Great Minds

Not long after reading Katherine's post on the Brontes I stumbled on this by Fergus Millar, on Metamorphoses 9.33-34, an incident where a hen lays a live chicken, blood rises from the floor, and wine boils in vats in the wine cellar:  "This story, as Apuleius tells it, has another important characteristic.  Rather as in Wuthering Heights, the remarkable and fantastic goings-on in Apuleius' novel take place in a solidly realistic background, in this case a farm-house with chickens in the yard, wine-jars in store, sheepdogs and sheep.  Indeed, I am going to suggest that the realism of tone in the novel may extend beyond purely physical descriptions, to realistic images of social and economic relations, the framework of communal life in a Roman province, and even, here and there, to the wider context of what it meant to be a subject in the Roman Empire."  (Fergus Millar, "The World of the Golden Ass" in S.J. Harrison ed. Oxford Readings in the Roman Novel: 1999).