Download or read book Apuleius' Debt to Plato in the Metamorphoses written by Maeve C. O'Brien and published by Edwin Mellen Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her very lively and eminently readable book Dr. O'Brien makes a solid case for her core in sight, namely, that the Metamorphoses in fact is a seamless garment, woven from creative imagination and Platonist concerns, and focusing on the abiding issue of discourse. This is an important perspective, and it will significantly enhance future discussion both of Apuleius and of the Platonist tradition. This book is a study of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius of Madaura which takes as its starting point the proposition that Apuleius, as a serious student of Platonism, adopts as a guiding theme in his narrative the distinction between two types of rhetoric, or discourse (logos), first set out by Plato in the Gorgias and the Phaedrus, but later becomes a basic assumption of the Platonic tradition, a 'higher' type, which is based upon a philosophical understanding of the world of Forms and true reality, and employs logos only in the service of a search for the truth, and a 'lower', sophistical, type, which employs every sort of trickery to secure an advantage based on appearance rather than reality. This insight is worked out with considerable ingenuity, and, 1 find, plausibility. After an in