Though the bulk of his extant work is narrative, Apuleius devotes no attention to onward narrative movement. Superficially continuous, his _Metamorphoses_ are nevertheless often quite separable, as is evident in the most famous of them, Cupid and Psyche. Such course of plot as there is eddies in harangues, _tirades_ and decorative descriptions. The abundant dialogue is uncontrolled by dramatic concision. Everywhere Apuleius is orally expansive. A rhetor telling stories, he goes little beyond the poetic of the platform: work for excitement, relying on lust and witchcraft; expand what is showy, emphasizing each part without regard to sequence; use dialogue for variety, letting _prosopopœia_ suffice for characterization; and if nevertheless the tale lags or becomes confused, make a fresh start by bringing on brigands. This habit of mind, and not the incidental satire, explains the narrative looseness. Apuleius is no Rabelais; he is only a facile second-century rhetor carrying the rhetorical fiction of his time to greater length. In style, though habitually diffuse, he is sometimes charming and often lively; but in composition he merely extends a meretricious convention. During his lifetime Iamblichus wrote the _Babylonica_, or Rhodanes and Sinonis (166-180); and, soon after, Chariton of Aphrodisias the _Chæreas and Calirrhoe_ (before 200).[72] Thus was established the mode followed later by Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, the perverted narrative known as the Greek Romances. Any one who has the patience for these phantasmagoria of passion, horror, and adventure will see their likeness to the _Metamorphoses_ of Apuleius, and will probably reproach him the more for ignoring that onward causal movement without which the art of narrative seems to lapse. FOOT-NOTES: [1] See F. B. Gummere’s _Beginnings of Poetry_. The controversy which was spread by the Homeric studies of Wolf, has lately shifted to the popular ballad. See G. L. Kittredge’s introduction to his one-volume selection of the _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_ from the collection of Child, Boston, 1904, and the recent studies of Professor Louise Pound. J. A. Scott maintains _The Unity of Homer_ in his University of California Lectures, 1921. [2] C. S. Baldwin, _Introduction to English Medieval Literature_, New York, 1914, pages 16-18. [3] As I write, Knut Hamson’s _The Growth of the Soil_ has just been called epic. [4] _Poetic_, xxiv. [5] Aristotle, _Poetic_, xxiv. See page 158 above. [6] _Poetic_, xxiv. [7] See above, page 106. [8] Opening of the _Étude sur Virgile_. [9] _Lectures on Poetry_, London, 1911. [10] “Vergil,” in _Great Writers_, New York, 1912.