I begin. Who is he? Hear it in a few words. Attic Hymettus and the Corinthian Isthmus and Spartan Taenarus, lucky lands laid up forever in luckier books still, are my old stock. There, in the first campaigns of boyhood, I earned the Attic tongue.

Exordior means “I begin,” but the first sense Lewis & Short gives it is “to begin a web, to lay the warp.” The prologue keeps to the loom. It has just promised to conserere, “string together,” its tales, and in 1.3 Lucius will urge a storyteller to pertexere, “weave to the end.” Under exordior Lewis & Short quotes Cicero putting the same two verbs together: pertexe modo, Antoni, quod exorsus es, “just weave to the end, Antonius, what you have begun” (On the Orator 2.145). The three places are Greek landmarks, and Lewis & Short describes each: Hymettus, “a mountain near Athens, famed for its honey and its marble”; the Isthmus, named here by Ephyra, “another name for Corinth”; and Taenarus in Laconia, where a cavern was “the fabled entrance to the infernal regions.” “Who is he?” Readers have argued about the answer ever since. The voice sounds like Lucius, the hero, who in 1.2 claims Plutarch’s family on his mother’s side. It also sounds like a book speaking, or like Apuleius, who was not a Greek at all: he came from Madauros in Roman Africa. Ancient readers already mixed author and hero. Augustine says that Apuleius, in the books he titled The Golden Ass, “either reported or made up” that this had happened to him (City of God 18.18). Stipendia merere is army language, “to serve one’s campaigns”: the boy earned his Greek the way a soldier earns his pay.