Epilogue. From Diana via Venus to Isis: Viewing the Deity with Apuleius

Elsner, Jaś

Save Cite Share

Free

Epilogue. From Diana via Venus to Isis: Viewing the Deity with Apuleius

Jaś Elsner

Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text

THE FIRST CHAPTER OF THIS BOOK proposed an account of two forms of visuality in the ancient world—a mimesis-related culture of viewing, and entertaining the fantasies...

Author

Jaś Elsner

PublisherPrinceton University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-32022

Epilogue. From Diana via Venus to Isis: Viewing the Deity with Apuleius

The first chapter of this book proposed an account of two forms of visuality in the ancient world—a mimesis-related culture of viewing, and entertaining the fantasies evoked by, statues or paintings and a ritual-centered visuality in which sacred images functioned to open a door to the other world. Both these forms of visuality involve desire and viewer investment, but the first is largely “horizontal,” taking in social and personal relationships with others (as evoked through images), while the second is largely “vertical,” involving the relationship with divine powers or forces as embodied in images. Successive chapters have sought to exemplify, instantiate, and elaborate both these forms of viewing. One way perhaps to frame the polarity is by means of a passage in Pausanias about the sanctuary of the Mistress near Acacesium in Arcadia: “On the right as you go out of the temple there is a mirror fitted into the wall. If anyone looks into the mirror, he will see himself very dimly indeed or not at all, but the actual images of the god and the throne will be seen quite clearly” (8.37.7).1With Frontisi-Ducroux and Vernant (1997), 196–99, and Platt (2002b), 44. In “vertical” visuality, the individual subjectivity of the ritual-sensitive viewer, like Pausanias’ temple visitor, is elided into a world of cult and sacred realities where ultimately the presence of the god looms large and dominates. Even if not entirely eclipsed, personal identity is subsumed by a larger divine reality before which the individual is placed. As one gazes into the mirror at Acacesium, what one sees is not oneself but the god. By contrast, in “horizontal” visuality, the viewer’s own needs or appropriations come to dominate the world of the image (and the image imagined as real)—in extreme cases, to the delusive extents dramatized by the Greco-Roman accounts of Encolpius, Pygmalion, or Narcissus and others.

Yet in the end it is not so simple or so schematic. I conclude by complicating my opening polarity. As we have seen, even in the most extreme instances of sexual desire as viewer-investment (for instance the narratives and images of Narcissus or the story of Pygmalion), antiquity did not fully separate the magical effects of divine intervention from its portrayal of the psychopathologies of visual attraction. In the fresco of Narcissus from the Casa di M. Loreius Tiburtinus (Pompeii, II.2.2–5), what looks like a Gorgon’s head is made to float in the water as Narcissus’ reflected face (figure 6.8). In Ovid’s story of Pygmalion, Venus herself intervenes to turn the desired ivory into flesh. Although conceptually we may separate visualities and ways of viewing, in the lived experience of actual people (whether Greeks and Romans or moderns today) shifts, combinations, and inconsistencies in ways of viewing are easy, frequent, and unsystematic. In effect viewers—even in sacred contexts—can shift between what I have called vertical and horizontal visualities at ease and at will; they may be skeptical as well as collusive, polemical as well as apologetic, about the effects of religious images.

Just as the supreme ancient accounts of the effects of naturalism find themselves bordering on the edge of the supernatural, so the most religiously centered descriptions of divine vision tend to withhold actual epiphany. When it comes to addressing the actual divine confrontation to which the complex of ritual and pilgrimage in ancient religion was to lead the worshipper (we might say the worshipping viewer or the viewer defined as worshipper), we find ourselves beset with problems. Actual cult images (as opposed to their replicas) rarely survive and never in the impressive architectural and visual contexts which were designed to empower them,2On cult images, see Gladigow (1985/6); Scheer (2000), 131–46; Bettinetti (2001); and see Lapatin (2001) on the chryselephantine examples. and our texts on matters of epiphany are deeply, deliberately, and often brilliantly ambivalent.3This is the independent conclusion of two excellent recent theses: Stevens (2002) and Platt (2003). See also Platt (2002b). One might argue that Lucian’s account of the “Hera” of Hierapolis, holding the gaze of all who approach her, discussed in chapter 1, is one of our most vivid glimpses of how ancient gods appeared to the worshipping viewer. But the most personal descriptions of such epiphanies tend to revolve not on statues as such but—like Aurelian’s vision of Apollonius—on dreams and waking visions where the gods take on the appearances of their statues.

The classic instance is Lucius’ vision of Isis in the eleventh book of the Golden Ass, whose interpretation happens also to be one of the trickiest, most elusive, and controversial issues in all Latin literature.4For useful summaries of the literature, see Finkelpearl (1998), 24–28, and Harrison (2000), 235–38. Generally on the history of interpretations of Apuleius, see Harrison (2002). The key problem (once one accepts the text’s coherence and unity, which is to say also its literary value) is whether the religion of Book 11 is sincere, or parodic and satirical. The fundamental reading (leading to an aporetic view of the text’s position on this) is Winkler (1985), especially 404–47. Other useful discussions of the Isis book include Griffiths (1975); Penwill (1975); Schlam (1992), 113–22; Shumate (1996), 285–328; Finkelpearl (1998), 199–217; Harrison (2000), 238–52; and Egelhaaf-Gaiser (2000), 30–37, 74–102. But it is worth noting that the problem of sincerity is precisely the same one to have bedeviled other elegantly contrived literary works on religious topics in antiquity, notably Lucian’s De Dea Syria (see Lightfoot, 2003, 184–89, 196–221). In principle, I think this a difficulty largely of our own making—a secular modernist and postmodernist self-distancing from the investments and emotive effects of religion (not only in antiquity) that transfers our problems in this area onto the texts we read. Indeed the Golden Ass as a whole—a single work probably written around A.D. 170 or 180, touching richly on many of the visualities which we have been exploring here—is perhaps the perfect test case for the difficulties of separating viewing in a sacred frame from that of nonreligious naturalism. The fact that its modern interpretations veer from a denial of any kind of artistic unity,5See especially Perry (1967), 242–45. to the affirmation of a straightforward religious allegory,6See Merkelbach (1962), 1–90. to the hypersophisticated ironical take on religious commitment7Especially Harrison (2000), 238–52. expresses in nuce the problems of studying Roman subjectivity and viewing. Two problems especially stand out. First, we have the fundamental difficulty of divorcing our own cultural and often unconscious presuppositions and prejudices (especially on matters of religion and supremely when they are expressed as common sense) from our picture of how the Romans saw and experienced the world. This is, of course, impossible, although being self-conscious and aware of our limitations is a start. It is here that the critical readings of the Golden Ass effectively reveal much deeper (and often conflicting) reflexes about culture and religion in the critics themselves than they necessarily illuminate the Ass. Second, the Greeks and Romans, as I hope this book has shown, did not offer any less complex a culture of contradictory visualities than our own world. In attempting to understand them, we study not one thing but many, not a harmony but a babble of voices.

The Golden Ass alludes to a series of works of art and their viewings in the course of the travels of Lucius, its protagonist—most notably, images of deities.8See Egelhaaf-Gaiser (2000), 116–45, on ekphrasis in general in the Golden Ass, and especially 117–25 on Götterbilder. Most impressively at 2.4, there is the atrium of Byrrhena’s house in Thessaly with its statues of palm-bearing goddesses,9See Peden (1985); Slater (1998), 27–8; and Mal-Maeder (2001), 94–95. and its remarkable marble group representing Diana and Actaeon, which was discussed briefly at the beginning of chapter 7.10See Winkler (1985), 168–70; Shumate (1996), 67–71; Laird (1997), 62–64; Slater (1998), 26–37; Merlier-Espenel (2001); Mal-Maeder (2001), 91–93, 98–113; and Paschalis (2002), 135–39. Much has been said about this passage as presaging the later action of the novel (as Byrrhena says to Lucius, “everything you see belongs to you,” 2.5) from the bestial metamorphosis of Actaeon via the dangers of curiosity (Actaeon’s curioso optutu—his curious gaze, 2.4).11On curioso optutu (or curiosum optutum) as the crucial interpretative steer in this ekphrasis, see Mal-Maeder (2001), 109–12. For curiosity as a central theme of the novel, see, for example, Wlosok (1999) and DeFilippo (1999). The potential implication here of the predictive qualities of art was already prepared at the beginning of Book 2 in Lucius’ frenetic thoughts about magic when he remarks “soon statues and pictures would begin to talk, walls to speak” (2.1).

But for our purposes it is worth noting Apuleius’ juxtaposition of visualities in this ekphrasis. On the columns in the atrium’s four corners stand “statues, likenesses of palm-bearing goddesses; their wings were outspread, but instead of moving, their dewy feet barely touched the slippery surface of a rolling sphere; they were positioned as though stationary, but you would think them to be in flight” (2.4). Here, divine figures (who may or may not be concealed prefigurations of Isis)12If one follows Peden (1985), 382–83. are nonetheless seen in terms of illusionistic naturalism—static, “but you would think them to be in flight.”13See Mal-Maeder (2001), 94–98, with bibliography. The Diana and Actaeon group—a “splendid image” (signum perfecte luculentum, 2.4)—is described with all the standard ekphrastic emphasis on naturalistic detail. Diana’s robe billows in the breeze; she runs forward vividly, coming to meet you as you enter; the dogs are so convincing you would think them to be barking if you heard the sound of dogs from next door; their sculptor is a superb craftsman, making the dogs seem to run; the landscaping is spectacular:

Up under the very edge of the rock, hung apples and the most skillfully polished grapes which art, rivaling nature, displayed to resemble reality. . . . If you bent down and looked into the pool that runs along by the goddess’ feet shimmering in a gentle wave, you would think that the bunches of grapes hanging there, as if in the country, possessed the quality of movement, among all other aspects of reality. (2.4)

The revelry in illusion is such that not only is the marble carving realistic but even its realization of its own reflection in water (whether this is carved water or real water, implying the described statue to be a fountain group at the atrium’s central impluvium, is left unclear) has the power to make one imagine it were real.14Cf. also the reflection of Actaeon in the spring at 2.4. On the reflection theme, see Slater (1998), 40–46. The illusionist thematics of this passage appear to relate also to the classic Roman texts about naturalism—so the grapes recall Pliny’s Zeuxis and Parrhasius story (Natural History 35.65–66), while the invitation to look into a pool reflects Narcissus. Yet we are reminded that Diana is “awesome with the sublimity of godhead” (maiestate numinis venerabile, 2.4). That awesomeness meets those who enter the room (introeuntibus obvium), while the eyes of her dogs threaten (oculi minantur). The description ends with the viewer’s looking at the doomed Actaeon, already turning into a stag, who is himself looking at the goddess with a curious glance (curioso obtutu): the naturalistic gaze of curiosity and its framing as the voyeurism of both Actaeon looking at the goddess and Lucius looking at Actaeon, is already offset by the hint of a more worrying supernatural gaze.

Later in the same book, the maid Photis arrives for her first night of passion with Lucius:

Without a moment’s delay, she whipped away all the dishes, stripped herself of all her clothes and let down her hair. With joyous wantonness she beautifully transformed herself into the picture of Venus rising from the ocean waves (in speciem Veneris quae marinos fluctus subit). For a time she even held one rosy little hand in front of her smooth-shaven pubes, purposely shadowing it rather than modestly hiding it. “Fight,” she said, “and fight fiercely, since I will not give way and I will not turn back. Close in and make a frontal assault, if you are a real man.” (2.17)

As has been pointed out, the text evokes famous images here—not only Apelles’ painting of the Venus Anadyomene but also Praxiteles’ sculpture of Aphrodite of Cnidos, whose hand quivers in the ambivalence between defense or suggestion (see the ancient replica at figure 5.2).15See, for example, Schlam (1992), 71–72; Laird (1997), 64–65; Slater (1998), 20–24; and Egelhaaf-Gaiser (2000), 119–20. On this theme in the Aphrodite of Cnidos, see, for example, R. Osborne (1994), 81–85; R. Osborne (1998), 231–35; and Platt (2002b), 33–36, 44. Even Photis’ shaved pudenda evoke the hairlessness of ancient statues and in particular that of the Aphrodite of Cnidos, whose lack of pubic hair defies her celebrated naturalism.16See, for example, Smith (1991), 83; D’Ambra (1996), 225 (with a long bibliography at n. 30); and Stewart (1997), 99. As these writers point out, even more deficient of naturalism is her lack of a sculpted vulva. That the most celebrated erotic female statue in antiquity—and indeed ancient nude sculpture of females in general—should deny naturalistic rendition in this arena (by contrast with the rendition of male genitalia) and in the context of repeated narratives that fantasize the image’s penetration, speaks volumes about some fundamental cultural problems in relation to eroticism which must be said to precede Christianity’s culture of resistance to sexuality. In this sense, the appearance of Photis as refracted in Lucius’ first-person wish-fulfillment account of seduction is a case of life imitating art, by contrast with the repeatedly emphasized naturalism of the Diana and Actaeon group—where the marble imitates reality. Yet in emulating Praxiteles’ famous statue down even to the pudenda, Photis takes on the sex—rather than the divine majesty—of Venus. One might add that the description of the Venus Pudica posture is one cultivated by Latin literature for moments of sexual excess (on which the full polemic of the moral rhetoric of decadence can descend)—as in the Historia Augusta’s extraordinary account of Elagabalus in the role of Venus, taken here by Photis, for the benefit of a male “partner in depravity” (H.A. Elagabalus 5.4–5). The emphasis in Photis’ speech on frontal assault appears to comment on discussions like that in Lucian’s Amores 17 about which way a “new Anchises” might attempt to penetrate the Cnidian statue.17See briefly chapter 5. The description of their lovemaking, with Photis sitting on top of Lucius, further complicates the dynamics here (the warrior is certainly attacked and conquered rather than being the attacker), while the phrase “if you are a man” is highly ironic given Lucius’ imminent metamorphosis into a donkey at the hands of Photis. Later, in the sex scene at 3.20, “Photis of her own generosity played the boy’s part (puerile) with me as a bonus,” hence reversing her declaration at 2.17 of not turning her back on Lucius. Apart from the erotic frissons of all this, it seems a further telling commentary on the Aphrodite of Cnidos theme, reduced again to pure sexual gratification. One wonders if the implicit punishments that fall on Lucius (becoming an ass) and on the boy in pseudo-Lucian’s Amores (his suicide at Amores 16) are not the result of attempting to use Aphrodite in his way—as a boy (cf. Amores 17). But most pertinent to the issue of visuality here is the way a famous set of artistic likenesses of a goddess are summoned not for divine vision or to evoke the sublimity of godhead but to spice up sexual intercourse. Statuary here is a masquerade and Venus (qua goddess) is a fake. Within the structure of the novel one might see Photis’ role-play in the form of Venus here as a very dangerous because transgressive, even potentially metamorphic, act, hinting at the future development of the plot. In this section, she may be “Venus,” but later in the novel she plays the “Diana” role in the narrative of Lucius-as-Actaeon, when by mistake she is responsible for his metamorphosis into an ass (3.21–25).

The theme of the masquerade of Venus—where a woman takes on the role and image of the goddess (or has it foisted upon her)—runs through the Golden Ass.18See Laird (1997), 65–69. Generally on theatricality and spectacle, see Slater (2003). Psyche, for instance, who is admired “as people admire an exquisitely finished statue” (4.32), is offered “prayers as if she were the very goddess Venus herself” (4.28–29), thus inciting Venus’ wrath at 4.29–31.19See, for example, Shumate (1996), 252–54. Again the Aphrodite of Cnidos is the statue explicitly evoked—this time in the list of Venus sanctuaries abandoned by worshippers as they flock to supplicate Psyche. These are Paphos, Cnidos, and Cythera—of which Cnidos is the one specifically associated with a world-famous statue. Whereas the account of Photis has the human impersonator appropriating Venus to emphasize sex above religion for the benefit of her spectator/lover Lucius (and her vicarious spectators reading the text), the narrative of Psyche has her, albeit innocently, appropriating the sanctity of Venus so that her spectator/worshippers abandon the real goddess in her real temples, emphasizing religion above sex. In both cases, whether through pose or site, the ambivalence of the visuality of the Aphrodite of Cnidos (between sex and religion) is a means for Apuleius to achieve parallel effects—whereby a human figure effectively supplants the divine.

At 10.30–35, Apuleius stages ekphrastically the theatrical performance whose culmination was to be the public exposure of Lucius the ass in sexual intercourse with a condemned woman. Among the warm-up acts is a masque of the Judgment of Paris starring a girl

surpassingly beautiful to look at, with a charming ambrosial complexion, representing Venus as Venus looked when she was a virgin (qualis fuit Venus cum fuit virgo).20This is frankly a truly remarkable idea—could Venus ever be conceived as virginal? She displayed a perfect figure, her body naked and uncovered except for a piece of sheer silk with which she veiled her comely charms. An inquisitive breeze would at one moment blow this veil aside in wanton playfulness so that it lifted to reveal the flower of her youth, and at another moment it would gust exuberantly against it so that it clung tightly and graphically displayed her body’s voluptuousness. (10.31)21On this passage, see Finkelpearl (1991), 223–24; Zimmerman–de Graaf (1993), 147–53, and Zimmerman (2000), 375–78.

Again, as with the position of the Venus-hand in the Photis love scene and the statue of Aphrodite of Cnidos, the coverings explicitly reveal the pudenda they are designed to veil. In the context of explicit and chiastically placed accounts of sexual intercourse in the novel’s second and penultimate books (2.17 and 10.21–22),22See Schlam (1992), 72–73, and Zimmerman (2000), 26. even the wording of lasciviam (2.17) and lasciviens (10.31) has the episodes echoing each other.23Other parallels: the slaves withdraw to ensure the lovers’ privacy (2.15 and 10.20), the use of diminutives (with Zimmerman, 2000, 276). In both this scene and the Photis “epiphany” as Venus, the divine is traduced by being appropriated to human sexual ends, and the complex of mixed visualities, admittedly with a predictive and even threatening edge, implicit in the Atrium sculptures of 2.4, is reduced to a single “horizontal” investment in the image as object of desire.

By contrast, Book 11, the Isis book, opens with Lucius the ass—newly escaped from the imminent threat of “Venus’ embrace” in public with a condemned woman (10.34)—waking from sleep.24There is a clear parallel with the opening of Book 2: see Laird (1997), 70. In general on sleep and dream in the Golden Ass, see Kenaan (2004). Before him is the full moon, which is described as the “sacred image of the goddess now present before me” (augustum specimen deae praesentis, 11.1), picking up on the novel’s thematics of religious images, but this time in the form of a natural aniconic rather than naturalistic man-made image and in the frame of a personal ritual obeisance. Lucius, still an ass, purifies himself by bathing in the sea (plunging in seven times) and then addresses the goddess. In response to his prayer, as he falls asleep, “from the midst of the sea a divine face arose, displaying a countenance worthy of adoration even by the gods. Slowly it appeared until its whole body came into view and, the brine shaken off, a radiant vision stood before me” (11.3). There follows a lengthy ekphrasis of “her wonderful appearance,” especially of the range of her divine accoutrements, including sounds and smells (11.3–4). Then Isis speaks, offering Lucius salvation in the form of metamorphosis from his donkey-form and instructing him in what he must do at her festival to achieve his transformative return to human shape (11.5–6). Immediately the goddess “withdrew into herself,” and Lucius wakes from his mystical sleep (11.7). The narrative then unfolds, recounting the festival of Isis (11.8–17) and Lucius’ miraculous transformation (11.13), after which he undergoes repeated ritual initiations into the mysteries of Isis (11.19–25) and then Osiris (11.27–30).25On Apuleius’ evocation of the Isis cult, see Egelhaaf-Gaiser (2000), 77–84, 251–58.

Significantly, Lucius’ prayer to the queen of heaven addresses her as a series of goddesses—including Ceres, Venus, Diana, and Proserpina (11.2)—but admits that he does not know her true identity: “By whatever name, with whatever rite, in whatever image it is meet to invoke you” (11.2). In her response, Isis accepts these titles and adds more—Cybele, Minerva, Juno, Bellona, Hekate, Rhamnusia, and “my real name which is Queen Isis” (11.5): “My divinity is one, worshipped by all the world under different forms, with various rites and by manifold names” (11.5). In effect the figures of Diana and Venus, whose images Apuleius has used earlier in the book, are subsumed in Isis and turn out to have prefigured her.

In the ritual procession during which Lucius is transformed and in the initiation rites he subsequently performs, there are repeated reversals of earlier false rituals, travesties, and parodies in the novel. The gods deigning to walk with human feet (11.11) reverse the theatrical masquerade of humans performing as god—Paris, Mercury, Juno, Minerva, Venus, and so forth—in 10.30–34. The procession and temple of Isis are replete with holy images.26See 11.16, simulacris rite despositis; 11.17, divinas effigies, simulacra spirantia, vestigiis deae, quae gradibus haerebat argento formata; 11.20, deae venerabilem conspectum; 11.24, deae simulacrum; 11.25, inexplicabili voluptate simulacra divini. These reverse the image possessed by the corrupt eunuch priests of the Syrian Goddess who buy Lucius the ass at 8.24 and use him to carry their statue (8.27, 8.30, 9.10). Likewise the series of sincerely performed rituals and obligations of the Isis cult—culminating in the final image of Lucius, head shaved, like an ancient Hare Krishna, wandering Rome as a priest of Isis (11.30)27See Winkler (1985), 233–37, for discussion.—reverse the false rituals performed to cheat the credulous by the priests of the Syrian Goddess at 8.27–30 and 9.8–9.28The Isis rituals include: abstinence and chastity (11.19); abstinence from certain foods (11.21, 23, 28); head shaving (11.28, 30); ritual baths and sprinklings (11.23); sacred rites and rituals, some secret (11. 22, 23); prayers and libations (11.20).

Strikingly, the scene of Lucius’ first initiation into the mysteries of Isis has him assimilated into statuehood: “I was set up in the guise of a statue (me . . . in vicem simulacri constituto, 11.24).”29Cf. Griffiths (1975), 316–17: “The identity of the mystes and his god could not be more clearly expressed.” He stands before the goddess’ own statue on a wooden base in “very holy attire” consisting of “twelve robes as a sign of consecration.” He is the “focus of attention because of my garment which was only linen, but elaborately embroidered.” Like the goddess in his vision and in her images, he carries accoutrements: “In my right hand I carried a torch alight with flames, and my head was beautifully bound with a crown made of leaves of shimmering palm, jutting out like rays of light.” Standing on his base before the statue of Isis, Lucius effectively forms a statue group with her,30Cf. Slater (1998), 39–40, and (2003), 100. which counterpoints the earlier group of Diana and Actaeon. There Actaeon gazed at the goddess surreptitiously, without performing the necessary rituals and rites of initiate viewing, and was metamorphosed into a quadruped in punishment. Now, metamorphosed back from a quadruped to humanity at the goddess’ own injunction, after a series of initiations that turn him into the perfectly trained ritual viewer, Lucius can gaze at Isis face to face. This new group has Lucius posing as a statue before a cult image, picking up on the masquerade theme of people as images of gods from Book 10, but now as part of the initiate ritual rather than as a travesty. Nothing seems to define the differences of ancient visualities, their apparent and dangerous similarities (in terms of masquerades, the use of common statue forms, the significance of viewing), and the possibilities of passage between them (via a series of misconceived Venuses), than the novel’s move from the Diana and Actaeon group to that of Lucius and Isis.31On contemplative adoration of Isis by Lucius, see Festugière (1954), 80–84. For an intriguing parallel concatenation of images reflecting Diana and Actaeon, the former in the posture of “crouching Venus,” and a bald priest of Isis in the Casa di Loreius Tiburtinus in Pompeii (II.2.2.), see Platt (2002a) and at greater length (2003), 117–133.

It is worth noting that Apuleius clearly likes the formulation of statue groups with a worshipper gazing at a goddess. In the Florida, an anthology of some of his best rhetorical turns, Apuleius writes of the statue of Bathyllus before the altar in the Heraion of Samos, dedicated by the young singer’s lover, the tyrant Polycrates (Florida 15.6–12).32For discussion, see Hunink (2001), 139–41, 143–46. The statue is described at length (“I don’t think I’ve seen anything better (effectius) than this,” 15.6) with several allusions to the love of Polycrates (15.11), including the refutation of the statue’s misidentification as an image of Pythagoras on the grounds that Polycrates was never Pythagoras’ lover (15.6, 12). But as in the group made by Lucius and Isis (by contrast with that of Diana and Actaeon), Bathyllus eschews the amatory for the celebration of deity: “he looks at the goddess (deam conspiciens, 15.8)” and sings to her playing his lyre (15.8–10). Even his robe, “decorated with figures in a variety of colours that reaches down to his feet,” seems to echo the decorations of Lucius’ tunic in the Golden Ass 11.24.

It is as if in the ritual visuality of the sacred (whether one takes Apuleius as sincere or mocking or both), the worshipper is himself reconstituted as image in a divine dispensation that thereby allows the initiate to confront the gods not merely through their images but face to face. The novel concludes (if we can trust the manuscripts regarding its correct ending)33On the mss, see Mal-Maeder (1997), 112–17. with a final vision: “He that is mightiest of the great gods, the highest of the mightiest, the loftiest of the highest and the sovereign of the loftiest, Osiris, appeared to me in a dream. He had not transformed himself into a semblance other than his own, but deigned to welcome me face to face with his own venerable utterance” (11.30). The novel ends with an end to transformations (the god appears as himself) and with Lucius making the choice of self-transformation (through mystical initiation and ritual) rather than being turned into something other than he is.34On this passage, see Laird (1997), 80–85. The willing statue-ification of Lucius is again in contrast with a pattern of petrification and stupefaction that runs through the novel—notably, the way Lucius is “frozen into stone just like one of the other statues or columns in the theatre” (3.10) after the practical joke at his expense during the Risus festival when he is tried for murder (3.2–9), and the city’s offer to him of a bronze statue (3.11), which he rejects.35For a list of such passages, see Winkler (1985), 170–71, though he fails to note the one at 11.24. For Apuleius and the offer of honorific statues, see Florida 16.1, 46–47; also Too (1996), 134–41. For a versatile and sensitive account of statues in the Roman world, see P. Stewart (2003).

The novel effectively negotiates its way through the dual culture of horizontal and vertical visualities characteristic of Greco-Roman antiquity. In every case before Book 11, images of the gods may be capable of divinity but they tend to be traduced—appropriated to the arts of seduction, to the titillation of their viewers or to ripping them off (as in the case of the image of the Syrian Goddess which the galli load on Lucius the donkey’s back). Only in the opening ekphrasis at 2.4 do Diana and Actaeon offer the challenge of a sublime godhead side by side with naturalistic realism and Actaeon’s voyeurism. In Book 11, all this is reversed. We find sacred images, epiphanies, and symbols in abundance—but the question becomes whether Lucius is a dupe (as the leading citizen, vir principalis, is duped by the galli at 8.30) or truly saved, whether we (and Apuleius) are to laud his salvific transformation or lament his further journey into ruin. Certainly his course of initiations leaves him all but financially ruined (11.28),36With, for example, Winkler (1985), 219–23, and Schlam (1992), 121. yet the god’s favor brings him success as a lawyer (11.28, 30)—unless this success is no more than a dupe’s shot at self-justification.

Strictly speaking, in exploring the Golden Ass’s evocation of visualities, it is not necessary to assess the work’s sincerity. What matters is that the attitudes it presents could be sincerely adopted in the Roman world. Here Aelius Aristides is a potent case—since he not only was roughly contemporary with Apuleius but specifically attributed his undoubted success as a sophist to the divine activity of Asclepius.37Effectively the subject of Sacred Tales 4, especially Or 50.15–102, with Harrison (2000–2001), 251–52. On Aristides’ revelations of divinities, see, for example, Festugière (1954), 45–47. Indeed the likes of Aristides might even be construed as a butt of the Golden Ass’s satire, if satirical it is.38See especially Harrison (2000–2001). On Aristides and Apuleius’ both reflecting sincere spirituality, see Festugière (1954), 85–104. Intriguingly, Aristides was also given to visions of Isis:

I was staying at the warm springs, and the goddess [Isis] ordered me to sacrifice two geese to her. I went to the city, having first sent ahead men to look for them, and having told them to meet me at the temple of Isis with the geese. On that day there were no other geese for sale, except only two. When they approached and tried to buy them, the man who raised the geese said that he was not able to sell them, for it was foretold to him by Isis to keep them for Aristides, and he would surely come and sacrifice them. When he learned the whole story he was dumbstruck and making obeisance, gave them to them. And these things I learned at the sacrifice itself. There was also a light from Isis and other unspeakable things which pertained to my salvation. Sarapis also approached in the same night, both he himself and Asclepius. They were marvelous in beauty and in magnitude and in some way like one another. (Sacred Tales 3, Or 49.45–46)

What is striking here is the parallelism with Lucius’ vision. In the Golden Ass, Isis not only appears to Lucius, giving him precise instructions (11.5–6), but simultaneously appears to the priest who will officiate at the procession, priming him too (11.6, 13).39The type is what is called the “double dream vision,” on which see Hanson (1980), 1414–21. For another interesting parallel also from an Egyptian-related context in the second century A.D., see P. Oxy. 11.1381, lines 91–145, with Nock (1933), 86–88, and Hanson (1980), 1416–17. This careful fixing of details in simultaneous dreams may be characteristic of Isis’ divine workings given its inclusion in both accounts, but there is no doubt about the wonder it evokes both in the Sacred Tales and the Golden Ass,40Cf. 11.13, sacerdos miratus; 11.13–14, populi mirantur, ego stupore . . . defixus. The theme of wonder specifically picks up the repetition of wonder at the sight of Psyche at 4.32: mirantur . . . mirantur. and that it is genuine in the case of Aristides, whose Sacred Tales cannot be read as other than sincere. In both the Apuleian and the Aristidean Isis visions, the need for an external audience to witness the miracle occasioned by her parallel visions effects a sacred theatricality which might be said to be a counterpoint to the voyeurism of nonsacred visuality, at least as performed in the Golden Ass.

By staging the range of Roman visualities in relation to a series of statues and statues imitated by characters in the course of his novel, Apuleius frames the gaze between curiosity and reverence. The gaze in the Golden Ass ranges between the intensity of personal revelation (whether sexual as in the case of Lucius and Photis, or sacred as in the visions of Osriris and Isis, or both sacred and sexual as in Psyche’s illicit vision of Cupid at 5.22–23) and the social panopticon of being gazed at while gazing as in the masquerade of 10.30–34 (with its planned culmination in public bestial intercourse) or of religious miracle (when the crowd watches Lucius’ transformation back to man, 11.13, 16) or of mistaken reverence (the collective gaze at Psyche as if she were the statue of a goddess, 4.32). The structure of the novel, literally undertaking a journey into revelation and initiate vision, promises to negotiate the passage between these visualities into the positive joy (gaudens is the text’s penultimate word) of salvific redemption. This parallels the positive structure of the Cupid and Psyche interlude, which ends happily with the divine marriage of the couple and the birth of their daughter Pleasure (Voluptas, 6.24).41On parallels between the Psyche story and the cult-myth of Isis, see Merkelbach (1958) and Krabbe (1989), 93–95. Yet that structure is potentially but persistently undermined with the sense that the sacred visions and initiations may all be self-delusion—on the pattern of the willful deceptions orchestrated by the priests of the Syrian Goddess.42As the old woman who tells the Cupid and Psyche story remarks, “visions which come with naps during the day are said to be false” (4.27)—throwing into relief if not doubt the vision of Isis at 11.3. Likewise the story of Cupid and Psyche, for all its happy ending, emanates from the mouth of a “crazy, drunken old woman” (6.25).43Thus itself putting into doubt the doubts her tale may have raised, as in the previous footnote.

The critical impasse about how to read the Golden Ass44Best expressed, still, by Winkler (1985), for example, 123–32, 247. reflects both the exclusivity of ancient visualities (religious or ritual-centered, on the one hand, and mimetic, on the other) and the inability of modern scholarship and perhaps also Apuleius’ ancient readership to legislate between them or to determine their sincerity unambiguously. Shrewdly, Apuleius chose repeated elliptical references to the Aphrodite of Cnidos as the figure through which to represent this problem—for in no other work of art is the instability of sacred or sexual, the difference between being adored as god and being assaulted as sex object, more acutely clear. Rightly, in his attack on both these arenas of pre-Christian visuality (sex and religion), Clement of Alexandria—a slightly later contemporary of Apuleius and Aelius Aristides, writing in the later second and early third century—was able to dismiss them both together:

If one sees a woman represented naked, one understands it to be “golden” Aphrodite. So the well-known Pygmalion of Cyprus fell in love with an ivory statue: it was of Aphrodite and it was naked. The man of Cyprus is captivated by its shapeliness (schemati) and embraces the statue. . . . There was also an Aphrodite in Cnidos, made of marble and beautiful. Another man fell in love with this and had intercourse with the marble. (Protrepticus 4.50)

But Clement’s choice of the Aphrodite of Cnidos type to deprecate both the sexuality of viewing and its ritual-centeredness (at least in the case of what he took to be idols)45Later in the same passage, Clement is even more explicit about the way illusion beguiles: “for it leads you, though not to be in love with statues and paintings, yet to honour and worship them.”—that is, both the Photis and the Psyche versions of Venus—is of course not only polemical but willful. The Golden Ass, having opened its discourse of statues and goddesses with Diana in the bathing stance of Aphrodite (of Cnidos) takes Lucius through a series of versions of Venus (not only Photis and Psyche but also the masquerade’s personification) to her real identity (vero nomine, 11.5) as Isis—a truly horrifying option for a Clement.

It is as if Apuleius, having laid out the frame of visuality, both as personal epiphany and as social panopticon—the intensity of personal gazing and the potential paranoia of being gazed at while gazing—chooses the key image of ancient religious art around which the mimetic and religious gazes collide. Whether we take the Aphrodite type as Diana, as Photis, as Psyche, as the masquerade Venus, or as Isis is in the end not legislated by any means other than the viewer’s choice. And in making our choice, as the novel’s narrative reveals, there are always prices to pay. The two visualities with which I began this book, and even the gazing (at a naked Venus) of Browning’s epigram which I discussed in the prologue, turn out to flip as two sides of a coin about a single image. At least in the case of Aphrodite, the efforts needed to ensure one kind of viewing over another are great and never wholly secure.

The novel’s final choice of Isis as savior, and of initiation into her cult, is both personal for Lucius and certainly not unambivalently or overtly endorsed by Apuleius. Cult visuality offers a space which, as we have seen in relation to other mystery cults in antiquity, could have a social politics both of collective sectarian identity for religious subgroups and even of resistance to other groups or to more normative authority. It is above all a space where visuality and subjectivity come together in a series of choices about personal belief and social identity. What is perhaps most amazing about the gaze in its ancient discussions and visual exemplification is how potent, wide-ranging, and fundamental are the ramifications entailed by the amazement to which it gave rise.

1 With Frontisi-Ducroux and Vernant (1997), 196–99, and Platt (2002b), 44. »

2 On cult images, see Gladigow (1985/6); Scheer (2000), 131–46; Bettinetti (2001); and see Lapatin (2001) on the chryselephantine examples. »

3 This is the independent conclusion of two excellent recent theses: Stevens (2002) and Platt (2003). See also Platt (2002b). »

4 For useful summaries of the literature, see Finkelpearl (1998), 24–28, and Harrison (2000), 235–38. Generally on the history of interpretations of Apuleius, see Harrison (2002). The key problem (once one accepts the text’s coherence and unity, which is to say also its literary value) is whether the religion of Book 11 is sincere, or parodic and satirical. The fundamental reading (leading to an aporetic view of the text’s position on this) is Winkler (1985), especially 404–47. Other useful discussions of the Isis book include Griffiths (1975); Penwill (1975); Schlam (1992), 113–22; Shumate (1996), 285–328; Finkelpearl (1998), 199–217; Harrison (2000), 238–52; and Egelhaaf-Gaiser (2000), 30–37, 74–102. But it is worth noting that the problem of sincerity is precisely the same one to have bedeviled other elegantly contrived literary works on religious topics in antiquity, notably Lucian’s De Dea Syria (see Lightfoot, 2003, 184–89, 196–221). In principle, I think this a difficulty largely of our own making—a secular modernist and postmodernist self-distancing from the investments and emotive effects of religion (not only in antiquity) that transfers our problems in this area onto the texts we read. »

5 See especially Perry (1967), 242–45. »

6 See Merkelbach (1962), 1–90. »

7 Especially Harrison (2000), 238–52. »

8 See Egelhaaf-Gaiser (2000), 116–45, on ekphrasis in general in the Golden Ass, and especially 117–25 on Götterbilder. »

9 See Peden (1985); Slater (1998), 27–8; and Mal-Maeder (2001), 94–95. »

10 See Winkler (1985), 168–70; Shumate (1996), 67–71; Laird (1997), 62–64; Slater (1998), 26–37; Merlier-Espenel (2001); Mal-Maeder (2001), 91–93, 98–113; and Paschalis (2002), 135–39. »

11 On curioso optutu (or curiosum optutum) as the crucial interpretative steer in this ekphrasis, see Mal-Maeder (2001), 109–12. For curiosity as a central theme of the novel, see, for example, Wlosok (1999) and DeFilippo (1999). »

12 If one follows Peden (1985), 382–83. »

13 See Mal-Maeder (2001), 94–98, with bibliography. »

14 Cf. also the reflection of Actaeon in the spring at 2.4. On the reflection theme, see Slater (1998), 40–46. The illusionist thematics of this passage appear to relate also to the classic Roman texts about naturalism—so the grapes recall Pliny’s Zeuxis and Parrhasius story (Natural History 35.65–66), while the invitation to look into a pool reflects Narcissus. »

15 See, for example, Schlam (1992), 71–72; Laird (1997), 64–65; Slater (1998), 20–24; and Egelhaaf-Gaiser (2000), 119–20. On this theme in the Aphrodite of Cnidos, see, for example, R. Osborne (1994), 81–85; R. Osborne (1998), 231–35; and Platt (2002b), 33–36, 44. »

16 See, for example, Smith (1991), 83; D’Ambra (1996), 225 (with a long bibliography at n. 30); and Stewart (1997), 99. As these writers point out, even more deficient of naturalism is her lack of a sculpted vulva. That the most celebrated erotic female statue in antiquity—and indeed ancient nude sculpture of females in general—should deny naturalistic rendition in this arena (by contrast with the rendition of male genitalia) and in the context of repeated narratives that fantasize the image’s penetration, speaks volumes about some fundamental cultural problems in relation to eroticism which must be said to precede Christianity’s culture of resistance to sexuality. »

17 See briefly chapter 5. The description of their lovemaking, with Photis sitting on top of Lucius, further complicates the dynamics here (the warrior is certainly attacked and conquered rather than being the attacker), while the phrase “if you are a man” is highly ironic given Lucius’ imminent metamorphosis into a donkey at the hands of Photis. Later, in the sex scene at 3.20, “Photis of her own generosity played the boy’s part (puerile) with me as a bonus,” hence reversing her declaration at 2.17 of not turning her back on Lucius. Apart from the erotic frissons of all this, it seems a further telling commentary on the Aphrodite of Cnidos theme, reduced again to pure sexual gratification. One wonders if the implicit punishments that fall on Lucius (becoming an ass) and on the boy in pseudo-Lucian’s Amores (his suicide at Amores 16) are not the result of attempting to use Aphrodite in his way—as a boy (cf. Amores 17). »

18 See Laird (1997), 65–69. Generally on theatricality and spectacle, see Slater (2003). »

19 See, for example, Shumate (1996), 252–54. »

20 This is frankly a truly remarkable idea—could Venus ever be conceived as virginal? »

21 On this passage, see Finkelpearl (1991), 223–24; Zimmerman–de Graaf (1993), 147–53, and Zimmerman (2000), 375–78. »

22 See Schlam (1992), 72–73, and Zimmerman (2000), 26. »

23 Other parallels: the slaves withdraw to ensure the lovers’ privacy (2.15 and 10.20), the use of diminutives (with Zimmerman, 2000, 276). »

24 There is a clear parallel with the opening of Book 2: see Laird (1997), 70. In general on sleep and dream in the Golden Ass, see Kenaan (2004). »

25 On Apuleius’ evocation of the Isis cult, see Egelhaaf-Gaiser (2000), 77–84, 251–58. »

26 See 11.16, simulacris rite despositis; 11.17, divinas effigies, simulacra spirantia, vestigiis deae, quae gradibus haerebat argento formata; 11.20, deae venerabilem conspectum; 11.24, deae simulacrum; 11.25, inexplicabili voluptate simulacra divini. »

27 See Winkler (1985), 233–37, for discussion. »

28 The Isis rituals include: abstinence and chastity (11.19); abstinence from certain foods (11.21, 23, 28); head shaving (11.28, 30); ritual baths and sprinklings (11.23); sacred rites and rituals, some secret (11. 22, 23); prayers and libations (11.20). »

29 Cf. Griffiths (1975), 316–17: “The identity of the mystes and his god could not be more clearly expressed.” »

30 Cf. Slater (1998), 39–40, and (2003), 100. »

31 On contemplative adoration of Isis by Lucius, see Festugière (1954), 80–84. For an intriguing parallel concatenation of images reflecting Diana and Actaeon, the former in the posture of “crouching Venus,” and a bald priest of Isis in the Casa di Loreius Tiburtinus in Pompeii (II.2.2.), see Platt (2002a) and at greater length (2003), 117–133. »

32 For discussion, see Hunink (2001), 139–41, 143–46. »

33 On the mss, see Mal-Maeder (1997), 112–17. »

34 On this passage, see Laird (1997), 80–85. »

35 For a list of such passages, see Winkler (1985), 170–71, though he fails to note the one at 11.24. For Apuleius and the offer of honorific statues, see Florida 16.1, 46–47; also Too (1996), 134–41. For a versatile and sensitive account of statues in the Roman world, see P. Stewart (2003). »

36 With, for example, Winkler (1985), 219–23, and Schlam (1992), 121. »

37 Effectively the subject of Sacred Tales 4, especially Or 50.15–102, with Harrison (2000–2001), 251–52. On Aristides’ revelations of divinities, see, for example, Festugière (1954), 45–47. »

38 See especially Harrison (2000–2001). On Aristides and Apuleius’ both reflecting sincere spirituality, see Festugière (1954), 85–104. »

39 The type is what is called the “double dream vision,” on which see Hanson (1980), 1414–21. For another interesting parallel also from an Egyptian-related context in the second century A.D., see P. Oxy. 11.1381, lines 91–145, with Nock (1933), 86–88, and Hanson (1980), 1416–17. »

40 Cf. 11.13, sacerdos miratus; 11.13–14, populi mirantur, ego stupore . . . defixus. The theme of wonder specifically picks up the repetition of wonder at the sight of Psyche at 4.32: mirantur . . . mirantur. »

41 On parallels between the Psyche story and the cult-myth of Isis, see Merkelbach (1958) and Krabbe (1989), 93–95. »

42 As the old woman who tells the Cupid and Psyche story remarks, “visions which come with naps during the day are said to be false” (4.27)—throwing into relief if not doubt the vision of Isis at 11.3. »

43 Thus itself putting into doubt the doubts her tale may have raised, as in the previous footnote. »

44 Best expressed, still, by Winkler (1985), for example, 123–32, 247. »

45 Later in the same passage, Clement is even more explicit about the way illusion beguiles: “for it leads you, though not to be in love with statues and paintings, yet to honour and worship them.” »

Next chapter

Base text size -

Chapter images ()