Realistic psychology in the tale of Cupid and Psyche: the relationship of Venus and Cupid Stephen Barber Paper submitted to Oxford University Department of Continuing Education December 2018 Neither must we admit at all, said I, that gods war with gods and plot against one another and contend . . . Hera’s fetterings by her son and the hurling out of heaven of Hephaestus by his father when he was trying to save his mother from a beating, and the battles of the gods in Homer’s verse are things we must not admit into our city either wrought in allegory or without allegory. Plato, Republic 378b-d Tantaene animis caelestibus irae? Virgil, Aeneid I. 11 Are resentments so great in divine spirits? The tale of Cupid and Psyche has been admired for many reasons, one of the chief being its significance as a Platonic allegory. However, in this paper I wish to consider another aspect, the realistic psychology Apuleius gives, particularly, to the divine characters Venus and Cupid. In using this, he develops three narrative techniques, one of which reaches back to Homer, one of which anticipates Shakespeare, and one is particularly characteristic of himself. The Homeric technique is to treat the gods as if they had the same kinds of passions and behaviour as do ordinary human beings. As a good Platonist, Apuleius was naturally familiar with the passage of Plato I have quoted above. However, as an original writer of fiction, instead of accepting the advice Socrates gives in this passage and elsewhere, he does the opposite: he deliberately gives his divine characters human passions and, if anything, exaggerates these in his characterisation, as we shall see. The second technique is to present the characters of what, after all, is a fairy or folk tale, as if their situations were entirely normal and for them to respond to them as would ordinary people if placed in those situations. This is more remarkable than it may seem, because English readers have got used to Shakespeare doing exactly the same thing in his romantic comedies. The clearest example is The Merchant of Venice, which employs two folk tale plots, the pound of flesh and the three caskets. Shakespeare may well have been influenced in this directly by reading Apuleius, either in William Adlington’s translation of 1566, or indeed in the Latin original. The transformation of Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream shows the direct influence of the framing story of Lucius. Apuleius uses this technique with both his divine and his human characters, though arguably more with the former than the latter, hence the focus of this paper. The third technique is the elaborate and flowery language in which he writes the tale, which is at odds, both to the character of the old woman who is supposedly retelling it, and to the normal way in which folk tales are retold. This creates a dissonance between the content of the story and the clever rhetoric of the narration, which serves to emphasizes the artificiality of the whole work. This points towards the allegorical meaning of both the framing story and the inset tales – not only this one – but I shall not be exploring this here. We start with Venus. We realize straightway that there is going to be trouble when we learn that Psyche was being worshipped as an incarnation of Venus: