek philosopher from the classical period of

Athens and wanted to entertain and educate the Carthaginians of 700 years later.

So he wrote, um,

not very deep philosophy but popularising ideas of Plato's concepts,

something like the nature of the soul or the biography of Plato.

And one of the things that was keen on telling

us is how the humans relate to the divine,

Um, and for him, between the gods

and the humans, they are messengers,

their travel between the gods and us.

And in a sense, those messengers are immortal and therefore quite like God,

but only just about, like God's their intermediaries.

And this is important

because one of the intermediaries he discusses is Cupid, the god of love,

and in his novel he makes him one of his heroes.

And in the next section, I want to tell you about what Apple is most known for.

His novel A player says, Golden Ass or Metamorphosis

and Cupid and Psyche is one of the most important sections in that story.