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Updated: June 25, 2025
If, indeed, Pudentilla wrote in a letter to another person what would clearly be prejudicial to myself, I think she could hardly have been in love with me at the moment in question. Tell me now, what is your contention? Was she mad or sane when she wrote? Sane, do you say? Then she was not the victim of magic. Insane? In that case she did not know what she was writing and must not be believed.
Would not the words suppressed by Rufinus have flown from his hands and filled the whole market-place with tumult, crying that they too had been sent by Pudentilla, they too had been entrusted with something to say, and calling upon men to listen to them instead of giving ear to a dishonest villain who was attempting to prove a lie by means of another's letter? for Pudentilla had never accused Apuleius of magic, while Rufinus' accusation was tantamount to an acquittal.
Finally I persuaded her to abandon all claims on the portion she had given them and to give them good hopes of one day coming into the rest of the property. All these concessions I extorted from Pudentilla with difficulty and against her will I have her leave to tell the whole story as it happened I wrung them from her by my urgent entreaty, though she was angry and reluctant.
Aemilia Pudentilla, now my wife, was once the wife of a certain Sicinius Amicus. By him she had two sons, Pontianus and Pudens. These two boys were left by their father's death under the guardianship of their paternal grandfather for Amicus predeceased his father and were brought up by their mother with remarkable care and affection for about fourteen years.
One more point and I shall have said enough about the letters. Pudentilla, after writing in jest and irony those words 'Come then, while I am yet in my senses', sent for her sons and her daughter-in-law and lived with them for about two months.
I cannot bring myself to believe Aemilianus such a fool as to think that the letter of a mere boy, who is also one of my accusers, could seriously tell against me. There is also that forged letter by which they attempted to prove that I beguiled Pudentilla with flattery. I never wrote it and the forgery is not even plausible. What need had I of flattery, if I put my trust in magic?
But whereas the gesture indicating forty is the simplest of all such gestures, for you have merely to hold out the palm of your hand you have increased the number by half as much again. There is no room for an erroneous gesture; the only possible hypothesis is that, believing Pudentilla to be thirty, you got your total by adding up the number of consuls, two to each year. I have done with this.
The fact is that Pudentilla, knowing your changeableness and unreliability no less than your shamelessness and mendacity, rather than forward the letter preferred to keep it as clear evidence of your intentions, and wrote a letter of her own on the same subject to her son Pontianus at Rome, in which she gave full reasons for her determination.
If your principle be followed, and whatever any one may have written in a letter under the influence of love or hatred be admitted as proof, many a man will be indicted on the wildest charges. 'Pudentilla called you a magician in her letter; therefore you are a magician! If she had called me a consul, would that make me one? What if she had called me a painter, a doctor, or even an innocent man?
I will quote the first lines, that you may not think this a mere invention of mine designed to meet the needs of my own case: There is a town named Wallet in the midst Of smoke that's dark as wine. The lines which follow are so wonderful, that had you read them you would envy me my wallet even more than you envy me my marriage with Pudentilla. You reproach philosophers for their staff and wallet.
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