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NOTES ON THE ‘NEW APULEIUS’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Gregory Hays*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia, Charlottesville

Extract

Justin Stover has recently edited a collection of Platonic placita, organized by individual dialogue, which he identifies as the lost third book of Apuleius’ De Platone. The work is preserved only in a thirteenth-century manuscript, Vatican BAV Reg. lat. 1572 (= R). The manuscript is filled with trivial errors, including a large number of one-word or two-word lacunae. Stover has worked ably to clean up the text and many of his emendations are uncontroversial. But any editio princeps is likely to be susceptible of improvement. I offer here some notes on a few points where I think either the text or Stover's translation and commentary can be bettered. I am not primarily concerned here with the ascription to Apuleius (if the work is not by Apuleius, it must in any case be by a Middle Platonist roughly contemporary with him), although one or two points may have some relevance to this question.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2018 

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References

2 A New Work by Apuleius. The Lost Third Book of the Platone, De (Oxford, 2016)Google Scholar.

3 In my review of Stover in TLS no. 5903 (20 May 2016), 29Google Scholar, I noted one potentially worrisome feature: the new text contains no example of ac, which is found over 400 times in Apuleius, including 47 instances in De Platone 1–2.

4 An exception is 21.18 (p. 118) ascesin.

5 It might be suggested that this is an Apuleian trait, but in fact two-member asyndeton is rare even in the Metamorphoses and often questionable where transmitted: see Harrison, S.J., ‘Some textual problems in ApuleiusMetamorphoses’, in Keulen, W.H. et al. (edd.), Lectiones Scrupulosae (Groningen, 2006), 59–67, at 60–3Google Scholar. Even three-member asyndeton (normally much more common) is rare in the De Platone: cf. Bernhard, M., Der Stil des Apuleius von Madaura (Stuttgart, 1927), 327Google Scholar.