Why Cenchreae? The Social Topography of a Desultory Crossing in Apuleius' Golden Ass

[...]OnosLucius is securely reintegrated into his Greek civic community while his perverse and failed liaison with the foreign woman at Thessaloniki serves as a travesty of the novelistic motif of a chaste heroine's evasion of barbarian advances.45 And if there is a hint of a religious ending, it involves saviour gods in his home town, not Egyptian ones in Cenchreae and Rome.4'1 In his translatio of the Onos, both linguistic and spatial, Apuleius has re-oriented the Onos novel and its wider network of generic relationships so that it goes beyond the bounded world of the civic community, the Greek polis.