MAGISTERIO Y POÉTICAS ESPACIALES EN DE DEO SOCRATIS DE APULEYO

Abstract

De deo Socratis, together with De mundo and De Platone et eius dogmate, forms the philosophical corpus of Apuleius of Madaura. Although the three works have in common the fact that they represent the Latin counterpart of earlier or contemporary Greek texts, De deo Socratis has the singularity of being a lecture. In his dissertation, Apuleius seeks to establish himself as a disciple and authorized spokesperson of his teacher Plato. We aim to observe the means by which Apuleius identifies himself as a disciple of the Platonic family and, at the same time, tries to stand out as a teacher of the contents to be explained. In one of the final segments, after the demonstration of the existence of the daemons and the disquisitions about their characteristics and classification, Apuleius refers to the question that gives his lecture its name: the relationship between Socrates and his personal daemon (§157-167). We intend to examine the series of Homeric exempla that illustrate the binomial "divination / wisdom" (§158-162). With the hypothesis that the generic ascription of the Homeric hypotext was known to the audience, and that each genre has its own peculiar way of representing the space where the action takes place, we’ll try to highlight how the evoked spaces contribute to Apuleius' explanations.