Reflections on the African Character of Apuleius

Abstract I flatter myself that the speaker of the Apuleian Prologue is very much in my position, since he talks as though he did not belong, yet claims by the act of writing that he does. The speaker’s anonymity is not, as many say, the initial problem in the Prologue; it becomes a problem only when he moves from speech to writing, at which point he, as it were, becomes anonymous.1 A Cicero or Demosthenes has no need to introduce himself, for how could he be making a speech at all if he were not already well known to his audience? It is only when he feels the need of access to a world that is larger than his own community that the speaker becomes an author. When the Carthaginian Apuleius embarked on writing it was time for him to forget his local patrons and dispatch his alter ego into lands that he would never dream of visiting. When an author travels