And then there were the witches, perpetually adding to the uncertainty by rendering it dubious in what form one might awake, if one awoke at all.  During sleep, a witch could draw the heart out through a hole in the neck, and, stopping up the orifice with a sponge, allow her victim to pine in wonder why he felt so incomplete.  With ointments compounded of dead men’s flesh she could transform a lover into a beaver, or an innkeeper into a frog swimming in his own vat of wine and with doleful croak inviting his former customers to drink; or herself, with the aid of a little shaking, she could convert into a feathered owl uttering a queasy note as it flitted out of the window.  Indeed, the whole of nature was uncertain, especially if disaster impended, and sometimes a chicken would be born without the formality of an egg, or a bottomless abyss spurted with gore under the dining-room table, or the wine began to boil in the bottles, or a green frog leapt out of the sheepdog’s mouth.

So life was a little trying, a little perplexing; but it afforded wide scope for curiosity, and Apuleius, an African, brought up in Athens, and living in Rome, was endlessly curious.  In his attraction to horrors, to bloodshed, and the shudder of grisly phantoms there was, perhaps, something of the man of peace.  It is only the unwarlike citizen who could delight in imagining a brigand nurtured from babyhood on human blood.  He was, indeed, writing in the very period which the historian fixed upon as the happiest and most prosperous that the human race has ever enjoyed—­those two or three benign generations when, under the Antonines, provincials combined with Romans in celebrating “the increasing splendours of the cities, the beautiful face of the country, cultivated and adorned like an immense garden, and the long festival of peace, which was enjoyed by so many nations, forgetful of their ancient animosities, and delivered from the apprehension of future danger.”  The slow and secret poison that Gibbon says was introduced by the long peace into the vitals of the Empire, was, perhaps, among the causes that turned the thoughts of Apuleius to scenes of violence and terror—­to the “macabre,” as Pater said—­just as it touched his style with the preciosity of decadence, and prompted him to occupy a page with rapture over the “swift lightnings” flashed against the sunlight from women’s hair.  He was, in fact, writing for citizens much like the English of twenty years ago, when the interest of readers, protected from the harsh realities of danger and anxiety, was flattered equally by bloodthirsty slaughters, the shimmer of veiled radiance, and haunted byways for access to the unknown gods.