Apuleius, The Golden Ass, and the Story of Thelyphron

I am Regina My I am working at the University of Leeds.

I'm specialist in upper layers,

and today we're going to look at your set text of upper Layers, the Sicilian,

which is in metamorphosis book, too.

So I'm going to start with setting it into the context of a player's life.

Now a player's lived from about 125 295 a. D. Nobody knows exactly.

He called himself a platonic philosopher

and he had interests in all kinds of things, lots of philosophy.

But he also wrote books about natural history, about animals, about trees.

Most of these are now lost.

Um, the only thing we really know about his life that in 158 or 159 a. D.

He was put on trial for witchcraft.

He was accused of using love magic to make his future wife fall in love with him,

and the trial went ahead.

And what we know about it is from his defence speech called

apology or upper layers on the defence against accusations of magic.

The speech that we have shows that a polio's

knows quite a lot about ancient magic and witchcraft,

and he knows everything from love,

magic to the ingredients commonly used by magicians and witches.

He did win the case because, uh,

he we know that he wrote some things after that because one of the

worst things you can do in the ancient world is using witchcraft on people.

It's one of the very few things where there's a possible death penalty.

It's worse than murder.

And this is relevant because the story you're

reading is all about witchcraft and magic.

Our players is apart from knowing about witchcraft.

He is mostly known for his book called The Metamorphosis, or the Golden Ass,

which I believe was written about the one seventies 80.

It's in 11 books

and you're set.

Passage is from book to, uh it showcases again Apple ASUs,

knowledge of ancient magic and also neck romantic rituals.

So the context of the whole novel is important. What, you're reading something.

I'm going to give you a little summary of the novel.

So this tale is all about this young man Lucius,

who's a young philosopher who travels to Thessaly, which is in northern Greece,

and it's the land of witchcraft in the ancient world.

Lucius is curious about witchcraft. He has read so much about it in his books,

and he wants to find out more.

He

at the beginning encounters various other

travellers who tell him tales about witchcraft

and how powerful and deadly these witches are.

Lucius, uh, does not heed these warnings,

and these stories are clearly intended as warnings.

For example, in Book one before your set scene, there's the tale of aristo,

minis and Socrates.

Not that Socrates, uh, this is not a philosopher at all,

but Aristotle Minis tells him the story about a wenge fel,

which managing to break through a locked door in an in

and killing her runaway love of Socrates with magical means

by thrusting a sword into his chest via his throat,

pulling out his heart and replacing it with a sponge of all things.

And his helpless friend Aris Terminus can only

watch without being able to defend himself,

because the witches half magically frozen him on the spot

the next morning, rather, to everybody's surprise, Socrates wakes up

and arsed Ominous is completely astonished, but they leave the in

until that moment when Socrates bends over

river in order to drink

the sponge falls out of his wound and he dies again,

this time forever.

And the traumatised aristo minis can only bury him.

No, Lucius, our hero of the whole novel,

does not learn his lesson

to stay away from which is at all

and on arrival in HIPAA to which is

the first town across the border

into Thessaly. So he is now in Sicily, the land of the witches.

He stays with his host, Milo, and his wife, Pamphili,

and he will soon learn

that Pamphili is the most powerful, which in Thessaly

Lucius is intrigued

and persuades Milos, servant girl

to help him watch the witch do her magic.

And indeed, one night he observes her,

turning herself into an owl with the help of a magical lotion.

When a servant girl tries to help him

to become a bird as well,

she is not very good with the magic, it turns out she takes the wrong lotion

and turns Lucius accidentally into a donkey

as a donkey with a human mind

but unable to speak.

He then travels basically like black beauty through Greece,

and he has many more stories until,

in the end he is rescued by the Egyptian goddess Isis.

So it's all about Egypt coming in here.

Isis is the goddess of healing and of magic,

and she helps lose.

She's become human again, and that ends the story with him becoming her priest.

Now, early on in the novel, while he is still in HIPAA to

Lucius visits his Aunt Marina for a dinner party,

and that happens in Book two.

And during that party, he here's another story about Sicilian witches,

their ability to turn into animals and ruthlessness, which can kill their victims.

This is the story of telephone, which is your, said text.

Lucius hears it,

but again, he does not heed the warning.

Instead, it fires him up even more

As you can probably tell,

there are lots of similarities between the story of Aristotle Minis in Book one

and of telephone in Book two.

Um, and as you know,

repetition is a really good tool to make people

understand things more to make a lesson sinking.

But Lucius really should learn his lesson.

But throughout the novel, he just is never that bright

and hardly ever realises what's good for him, which is why he ends up as a donkey.

So instead he remains deeply curious about magic

and witchcraft,

and especially wants to know if humans transformed into animals,

think like animals or retain the human thought processes.

He then finds out as a donkey

that he can still think but just not communicate.

Our story showcases the same idea

of a human transformed into a weasel

but able to use magic for all purposes and therefore keeping her human mind.

It is therefore one of the stories that set the scene

for Lucius transformation and introduce the power of the salient,

which is

to apologises readers.

It goes beyond the story of aristo Minis in Book One,

because they're the corpse does speak on its own accord,

even though really only to complain that the hospitality in that in is really,

really bad.

But here the corpse has to be interrogated by a specialist,

as we shall see on that specialist is an Egyptian priest,

which links the ending of our story with that of the novel as a whole.

In both cases,

it is an Egyptian priest who works out the truth here.

Zach Atlas reveals the mystery of how the rich man from Teresa died,

and at the end of the novel,

the Isis priest helps the donkey to become Lucius the human again.

So what happens in our story? There's a quick summary here now.

So as a young man, telephone is in Larissa,

at the centre of Thessaly.

As he's broke, he agrees to guard a corpse in the night before the funeral.

He's told to guard carefully and not to fall asleep as the witches in

Thessaly like to transform themselves into animals

in order to steal body parts from corpses

for the nefarious magical purposes.

The widow retires for the night after checking

officially that her dead husband's faces unharmed.

Telephone starts, his vigil a little scared, but awake

until a small weasel

comes into the room

and stares at him,

he shushed Is it away but immediately falls into a deep death like sleep.

We're meant to realise that it has been magically induced by the witch who came in

as a weasel.

When he wakes up the next morning,

the corpses checked.

It is unharmed on telephone is paid, while the corpses then carried to the funeral.

An old man, the corpses uncle,

interrupts with the accusation that his nephew has been murdered by his widow,

who wanted his money

to spend with her adulterous boyfriend

To prove the crime,

the uncle has hired an itinerant Egyptian priest

to perform a necromancy.

The corpse wakes up and accuses his widow of murder

as proof that he is talking the truth. He points at telephone.

Telephone was magically comatose,

the, which is called the name of the corpse,

to force it to come to a crevice in the wall

so they would cut off his nose and ears.

Only then

do we realise

that the corpse is also called telephone,

and that when the witch called the name telephone,

the dead corpse and the living man

Oh,

in the death like sleep,

both arise.

But as the living man is not quite as dead as the corpse, he's a little bit quicker

and reaches the crevice first

and therefore

telephone the living one has his ears and nose

cut off and replaced with wax replica replicas.

So telephone touches his nose

and it falls off.

The corpse

Realise, has spoken the truth,

too. Ashamed of his mutilation.

He never returns home to my litres, but stays in Thessaly,

where he meets Lucius in Chipata and tells him his sorry tale,

a warning against witches,

their powers

and curiosity

to understand therefore, how are seen works on its own. And as part of the wider

picture,

we will need to look at this alien, which is

an Egyptian necromancy, in the next

sessions.