ASCLEPIVS

the Latin Asclepius, ascribed through the Middle Ages to Apuleius of Madauros

Hermes Trismegistus, Asclepius (The Perfect Discourse).
The Latin text established by Paul Thomas
(Leipzig: Teubner, 1921).
Digital edition by the Orphic Church, 2026, which transcribed
Thomas's printing, divided the text into verses, keyed his
apparatus to them, and set the pages.
https://orphic.church/library/asclepius/
Cite by chapter and verse: Asclepius 1:3.

About this edition

The Asclepius survives in Latin, in manuscripts that all descend from a single damaged archetype. Aloys Goldbacher, whose Vienna edition of 1876 first set the philosophical works of Apuleius on a critical footing, sorted the surviving copies into two families and judged the first the more trustworthy: the manuscripts at Munich, in the Vatican, at Wolfenbüttel and one at Paris on the one side; a second Paris manuscript, one at Florence, and a third formerly at Venice on the other.

One manuscript Goldbacher passed over altogether: Brussels 10054 to 10056. Bringing it into the text is Paul Thomas's distinctive act, and the reason to read his edition. He describes it closely: parchment, seventy-five leaves, twenty-three lines to the page, written at the beginning of the eleventh century in two hands. It is roughly a century older than the Munich and Vatican copies on which Goldbacher had chiefly relied.

Thomas made it his guide. He judged that its scribe had worked in good faith, so that where it goes wrong the fault is carelessness rather than interference, and that it alone often keeps either the true reading or one from which the truth can be recovered without difficulty. He marked it B, and constituted his text by it. It is the same manuscript that Clement Salaman, translating the work in 2007, singles out as the most important of the early witnesses.

He did not take the rest on trust. He had the Munich manuscript sent to him and collated it afresh, recording what had escaped his predecessor. He examined the Florentine manuscript himself at Florence in 1903 and corrected the published collation. He obtained a specimen of a further copy in the British Museum, which also carries the Asclepius, and judged it of little worth. The interpolated manuscripts he set aside deliberately, keeping only what other editors had already won from them.

His edition prints the received division into forty-one chapters by which the work is cited everywhere, and beneath the text two registers of notes: the parallels to the work elsewhere, and the readings of the manuscripts.

To Thomas's text this edition adds four things: its transcription from the scan of his printing; the division of each chapter into numbered verses, so that a single clause may be pointed at and returned to; his apparatus, transcribed from the same scan and keyed to those verses; and the setting of the page.

A note from the publisher

We offer this new edition as a gift for the remembrance of the sacred in times to come. It is a great blessing that this text has come down to us with its ancient language intact, for us to consider and learn from. We hope it will help new editions and translations come forth, by the new means now emerging.

Because we hold this text to be sacred, we have divided it into verses, to invite the close and intimate study it deserves, so that more may receive the spiritual nourishment this gift from the past provides. The verses follow a standard arrangement, so that a passage may be referenced alike in the Latin and the English. We have also set out to beautify the text and make it enjoyable for reading and study.

The Orphic Church

Acknowledgements

The preservation of texts involves many hands, and many of those who are responsible for preserving this text we are not able to thank by name, for their names do not come down to us. We thank all those who have translated, compiled, preserved and published this work in the past.

We thank Paul Thomas for his work on this text, for this edition would not be possible without him.

We provide a digital parallel edition of G. R. S. Mead's English translation alongside Thomas's Latin text, and we extend our gratitude to him for this as well.

• Paul Thomas, ed., Apulei Madaurensis opera quae supersunt, vol. III (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1921).
• G. R. S. Mead, trans., “The Perfect Sermon, or The Asclepius,” in Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II (London and Benares: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1906), 307–390.