Apuleius

Sir Kenelm Digby records that the animal would restore a glove to the due owner after the master had whispered the man's name in his ear, and would tell the just number of pence in any piece of silver coin newly showed him by his master.

De Mallery, in a note to his translation of the Golden Ass of Apuleius, says that he witnessed the performance of this animal in the Rue Saint-Jacques in Paris, to which city Banks proceeded in or before 1608.

And he states that Morocco could not only tell the number of francs in a crown, but knew that the crown was depreciated at that time, and also the exact amount of the depreciation.

The fame which Banks and his horse acquired in France brought the former under the imputation of being a sorcerer, and he probably had a narrow escape of being burned at a stake in that character.

But the bibliophile in him consoled the student when he touched with worshipful hands the superb edition of the Satyricon which he possessed, the octavo bearing the date 1585 and the name of J. Dousa of Leiden.

Leaving Petronius, his Latin collection entered into the second century of the Christian era, passed over Fronto the declaimer with his antiquated terms, skipped the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, his disciple and friend, a clever ferreting mind, but a writer entangled in a glutinous vase, and halted at Apuleius, of whose works he owned the first edition printed at Rome in 1469.

This African delighted him.

The Latin language was at its richest in the metamorphoses.

So many great figures of Roman literature came from North Africa.

The playwright Terence, the novelist Apuleius, the historian Suetonius.

The rhetorician Franto.

All of these great names in classical Roman literature were North Africans.

Strange creatures with strange secrets startled abroad into open daylight.

The delirious sort of religion of which Marius was a spectator in the streets of Rome during the seven days of the Lectisternium reminded him again of an observation of Apuleius.

It was as if the presence of the gods did not do men good, but disordered or weakened them.

Some jaded women of fashion especially found in certain

It was as if he viewed it through a diminishing glass.

And the permanency of this change he could note some years later, when it happened that he was a guest at a feast in which the various exciting elements of Roman life, its physical and intellectual accomplishments, its frivolity and far-fetched elegances, its strange mystic essays after the unseen, were elaborately combined.

The great Apuleius, the literary ideal of his boyhood had arrived in Rome, was now visiting Tusculum, at the house of their common friend, a certain aristocratic poet who loved every sort of superiorities, and Marius was favored with an invitation to a supper given in his honor.

It was with a feeling of half-humorous concession to his own early boyish hero-worship, yet with some sense of superiority in himself, seeing his old curiosity grown now almost to indifference when on the point of satisfaction at last, and upon a juster estimate of its object, that he mounted to the little town on the hillside.

It is to the author's recognition of the importance of environment, of the vital role of inanimate surroundings as a means for bringing out character and imbuing his episodes and the actions of his characters with an air of reality and with those impulses and actions which are common to human experience, that his influence is due.

By this, the Roman created a new style of writing and inaugurated a class of literature which was without parallel until the time of Apuleius and, in a lesser degree, of Lucian.

This class of literature, though modified essentially from age to age, in keeping with the dictates of moral purity or bigotry, innocent or otherwise, has come to be the very stuff of which literary success in fiction is made.

One may write a successful book without a thread of romance.

And it's interesting that in ancient times, there were writers who were appalled at the cruelties inflicted on animals, but they were not Stoics.

They were Plutarch, for example, Apuleius, who wrote The Golden Ass, which tells a novel written from the point of view of a donkey and tells amazing tales of what the donkey has to endure.

And he appears to have been a Platonist or Neoplatonist.

So do you think that given that you're reviving Stoicism for a modern period, do you think that this is something that can be remedied? Or is it something inherent in Stoicism that it's really only going to consider rational beings rather than beings who can suffer it?