Apuleio, frr. 18-19 Beaujeu: Caspar von Barth fra verità e menzogna

In 1624 Caspar von Barth published in his Adversaria (15, 17) some ‘new fragments’ from Apuleius, both in prose and verse, supposedly discovered in a mysterious manuscript in his own possession. This paper shows that Barth’s manuscript is to be identified with a codex now in Zwickau, and thereby demonstrates that, of the alleged ‘new fragments’ , those in prose are tralatitious, the poetical ones were forged by Barth himself; as a result, these items must be excluded from future collections of Apuleius’s fragments. Consequences from this discovery are also drawn in relation to the so-called Life of Secundus the Philosopher and to the manuscript tradition of [Walter Burley]’s De vita et moribus philosophorum, both involved in Barth’s adv. 15, 17.