American Journal of Philology

The implicit presence of wedding imagery in the servant’s narrative regarding the tragic end of Charite in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (8.1–14) ¹ has received little scholarly attention. ² In the tale of Charite, her unsuccessful suitor, Thrasyllus, devises a scheme to kill her husband, Tlepolemus, during a hunt and to marry the widowed Charite. After the ghost of Tlepolemus has exposed to his wife the actual circumstances of his death, the heroine devises a scheme for exacting vengeance on Thrasyllus, both for his cunning in killing her husband in the boar hunt and for his sexual ambitions toward her. The former is revealed in the similarities between Charite’s revenge scheme and Thrasyllus’ plot to bring about Tlepolemus’ death; the latter emerges from Charite’s clever exploitation of aspects of the wedding ritual in her revenge scheme. To be persuasive, the (fictional) marriage ritual, like the hunting scheme before it, requires role playing ³ and a reversal in gender roles such that [End Page 601] the heroine punishes her opponent most appropriately for his actions within the tale’s narrative. This wedding imagery is further sustained in the conclusion of the tale: Charite’s suicide on her husband’s tomb is represented as (re)marriage to her husband in death, since it reenacts several aspects of the wedding ritual from the earlier narrative of Tlepolemus’ liberation of his bride from her captivity in a robbers’ cave, and their subsequent marriage. ⁴ In the end, Thrasyllus’ suicide by starvation is also represented as a marriage in death, as Charite herself foreshadows in her angry speech as she prepares to attack him in his sleep.

Our object here is to explore the ways in which Apuleius artfully designs the narrative of the latter portion of Charite’s story: the wedding imagery enhances her scheme for revenge, which is based both on Thrasyllus’ murderous plot against her husband and on Thrasyllus’ amatory designs upon her, and also intensifies the tragedy of the narrative, as all three marriages, Tlepolemus’, Charite’s, and Thrasyllus’, are fulfilled only in death. ⁵

There are a number of intriguing resonances between the story of Charite and the tale of Cupid and Psyche that features so centrally in the novel as a whole. Space here does not permit much development of comparisons between the two narratives, but particularly striking points of similarity or contrast are indicated in the notes as we proceed.

In the servant’s tale, Thrasyllus, the unsuccessful suitor, assumes the persona of a trusted friend in order to gain admission to the house of the married couple. After being forbidden access to Charite, he tricks his rival, Tlepolemus, into going hunting. Their departure on the hunt marks a spatial shift, from the interior of Tlepolemus’ home to the open space of wild nature, where Thrasyllus works his scheme.

Charite has forbidden Tlepolemus to hunt horned and tusked animals (except mountain goats), a request that reveals her concern for her husband’s safety. Her apprehensions about his vulnerability also suggest a female aspect to Tlepolemus’ identity, an ambivalence of gender role that adumbrates her later worship of him as Liber/Dionysus, with both male and female characteristics. [End Page 602]

For the tale’s authorial audience, Thrasyllus’ invitation to go hunting also recalls his own earlier advice to some robbers, to go on a hunt to collect animals for a sacrifice to their patron deity, Mars the Companion (7.10). In contrast to Tlepolemus’ earlier success in a hunt (which led to Charite’s liberation from captivity in the robbers’ den, and his marriage to her), Thrasyllus’ hunting scheme brings about Tlepolemus’ death, putting a violent end to Charite’s marriage. ⁶

In a wedding context, Tlepolemus’ death may be interpreted as a prenuptial sacrifice for Thrasyllus’ planned marriage to Charite. Thrasyllus’ “sacrifice” here mirrors Tlepolemus’ earlier sacrifices of various animals at temples and public places in connection with the symbolic abduction of his bride from her parental home, at the opening of the Charite complex (4.26, ad nuptias . . . templis et aedibus publicis victimas [End Page 603] immolabat...