Groningen Commentary On Apuleius Metamorphoses 10 Volume Set

Zimmerman presents a new edition of Apuleius' Metamorphoses, which was written in the second century AD and is the only ancient Latin novel to survive in its entirety. In establishing her new text edition, Zimmerman has built on important recent research on the language and style of the literary artist Apuleius.

Apuleius’ Golden Ass and the Lucianic Loukios, or the Ass depend on and play with readers’ familiarity with the clear patterns of Greek and Roman stories of metamorphosis. The formulaic nature of these stories suggests that the appearance of a god at the end of the Golden Ass is unsurprising and that the end of the Loukios is more innovative. This context also sheds new light on the function of the Cupid and Psyche story, the meaning of these works’ titles, and the lost Metamorphoseis on which they are both based and of which the Golden Ass is a translation.

This is the first volume dedicated to the topic of characterisation in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, the Latin novel from the second century CE. The subject has not been ignored in recent scholarship on individual characters in the work, but the lack of an earlier general overview of the topic reflects the general history of scholarship on the Metamorphoses. Literature on Apuleius’ novel until the 1960s centred around the issue of his general literary quality, and some key scholars held distinctly low estimates of Apuleius’ talents. Since 1970, most critics have seen Apuleius as a conscious and effective literary artist, and this is reflected in the emergence of this volume. The volume’s contributors are a distinguished collection of international scholars, many of whom have worked together on the long-established Groningen Commentaries on Apuleius, a project which is currently coming to completion. No ideological line has been imposed, and contributors have been free to offer their thoughts on how the text of the novel presents particular characters, including divine ones. The volume covers the whole of the novel and all the significant characters, and will constitute a substantial contribution to the interpretation of the most important Latin novel to survive complete from the ancient world.