Apuleius continues to fascinate. Rhetorician, philosopher, novelist, polymath, poet, traveller, product and exemplar of that period in classical intellectual history known as the Second Sophistic, Apuleius presents an ongoing challenge to those who seek to understand the nature of the man and his work. A highly public figure both in his home town of Madauros and in Roman Carthage where he spent much of his life, he excelled in display of rhetorical talent and education to his provincial audience; yet at the same time he staked out a place for himself in the mainstream of Latin culture, producing a body of work that demonstrates and celebrates engagement with the classical Greek and Roman tradition. The stylistic flamboyance that characterises his writing manifests a strong sense of Latin as a literary language, whose origins lay the third and second centuries BCE as Roman writers responded to the stimulus of Greek culture by a process of creative adaptation. For Apuleius this was an ongoing issue. The intellectual world of the Second Sophistic was largely inhabited by Greek writers and rhetoricians; to be well-versed in Greek was still the ultimate hallmark of the cultured individual. The task for Apuleius remained one of transforming a fabula Graecanica ('Greekish story') into a Latin classic, whether that story be the philosopher's defence against a charge of practising magic (as a variant on corrupting the young), an account of Socrates' daimon and the way the divine communicates with the human or a novel about a man who was turned into a donkey.

Of the six essays contained in this number, two address the issue of cultural identity (which has become a major interest in Apuleian studies in recent years), one through an examination of the Marsyas story in the Florida and the other through Apuleius' use of Platonic quotation and allusion in the Apology; two revisit that best known and perhaps most enigmatic of Apuleius' works, the Metamorphoses or Golden Ass, and typically for this text reach very different conclusions; and the final two are concerned with aspects of reception, one looking at the presence of the ass-story in one of the 20th century's more famous novels, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, and the other examining the way in which this same story was received and adapted in Meiji Japan.

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