How did the text of Apuleius' Apology originate? The question has seldom drawn the attention of scholars. Those who have dealt with it simply assume that Apuleius worked out and elaborated upon whatever he had actually said in court and then had the finished version published. Paul Vallette thus assumes Apuleius must have reworked the speech.' Adam Abt is so confident that the Apology was improved and augmented that he attempts to determine which sections would have been added for publication.2 Georg Misch writes: "He brilliantly defended himself... and he then published a long and lively version of his speech.3 The purpose of this article is to offer an alternative to this somewhat blithe assumption. There is external evidence, partly from other sources and partly from Apuleius himself, to indicate that the speech could have been recorded and published by stenographers. The Apology is a long speech. From my own experiments, I find it must have taken almost four hours to deliver. Yet the length of the Apology cannot be used to argue that it must be an extended version of the spoken oration. The defendant was allowed one third more time than the plaintiff had used,4 and Pliny boasts of speaking almost five hours, despite poor health, when prosecuting Marius Crispus (Ep. 2. iI). Pliny elsewhere records his pleasure at drawing a good crowd at a trial, and keeping the audience spellbound through seven hours (Ep. 4.I6). It is not unlikely, then, that Apuleius did hold forth