Finding God: Augustine and Apuleius

Harvard HDS

This course on imperial and late antique prose authors will examine the religious conversion narratives of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and Augustine’s Confessions. In Apuleius (Met. 11), Lucius converts to Isis, while Augustine narrates his conversion to Christianity (Conf. 6–8). Both are stories of deep religious experience made compelling by their daring literary, rhetorical, and philosophical qualities. We will complement our Latin texts by reading modern and contemporary scholarship on…