Cupid and Psyche by Apuleius: a summary of the fable that tells of the love between the beautiful Psyche and the son of Venus, Cupid.
The tale of Cupid and Psyche was told by Apuleius in his Metamorphoses. The legend of Cupid and Psyche tells of two lovers whose love is hindered by envy. The tale has inspired artists of all ages: think, for example, of the homonymous sculpture by Antonio Canova but also the painting by Jacques Louis David .
Summary
An old servant who lived with a band of brigands tells a girl, Charite – whom they had kidnapped for ransom – the tale of the story of Cupid and Psyche . The young woman had had a bad dream and the old woman, to console her, decides to tell her a beautiful fairy tale. Lucius, who has also been kidnapped, lends an ear, while the story is told to Charite, unaware that he is listening to the tale of his own life and his future liberation.
Plot
The tale begins in the most classic of ways: in a city there lived a king and a queen who had three beautiful daughters. The youngest, Psyche , possessed an indescribable beauty and her splendor was compared to that of Venus. An incredible number of foreigners and many people from her country went to pay homage to the girl and instead the adoration to the goddess Venus decreased, reason for which the divinity became furious. Venus then called her son Cupid, showed him her rival and ordered him to make the girl fall in love with the vilest man that existed on the face of the earth. But Cupid struck himself, falling madly in love with the girl.
Despite her beauty, Psyche was very sad because no mortal, knowing he did not deserve her, had the courage to ask for her hand. So the father asked the oracle of the god Apollo for a wedding and a husband for his daughter: Apollo ordered him to take the girl to the top of a cliff decorated for a funeral wedding, and there Psyche would meet her husband, an evil monster.
When this sad day came, Psyche followed Apollo’s orders to the letter and left her parents in despair. It was not the monster foretold by the oracle that arrived at the rock, but Cupid, who led her to his palace with the help of Zephyr. Cupid went to meet her only at night, forbidding her to look at his face. Psyche followed these instructions but gave in only after being convinced by her envious sisters to look at him in her dreams.
Psyche thus discovered the true face of the god Love , his hair scented with ambrosia, his wings dewy with light, his white neck and cheeks of purple. From the god’s quiver, Psyche drew a thunderbolt, which stung her, thus falling madly in love with Love himself. The lover, now awake, fled from Psyche who had violated the pact. Disconsolate, Psyche began to wander through the woods until she reached the city where her sisters lived and told them that Love had abandoned her because of them.
Meanwhile Venus and her son Cupid had a very heated argument because the man had fallen in love with his mother’s greatest rival, Psyche .
Psyche, after having asked other goddesses for help in vain, decided to face Venus and went to her palace to ask permission to stay with her son Love. Venus gave her four increasingly difficult tests. The first test consisted of separating all the seeds from a large pile into many separate piles. She was helped by ants. In the second test, Psyche had to bring Venus a thread of golden wool taken from the fleece of a flock of sheep. A reed gave her the right advice to complete the task. Subsequently, Psyche had to go to the source of the river that feeds the Styx marsh and bring an amphora of water to the goddess. Help was provided by Jupiter’s eagle.
Conclusion
Venus’s last test was to bring a fragment of Proserpina’s beauty from the underworld. During this test, Psyche opened the jar with the beauty, which had been strictly forbidden to her, and in the blink of an eye she was enveloped in a cloud of sleep and fell in the middle of the road back to Venus ‘s palace . Love rushed to the aid of his beloved and asked her father Jupiter to take her with him to Olympus. Here Psyche , drinking ambrosia, finally becomes immortal . From the union of Love and Psyche a daughter was born, named Voluptuousness.
