Apuleius: Fragmentary Works (Apulei Madaurensis Operum Deperditorum Reliquiae)

This edition of Apuleius’s fragmentary works includes 62 items which, based on the most up-to-date scholarship, can be attributed with reasonable certainty to the ’lost Apuleius’. In most cases, identifying the ipsissima verba of the author is difficult or impossible, and even the methodological validity of such an attempt remains open to debate. Following established precedents, no distinction is drawn between testimonia and fragmenta; instead, a single consecutive numbering system is adopted for the various reliquiae. These are drawn from sources in Latin and Greek, as well as in Syriac, Arabic, and Armenian. Passages known from oriental languages are presented here in a Latin back-translation, specially prepared for this edition. Each entry includes a pre-apparatus (wherever applicable) and a selective but meticulous apparatus criticus. For certain Greek and Latin sources still lacking a reliable modern edition, the principal relevant manuscripts have been reexamined. This edition is further enriched by 161 purported ’new fragments’ of Apuleius embedded in Niccolò Perotti’s Cornu Copiae, a hitherto scarcely accessible set of dubious items which merit greater scholarly attention. An extensive praefatio (in Latin) surveys all the works either lost or falsely attributed to Apuleius, while also detailing the principles and methods underlying this edition.

Antonio Stramaglia, Professor of Latin, University of Bari, Aldo Corcella, Full Professor of Classical Philology, University of Basilicata

Antonio Stramaglia is Professor of Latin at the University of Bari. He is a member of Academia Europaea and other learned institutions. In 2016-17, he was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His research focuses on Greek and Latin fiction (Apuleius, papyrus fragments), the supernatural in classical literature, ancient paradoxography, ’comics’ and other forms of text-image interaction in Greece and Rome, education in antiquity (with special emphasis on declamation), Roman satire (particularly Juvenal), Galen, and Terence. He has lectured extensively in various countries and languages. In 2021 he was awarded the Tartufari Prize in Classical Philology by the Accademia dei Lincei.

Aldo Corcella is Full Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basilicata (Potenza-Matera, Italy). he took his degree at the Università di Bari in 1983 and specialized at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (1985-1987). He previously taught Italian culture at the University of Saint Andrews, and in 2008/09 he was Visiting Professor of the Classics at Harvard University. He is a specialist in ancient historiography and rhetorics.