American Journal of Philology 142 (2021) 103–136 © 2021 by Johns Hopkins University Press “CHARACTERIZING” LUCIUS: PYTHAGOREANISM AND THE FIGURA IN APULEIUS’ METAMORPHOSES EDWARD KELTING u Abstract: Why does Apuleius reference Pythagoras at the opening of the Metamorphoses’ final book? Drawing on Pythagoreanism’s importance to Plutarch and Apuleius, I suggest that Pythagoras signals Book 11’s overarching theme and tone. Thematically, Apuleius uses Pythagorean metempsychosis to connect Lucius’ quest for recognition as a human in asinine “form” (figura) with his later inabil- ity to access Isiac wisdom hidden by hieroglyphic animal “characters” (figurae). Tonally, Apuleius builds on the ambiguity of parody and sincerity in Pythagoras’ speech in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Couched in a set of Egyptian and Pythagorean topoi, Lucius’ reinterpretation of his metamorphic adventures hovers between profundity and absurdity. DO DONKEYS MAKE GOOD PYTHAGOREANS? This is one of several odd questions that Apuleius asks his readers at the opening of Metamorphoses Book 11. 1 The sequence that opens the final book, where Lucius-the-ass wakes up on a moonlit beach, feels the presence of a divinity, dunks himself into the ocean seven times, and prays to a series of syncretized goddesses, is awash in vocabulary that connects Lucius’ anticipation of a return to human form with philosophical questions about his combined humanity and animality. This opening ends with a reference to Pythagoras, who appears in the narrative precisely when Lucius’ tearful prayer to the “queen of heaven” initiates the narrative’s religious turn. Lucius, keen to get the ritual right at what he senses is a moment of divine immanence, washes his head seven times, “because that godlike Pythagoras has recorded that that number is particularly fitting for religious veneration” (quod eum numerum praecipue religionibus aptissimum divinus ille Pythagoras 1 I use Metamorphoses as title throughout, though the Asinus Aureus title, discussed by Winkler 1985, 292–321, points to an Egyptian mythic frame that is important for the present argument. See Lévi 2014, 445–7 for a reevaluation of the connotations of “golden.”