Psyche

Psyche (“soul”) was a mortal princess so beautiful that people honoured her in place of Aphrodite. After many trials she became the wife of Eros and was made immortal. Her story is told by the Roman writer Apuleius in his Metamorphoses (also called The Golden Ass), 4.28–6.24, where Eros is named Cupid and Aphrodite Venus; it is the only full ancient telling.

Psyche and Eros

Apuleius says Psyche was the youngest of three royal sisters and far more beautiful than the others. Crowds came to admire her and neglected the temples of Aphrodite. The goddess, furious, told her son Eros to make Psyche fall in love with the lowest of men. Instead Eros himself fell in love with her (Metamorphoses 4.28–31).

The oracle of Apollo at Miletus told Psyche’s father to dress her as a bride for a funeral and leave her on a mountain crag for a winged, serpent-like husband feared even by the gods (4.32–35). The west wind Zephyrus carried her down to a splendid palace where she was served by unseen voices. He came to her only in the dark and made her promise never to look at him. Her jealous sisters persuaded her that her husband must be a monster. One night Psyche lit a lamp to see him, and found the god of love himself asleep; a drop of hot oil from the lamp fell on his right shoulder, he woke, reproached her and flew away (5.22–24). Psyche threw herself into a river, which cast her safely ashore, and the god Pan told her to win Eros back by service rather than die (5.25). Her sisters, each hoping to take her place, leapt from the crag expecting Zephyrus to carry them, and were dashed on the rocks (5.26–27).

The Tasks of Aphrodite

Psyche searched for Eros, and Demeter (Ceres) and Hera (Juno) refused to shelter her for fear of Aphrodite (6.1–4). When Hermes (Mercury) proclaimed a reward for the runaway, she gave herself up at Aphrodite’s house, where the goddess’s maids Anxiety and Sorrow whipped her, and Aphrodite, mocking the child Psyche was carrying, set her impossible tasks (6.8–21):

• to sort a huge heap of mixed grains and seeds in a single night, which ants helped her do;
• to gather wool from dangerous golden-fleeced sheep, which a reed by the river told her how to do safely, picking the wool caught on the briers once the sheep had cooled;
• to fill a crystal flask from the black waters that feed the Styx and Cocytus, guarded by sleepless dragons, which the eagle of Zeus did for her;
• to bring back from Persephone in the Underworld a box holding a little of her beauty. A tower told her the way down through Taenarum, with two coins for Charon and two honey-cakes for Cerberus.

On the way back Psyche opened the box, against instructions, and found in it only a deathlike sleep, which overcame her. Eros, his burn healed, slipped out of the room where his mother had shut him, wiped the sleep back into the box and woke her with the tip of an arrow (6.21).

Marriage and Immortality

Eros appealed to Zeus (Jupiter), who had Hermes call the gods together, declared the marriage lawful and had Psyche brought up to heaven, where he gave her a cup of ambrosia to make her immortal. At the wedding feast Ganymede and Dionysus poured, Hephaestus cooked, the Muses sang, Apollo played the lyre and Aphrodite, reconciled, danced. Their daughter was called Voluptas, “Pleasure” (6.22–24); Hedone is the Greek word of the same meaning, and the name by which she is often given in modern retellings.

Psyche in Art

The Greek word psyche means breath, life and soul, and Greek writers on animals also used it as a word for a butterfly. In Hellenistic and Roman art Psyche is usually a young woman with butterfly wings, often shown with Eros in an embrace. Her story has therefore been read as a story of the soul and love, but Apuleius himself tells it as a tale told by an old woman to a captive girl in a robbers’ cave (4.27–28, 6.25), and the heroine of his novel is otherwise unknown in Greek myth.

See Also: Eros and Psyche, Eros, Aphrodite, Zeus, Persephone