Comic Invention and Superstitious Frenzy in Apuleius' Metamorphoses: The Figure of Socrates as an Icon of Satirical Self-Exposure

This article concentrates on the Apuleian Socrates (Met. 1.6-19) as a programmatic figure who reflects both the comic ambiguity of the novel and the paradoxical identity of its protagonist and main narrator, Lucius, author of an entertaining narrative and a superstitious initiate of a religious cult. It offers a reading of a satiric Socrates as parallel to a satiric Lucius. Socrates' ambiguous exhibitionistic gesture (1.6) is a tribute to his Socratic-Cynic pedigree and can be viewed as an icon of satirical self-exposure. Both Socrates and Lucius seem to be literary projections of Apuleius himself as an author of comic autobiographical fiction.