Apuleius was born around 124 CE at Madauros, a Roman colony in Numidia in North Africa, to a wealthy provincial family, and received the full circuit of a privileged Roman education, studying at Carthage, then Athens, where he immersed himself in Platonist philosophy, and finally at Rome. Around 156 CE, traveling toward Alexandria, he fell ill at Oea, in modern Libya, and was nursed back to health by a wealthy widow, Pudentilla, whom he then married. Her relatives, unhappy at the marriage and the inheritance it threatened to redirect, brought a formal charge against him before the Roman proconsul: that he had used magical means to seduce her.
Apuleius conducted his own defense, and the speech he delivered, the Apologia, survives complete, a virtuoso performance mixing legal argument, philosophical erudition and studied wit that turned the accusation itself into an occasion to display the very learning his accusers found suspicious. He was acquitted, and the speech remains one of the fullest surviving windows onto how educated Romans of the second century actually thought about magic, the line between philosophy and sorcery, and the reputational danger that attached to any intellectual too visibly interested in the occult sciences.