The glory won by Apuleius during his lifetime survived after his death. Augustine knows his works well. He recognizes his importance as a writer, but abhors him as a magician. Apuleius is a thaumaturge against whom the faithful need to be warned. 'The enemies of Christianity,' says Augustine (_Ep._ 138), 'venture to place Apuleius and Apollonius of Tyana on the same or even a higher level than Christ.' But in the same letter he speaks of him as a 'great orator' whose fame still lives among his fellow countrymen of Africa. Above all the _Golden Ass_ has kept his name alive to our own day. Even those who know nothing of the work as a whole, or who would relegate it to obscurity for its occasional gross indecency, know and love the story of Cupid and Psyche, if not in the original at least in many a work of art, and in the pages of La Fontaine, Walter Pater, or William Morris. As might be expected from one who left so few themes untouched, Apuleius is one of the most superficial of ancient writers. It has been well said of him by M. Paul Monceaux, 'Apulee est un de ces esprits encyclopediques, apres a la curee de toutes les connaissances, qui se rencontrent au commencement et a la fin des civilisations.' For the acquisition of his extraordinary reputation he needed an age and an audience in which learning and literature alike were decadent, though far from forgotten. He has none of the scientific spirit. He does not really understand the authors he quotes; he has no critical spirit, and his own investigations are prompted by indiscriminate curiosity. But he has vast stores of miscellaneous knowledge such as might delight the half-educated, and as a rhetorician he possesses a strange and debased brilliance, fired by an astonishing if disorderly imagination. The verve, the humour, and above all the welter of warmth and colour that characterize the _Golden Ass_ make us forgive the palpable degradation of the Latin language. Not less remarkable is the _Apologia_. There are few speeches of antiquity that give such a vivid impression of the character of the author and of the life of the society in which he moved. The style, it is true, is often bombastic and affected, many of the arguments are almost more puerile and absurd than the accusations, while the intense conceit and complacency of the author often make him ridiculous. A man of wide and varied knowledge, he has no depth of intellect. He is always half charlatan, and the reader is rarely free from the impression that he is taking liberties with the uncertain taste and ignorance of his provincial audience. But even the weaknesses of style and argument have their charm for the modern reader. For, if he never entirely fails to laugh with Apuleius, he certainly indulges in many a hearty laugh at him.