Soon after, in the Latin city, a newcomer to the studies of the Romans, I took on their native speech and worked at it with wretched toil, with no teacher leading the way. So look: we ask your pardon in advance if at any point, a raw speaker of a foreign tongue, the speech of the forum, I stumble.

The apology is a joke at its own expense. This is some of the most worked-over Latin that survives, full of rare and old words. Aerumnabilis, “full of trouble,” is one: Lewis & Short knows it from Lucretius and from two places in Apuleius, this sentence among them. Prosapia, “stock, lineage,” in the sentence before, is another; Lewis & Short marks it “archaic” and points to Quintilian. Lewis & Short’s only example of locutor in its plain sense, “a speaker,” is this phrase, rudis locutor exotici sermonis. Quirites is the name Romans used for themselves as citizens; Lewis & Short traces it to Cures, a Sabine town. A Greek newcomer to Rome who masters Latin without a teacher fits the speaker of the prologue. It fits Apuleius only in part. He was born in Madauros, a Roman colony in Africa where public business was done in Latin, and studied at Carthage and then at Athens, as he says in the Florida (18 and 20). Forensis means “of the forum,” the public square where Rome’s courts and business met. A Greek in the provinces heard Latin mostly from magistrates and in court.