making a sufficient income to provide more than adequately for the expenses of this fresh initiation (_Metamorph._ xi. 28, 30). While at Rome he made the acquaintance of Aemilianus Strabo and Scipio Orfitus, men of distinguished position, whom he was to meet again when their official career brought them to Africa as proconsuls of that province (_Florida_ 16, 17). At last he returned home, and it was probably at this period of his career that he wrote his famous novel, the _Metamorphoses_ or _Golden Ass_.[1] It is based on the lost work of a certain Lucius of Patras, of which we have another version in the [Greek: Loukios e onos], falsely attributed to Lucian. He enlarged the original by the free insertion of sensational or humorous stories of the kind popularized later by the _Decameron_ of Boccaccio, above all by the insertion of the beautiful fairy-tale of Cupid and Psyche. And then at the end comes the curious personal note, where Lucius, a Greek at the outset of the romance, becomes strangely transformed into a native of Madaura. [Footnote 1: See Introd. to my translation of _Metamorphoses_.] But he did not settle down in his native town. After a time he visited Alexandria, and it was in the course of his return from the capital of Egypt that the crisis in his life occurred, to which we owe that remarkable human document, the _Apologia_. For on his homeward journey he fell sick at Oea, the modern Tripoli.[2] In this town there dwelt a wealthy lady, named Aemilia Pudentilla, the widow of Sicinius Amicus, by whom she had two sons, Sicinius Pontianus and his younger brother, Sicinius Pudens. Pontianus was already the friend of Apuleius; he had made his acquaintance at Athens; an intimacy had sprung up between them, and they had lived together in the same lodgings. Hearing, therefore, of Apuleius' sickness, he called on him at the house of their mutual friends the Appii, where he was lodging. The reasons for Pontianus' visit were somewhat remarkable. His grandfather had been anxious that Pudentilla should take a second husband in the person of his son and her brother-in-law, Sicinius Clarus, and with this end in view threatened to exclude her sons, whose guardian he was, from the possession of any of their father's property, if she married elsewhere. She therefore suffered herself to be betrothed to Sicinius Clarus, 'a boorish and decrepit old man,' but put off the marriage, until her father-in-law's death released her from all embarrassment. Pontianus and Pudens succeeded to the property, and Pudentilla felt herself free to take a husband of her own choice. She informed her sons of her intentions. Pontianus approved, but since the property left to himself and Pudens by their grandfather was small, and all his expectations of wealth depended on the ultimate inheritance of his mother's fortune (4,000,000 sesterces = L40,000), he was most anxious that his mother should marry an honest man who might reasonably be