Cupid and Psyche: Apuleius's tale and the god who falls in love

Among the love stories of antiquity, few have enjoyed the fortune of Cupid and Psyche. Only one author tells it in full, Apuleius of Madauros, a writer and orator born in Roman Africa in the second century AD, who placed it at the centre of his novel, the Metamorphoses, also known as The Golden Ass. Here the god of love, usually the maker of other people's passions, becomes a lover himself.

A tale within the novel

The Metamorphoses tell the adventures of Lucius, a young man accidentally turned into a donkey. In the fourth book the donkey finds himself in the cave of a band of robbers, who have kidnapped a girl of good family. To comfort her, an old servant begins to tell her a tale: once upon a time there were a king and a queen with three daughters, and the youngest, Psyche, was so beautiful that people had stopped honouring Venus in order to worship her.

Offended, Venus orders her son Cupid to make the girl fall in love with the most wretched creature on earth. An oracle of Apollo, consulted by her father, commands that Psyche be left in bridal clothes on a crag, as the bride of a monster. The west wind Zephyr instead carries her to a valley where a marvellous palace stands. Every night an invisible husband comes to her, on condition that she never tries to see his face.

The lamp and the trials

Urged on by her envious sisters, who are convinced the husband is a serpent, Psyche one night lights an oil lamp and discovers the god of love asleep beside her. A drop of boiling oil falls on Cupid's shoulder; he wakes and flees. So begins the girl's long wandering, which ends with her presenting herself before Venus, who is determined to punish her with a series of seemingly impossible trials.

Psyche must sort in one night an enormous heap of mixed seeds, and she succeeds thanks to an army of ants. She must then gather the golden wool of fierce sheep, draw, with the help of Jupiter's eagle, the water of a spring that feeds the Styx, and finally go down to the Underworld to obtain from Proserpina a little box holding part of her beauty. Overcome by curiosity, she opens it and falls into a deathlike sleep.

The wedding on Olympus

It is Cupid who finds and wakes her, putting the sleep back into the box. He then goes to Jupiter and obtains that the wedding be celebrated before the gods. Psyche drinks ambrosia and becomes immortal, and Venus is reconciled with her daughter-in-law. From the union a daughter is born, whom Apuleius calls Voluptas, Pleasure. The tale closes with a divine banquet, in sharp contrast with the robbers' cave in which it is told.

Already in antiquity the heroine's name, which means soul in Greek, suggested allegorical readings. The mythographer Fulgentius, in the fifth or sixth century, interpreted the story as the journey of the soul, and in the Renaissance the Neoplatonists saw in it the ascent of the spirit towards divine love. Modern scholars debate whether Apuleius, who in the last book describes Lucius's initiation into the mysteries of Isis, intended a religious meaning or reworked a folktale.

From Raphael to Canova

The story's fortune in art was immense. In Rome, in the villa of the banker Agostino Chigi now called the Farnesina, Raphael designed around 1517-1518 the Loggia of Cupid and Psyche, painted largely by his workshop. A few years later Giulio Romano painted the Chamber of Cupid and Psyche in the Palazzo Te at Mantua. At the end of the eighteenth century Antonio Canova carved his group of Cupid and Psyche, now in the Louvre, with the god bending to wake the girl.

In this story the god of love, used to wounding, is wounded in turn, and a mortal wins immortality through her own perseverance. It is perhaps this reversal, even more than the allegories, that explains why Apuleius's tale is still read, painted and set to music after almost nineteen centuries.