vision and bade him set forth homewards. He therefore took
ship for Rome, where for the space of a year he dwelt, a fervent
worshipper at the temple of Isis on the Campus Martius. Once more
visions of the night began to afflict him; he consulted the priests
and discovered the cause; he required yet to be initiated into the
mysteries of Osiris. The priests of Corinth had worked upon his
credulity to such good effect, that he found himself in serious
financial difficulties, but by practising as a lawyer he succeeded in
making a sufficient income to provide more than adequately for the
expenses of this fresh initiation (_Metamorph._ xi. 28, 30). While at
Rome he made the acquaintance of Aemilianus Strabo and Scipio Orfitus,
men of distinguished position, whom he was to meet again when their
official career brought them to Africa as proconsuls of that province
(_Florida_ 16, 17).

At last he returned home, and it was probably at this period of his
career that he wrote his famous novel, the _Metamorphoses_ or _Golden
Ass_.[1] It is based on the lost work of a certain Lucius of Patras,
of which we have another version in the [Greek: Loukios e onos],
falsely attributed to Lucian. He enlarged the original by the free
insertion of sensational or humorous stories of the kind popularized
later by the _Decameron_ of Boccaccio, above all by the insertion of
the beautiful fairy-tale of Cupid and Psyche. And then at the end
comes the curious personal note, where Lucius, a Greek at the outset
of the romance, becomes strangely transformed into a native of
Madaura.

[Footnote 1: See Introd. to my translation of _Metamorphoses_.]

But he did not settle down in his native town. After a time he visited
Alexandria, and it was in the course of his return from the capital of
Egypt that the crisis in his life occurred, to which we owe that
remarkable human document, the _Apologia_. For on his homeward journey
he fell sick at Oea, the modern Tripoli.[2] In this town there dwelt a
wealthy lady, named Aemilia Pudentilla, the widow of Sicinius Amicus,
by whom she had two sons, Sicinius Pontianus and his younger brother,
Sicinius Pudens. Pontianus was already the friend of Apuleius; he had
made his acquaintance at Athens; an intimacy had sprung up between
them, and they had lived together in the same lodgings. Hearing,
therefore, of Apuleius' sickness, he called on him at the house of
their mutual friends the Appii, where he was lodging. The reas