The Novelist Who Was Tried for Witchcraft

Thallus went down in front of the whole court. More than once, Apuleius says, always the same slave boy, always the same collapse, and the prosecution wanted the jury to see exactly one thing in it: proof that a dangerous magician had used the boy as an instrument, staring him into a trance until some power took hold and threw him to the floor.

Apuleius stood up and said the boy had epilepsy. He had medical opinion ready to cite, and a list of ordinary things that can trigger a fit in someone who suffers from it: the smell of burning jet, the sight of a potter's wheel spinning. Nothing supernatural required. Just a sick child and an accusation built on top of him.

That was the smallest charge on the table. Apuleius was on trial for his life.

A capital case in a provincial court

Sabratha, on the Libyan coast, in 158 CE. The proconsul Claudius Maximus is hearing a case brought under the Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficiis, a law from 81 BCE written for murderers and poisoners and by now stretched to cover sorcery as well. Conviction can mean death.

The defendant is a young philosopher from Madauros, trained at Athens, fluent in two languages, on his way somewhere in the Roman world when he stopped in the port city of Oea and, within a few months, married one of its richest widows.

That marriage is the whole case. Everything else is decoration built to support it.

Pudentilla, and who lost out

Aemilia Pudentilla had been alone for fourteen years since her first husband died, raising two sons and managing a fortune that everyone in Oea had an opinion about. When she married Apuleius, her late husband's brother, Sicinius Aemilianus, did not treat it as a private matter. Neither did Herennius Rufinus, father-in-law to her younger son.

Both men stood to benefit if that money stayed in the family rather than passing to a new husband. Both put their names behind the prosecution. The charge on paper was magic. The dispute underneath it was an inheritance.

Apuleius does not let the jury forget this for long. He returns to Pudentilla's own letters, to her age, her reasons, her agency in the marriage, again and again, because the whole prosecution depends on nobody looking at her too closely.

Fish, wrapped cloth, and a poem

Strip away the rhetoric and the physical evidence is thin. Apuleius, the prosecution says, sought out rare sea creatures with suggestive names, the sort of ingredient a love potion calls for. He answers that he was dissecting them, as a natural philosopher does, and invites the court to consider whether a fish has ever successfully seduced anyone.

There are objects, too: something wrapped in a napkin, kept at a household shrine in his stepson Pontianus's house. Nobody testifying has actually seen inside the cloth. Apuleius says this without much difficulty, since the accusers themselves admit as much, and offers instead an ebony statuette of Mercury he happens to have brought to court, commissioned from a sculptor named Saturninus, explaining it as an object of philosophical devotion rather than sorcery.

And there is a poem, erotic verse addressed to a young man named Charinus, which Apuleius does not deny writing and instead defends on the grounds that half of Latin literature's respectable names wrote the same kind of thing.

None of it, on its own, would trouble anyone. Strung together and read aloud by a hostile prosecutor, it becomes a portrait of a man who does not belong in decent society.

What a magus actually is

Apuleius's real strategy is not denial. It is redefinition.

He accepts that the word magus exists and asks the court which meaning they intend. In Persia, he says, a magus is a priest, and any educated Roman knows this from Plato. If that is what the prosecution means by the word, he is guilty and proud of it. If they mean the vulgar sense, a hired sorcerer who harms people for money, then they have produced no victim, no poison, no curse tablet, nothing except a marriage and some fish.

He talks about his research into animals and plants. He talks about mirrors, and what a philosopher actually understands about optics that a frightened jury does not. He talks, at length, about daemons, the intermediate spirits between gods and humans that Platonists like him wrote seriously about, elsewhere, at length, without anyone accusing them of a capital crime.

By the end of it he has turned a courtroom into a lecture hall, and made the prosecution's entire case look like a failure to tell the difference between philosophy and folklore.

The only speech we have

Here is the difficulty, and it is worth saying plainly. Every fact in this article except the outcome comes from Apuleius himself. No transcript of Aemilianus's accusation survives. No record of Claudius Maximus's verdict survives. What we have is the version Apuleius wrote up afterwards and chose to publish, polished, quotable, and built to make him look brilliant.

That does not mean he is lying. It means there is no independent account to check him against, which is exactly the situation this kind of case always produces: nobody publishes the losing side of a capital trial. We infer the acquittal from silence and from what came after, not from a verdict anyone wrote down.

What came after is a public career. Apuleius went on to hold the priesthood of the imperial cult for the province of Africa, an office that would not have gone to a convicted magician.

A name nobody had to write

Back in Madauros, his hometown, a statue base survives. The statue itself is long gone. The inscription reads simply that the citizens of Madauros dedicate it to the Platonic philosopher, their ornament.

No name. Nobody who set it up needed one. In the town he came from, that description pointed to exactly one man, and everyone reading it already knew which trial he had walked out of.