Thread by @BretDevereaux

I am going to engage in some #ClassicsDiscourse; you will all have to forgive me.

When I saw that @AntigoneJournal was running a bit by Peter Singer, I was disappointed. When I *read* the bit by Singer I was...confused?

This? This is what you flushed your reputation for?
1/14

I will, I hope, spare you all from reading it (google will provide if you must) but for the better part of 800 words, Singer tells that he had never known about Apuleius' Metamorphoses (aka 'The Golden Ass') until quite recently. "Hey I just read this" - not a great start. 2/14

He concludes, and I am not at all kidding you, that this must be because it is *bad* - because how else would noted ::checks notes:: philosopher, animal rights advocate and eugenicist (careful, that last step is a doozy) have missed it?

Clearly, it must just be bad! 3/14

To be clear, Apuleius was sufficiently popular that his work was copied, painstakingly, by hand, for centuries in multiple manuscripts, such that it is the only Roman novel - though there were others - that we have transmitted to the present complete. 4/14

A work so obscure that it was translated into English in 2011, and 2007, and 1998, and 1994, and 1989, and 1962, and 1950 (Robert Graves! Such obscurity!) and in 1910 and 1904 and 1853 and 1851 and 1822 and Year Of Our Lord FIFTEEN SIXTY-SIX. 5/14

This is a book so obscure it was translated into English first a full 60 years before noted-unimportant-author Thucydides.

Machiavelli made an (incomplete) riff translation of Apuleius. C.S. Lewis based a book on it. The 'Beauty and the Beast' tale-type is from this book. 6/14

(Beauty and the Beast - presumably another obscure tale! Must be bad!)

I was assigned this book (in translation) as an undergrad and translated it cover-to-cover in a Latin course as a post-bacc. There is a *mountain* of modern scholarship on it.

It is not obscure. 7/14

But don't worry, Singer - noted author of ::checks notes:: zero works of intentional fiction - has identified where famous, celebrated 1900-year-old fiction writer Apuleius went wrong.

See, it was all of the digressions: 8/14

Peter Singer - noted ::checks notes:: advocate for the murder of disabled people - it seems, has learned from other, better authors that they sometimes use frame stories, but he has not learned why.

And he doesn't care to!

9/14

So he is going to *fix* the World's Literal Oldest Surviving Novel by producing an edited version which - in his own😬words - "cut[s] out the episodes that stay from the main story...but still retaining the material that shows Apuleius' remarkably empathy for an animal..." 10/14

All of this is in service to the notion that Apuleius was really writing a book about animal rights which...I have my doubts. Especially if apparently the only way to make it work is to hacksaw off every part of the work which doesn't fit that thesis. 11/14

But my real question is why a "new and open forum for Classics" thought that running a 1300 word ad for what is essentially a bowdlerized version of a key classical text by a non-Classicist (and not the classically trained translator) was worth their digital pixels. 12/14

And that is of course before one gets into the considerable controversy behind the fellow himself which one might think, given the manifest paucity of the inducement of the paper itself, would have been enough to warn @AntigoneJournal off.

Was there really nothing better? 13/14

Why, @AntigoneJournal, it profits a journal nothing to give its reputation for the whole world.

But for Wales?


(My apologies to Wales and the Welsh for this likely unwelcome and demeaning comparison). end/14