Word: apuleius
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...that Schami fits only into the queerball towel-head tradition. He weds Middle Eastern enigma with good old-fashioned European story-cycles. He self-consciously spurns the narrative conventions of the modern novel and reverts to the tradition of Homer, Apuleius, Bocaccio and Chaucer. We're talking tale within a tale within a tale...
...classical learning and his devotion to all vertical and horizontal forms of the chase. In Giulio, this son of Isabella d'Este found a court artist whose libidinousness and intelligence fit his own. Both men moved naturally in the imaginative world of a recovered antiquity -- the world of Apuleius and Ovid's Metamorphoses, the brutal sharp humor of Martial's epigrams, the fantasies of a Golden Age and the pseudo-scientific world view of astrology...
Vidal is his own best act, and he does show off. He cannot defend homosexuality without name-dropping Apuleius, making sly references to the Spartans, and advising the reader to check his concept of masculinity against circuitous quotations from the Apocrypha (Il Maccabees 4: 7-15). Even in the midst of considering children's literature, the portentous generalization can tempt him: "In the last fifty years we have contributed relatively little in the way of new ideas of any sort. From radar to rocketry, we have had to rely on other societies" etc., etc. Sarcasm betrays him into rhetorical...
...blame on the playwright. For A Midsummer Night's Dream was the finest comedy in the English language until Shakespeare himself surpassed it in Twelfth Night. It is undeniably true that Dream is an unusually eclectic work, drawing its material from Plautus, Plutarch, Ovid, Apuleius, Chaucer, French romance, Italian commedia dell'arte, a couple of earlier English plays, popular folklore, and even Scot's nonfiction treatise The Discoverie of Witchcraft. But Shakespeare worked everything up into a fresh plot of his own -- or, rather, a skillfully unified interlocking set of three plots -- involving four classes of people from supernatural beings...
...curious observer, not a soldier. This modern translation by the late Professor William H. D. Rouse (the Iliad and the Odyssey) marks another important addition to the ancient classics that are being turned into briskly readable, contemporary English by such able writers as Robert Graves (The Golden Ass of Apuleius. Lucan's Pharsalia), Rolfe Humphries (Ovid's Metamorphoses), Moses Hadas (An Ethiopian Romance by Heliodorus), Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald (Sophocles' Theban plays), Stanley Alexander Handford (Caesar's Gallic Wars...