Men between worlds: Aelius Aristides, Apuleius, Augustine, and interdisciplinary literature in the Second Sophistic

Human nature compels us to wonder about the meaning of our lives and the divine powers that guide them. The ancient Romans asked the same questions about these matters. They worried about being the best person they could be, who among them to emulate to better themselves, and where to learn the answers to life’s burning questions.

The role of public speakers was to guide the Romans on their quest for virtue, wisdom, and happiness. They praised good people, good cities, and good behavior and condemned the shameful. In this way, many Romans learned what virtue was and how to conduct themselves, but, in the second century CE, many Romans wanted more. Not all public speakers were noble, so some began to teach philosophic principles of virtue to revive the noble art of oratory. Likewise, philosophers, who studied the natures of virtue and of man, stepped out of their dark studies and began to publicly proclaim their ideas in the hope of drawing men to philosophy. Some orators, the philosopher-sophists, saw that the answers were not so easy to come by through either method alone, so they mixed oratory, philosophy, and their own personal religious belief together to help teach people about the various paths to virtue and to god.

This dissertation examines three such philosopher-sophists and their interdisciplinary works—Aelius Aristides’s Sacred Tales, Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, and Augustine’s Confessions—in order to help understand both the works themselves, which are largely misunderstood, and the culture of virtue-cultivation that inspired them.