Apuleius and Roman Demonology

Abstract Apuleius’s status as philosopher and intellectual has long been diminished in scholarship, and his lectures on demonology, Platonic doctrine, and cosmology disregarded as lacking innovation and “popularizing.” This chapter reassesses Apuleius’s relationship to his predecessors in the philosophical discourse of demonology: rather than searching for the Greek sources for his “hack” pastiche treatises on daemones, it analyzes instead how he embodies the role of translator and intermediary of demonological doctrine for his local, African audience—both by phrasing Platonic ideas about the divine in terms of ancient Roman ritual and archaic and classicizing poetry, and by positioning himself, in turn, as a Socrates Africanus for his Carthaginian listeners/readers.