Cupid And Psyche: marble statue-group from the House of Cupid and Psyche at Ostia, copied from a second-
century B.C. original. The fairy tale of Cupid and Psyche is the most famous of the stories embedded in The
Golden Ass. The two lovers are eventually united after various trials and tribulations occasioned by the jealousy
of Venus and Psyche's sisters.
Outside the story of Psyche, too, it enables him to create an atmosphere of his own, and to produce effects unlike
anything else in Latin literature. His is a fantasy world, and yet it gives a curiously convincing picture of life
under the Roman empire. The scene in which Lucius falls for the slave-girl Fotis when he sees her stirring the
porridge in a seductive manner is at once erotic and absurd (2.7). Lucius asks a cackling crone for directions to
Milo's house; she answers with a terrible joke, but Lucius continues straight-faced with an elaborate gravity
(1.21): '"Remoto" inquam "ioco, parens optima, dic oro et cuiatis sit et quibus deuersetur aedibus"' ('"Jesting
aside, my good woman," I answered, "tell me, pray, what manner of man he is and in what abode he lodges'").
Set against the comedy are glossy set-piece descriptions: the statues in Byrrhaena's house, so lifelike that they
seem to be in motion (2.4); the beauty of a head of hair, glittering gold in the light, with shadows the colour of
honey (2.9); the sheen of Cupid's dewy wings, with tender little downy feathers dancing tremulously at their
edges as he sleeps (5.22). Many of Apuleius' stories are told with an outrageous insouciance, with loose ends left
hanging all over the place. One might expect the result to be a disordered ragbag, but the combination of
mannerism and panache holds the work together. Apuleius is a curious figure with whom to end the account of a
period; but it is stimulating to know that in the second half of the second century A.D. Latin literature could still
throw up a writer so full of vitality and imagination.