The novel is the _Golden Ass_--that at least is what St Augustine tells us the author called it.[73] Passages from this have been seriously used as sources of information as to the author. But there is another _Ass_, long attributed to Lucian though probably not Lucian's, and in each case the hero tells the tale in the first person, and the co-incidences between the Greek and the Latin make it obvious that there is some {228} literary connexion between them, whatever it is. The scene is Greece and Thessaly, but not the Greece and Thessaly of geography, any more than the maritime Bohemia of Shakespeare. Yet in the last book Apuleius seems to have forgotten "Lucius of Patrae" and to be giving us experiences of his own which have nothing to do with the hero of the _Ass_, Greek or Latin. [Sidenote: The _Apology_ of Apuleius] In the _Apology_ he comes closer to his own career and he tells us about himself. Here he does not venture on the delightful assertion that he is the descendant of the great Plutarch, as the hero of the _Ass_ does, but avows that, as his native place is on the frontiers of Numidia and Gaetulia, he calls himself "half Numidian and half Gaetulian"--just as Cyrus the Greater was "half Mede and half Persian." His city is "a most splendid colony," and his father held in turn all its magistracies, and he hopes not to be unworthy of him.[74] He and his brother inherited two million sesterces, though he has lessened his share "by distant travel and long studies and constant liberalities."[75] Elsewhere he tells us definitely that he was educated at Athens.[76] Everybody goes to the _litterator_ for his rudiments, to the grammarian next and then to the rhetorician--"but I drank from other vessels at Athens," so "Empedocles frames songs, Plato dialogues, Socrates hymns, Epicharmus measures, Xenophon histories, Xenocrates satires; your Apuleius does all these and cultivates the nine Muses with equal zeal--with more will, that is, than skill."[77]