Bret Devereaux

To be clear, Apuleius was sufficiently popular that his work was copied, painstakingly, by hand, for centuries in multiple manuscripts, such that it is the only Roman novel - though there were others - that we have transmitted to the present complete. 4/14

A work so obscure that it was translated into English in 2011, and 2007, and 1998, and 1994, and 1989, and 1962, and 1950 (Robert Graves! Such obscurity!) and in 1910 and 1904 and 1853 and 1851 and 1822 and Year Of Our Lord FIFTEEN SIXTY-SIX. 5/14

This is a book so obscure it was translated into English first a full 60 years before noted-unimportant-author Thucydides. Machiavelli made an (incomplete) riff translation of Apuleius. C.S. Lewis based a book on it. The 'Beauty and the Beast' tale-type is from this book. 6/14

(Beauty and the Beast - presumably another obscure tale! Must be bad!) I was assigned this book (in translation) as an undergrad and translated it cover-to-cover in a Latin course as a post-bacc. There is a *mountain* of modern scholarship on it. It is not obscure. 7/14

Peter Singer - noted ::checks notes:: advocate for the murder of disabled people - it seems, has learned from other, better authors that they sometimes use frame stories, but he has not learned why. And he doesn't care to! 9/14

So he is going to *fix* the World's Literal Oldest Surviving Novel by producing an edited version which - in his ownwords - "cut[s] out the episodes that stay from the main story...but still retaining the material that shows Apuleius' remarkably empathy for an animal..." 10/14

All of this is in service to the notion that Apuleius was really writing a book about animal rights which...I have my doubts. Especially if apparently the only way to make it work is to hacksaw off every part of the work which doesn't fit that thesis. 11/14