REASSESSING THE APULEIAN CORPUS: A COMPUTATIONAL APPROACH TO AUTHENTICITY

The renaissance of Apuleian studies of the past few decades shows no signs of abating. 1 The summer of 2014 may well be the highest watermark yet recorded in the tide of interest in Apuleius: June and July alone saw the release of two monographs, one each from Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, and one edited conference volume, from Routledge. 2 The clearest sign that the sophist of Madauros has come into his own is his admission into the exclusive club of the Oxford Classical Texts: the first volume of his complete works containing the Metamorphoses edited by Maaike Zimmerman came out in 2012. One of the most salutary effects of this renewed interest has been the reappraisal of the ‘whole Apuleius’: Apuleius has more to offer than just the Metamorphoses , and recent scholarship on the rhetorica and the philosophica have shown not only how these opera minora can help us understand the opus maius , but also how they are important and interesting documents in their own right. 3