Source Verification: Eros and Psyche
Every claim below is either what a named ancient source attests, in its own line or section, or a point where the sources themselves disagree.
What the Sources Attest
Why did Aphrodite want to punish Psyche?
People had begun neglecting Aphrodite's own temples to travel and admire Psyche's beauty instead, leaving the goddess's altars cold. Furious at being upstaged by a mortal, Aphrodite sent her son Eros to make Psyche fall in love with the most degraded man alive, a plan Eros never carries out because he falls in love with Psyche himself instead.
Source: Apuleius, Metamorphoses 4.28-31
Why was Psyche exposed on a mountain in the first place?
An oracle, consulted by her father about why none of his three daughters could find a husband, answered instead that Psyche was fated to marry a monster no god could withstand, and ordered her left on a mountain crag dressed for a funeral. Her family, however reluctantly, carried the order out.
Source: Apuleius, Metamorphoses 4.32-35
What happened when Psyche looked at her husband with the lamp?
Convinced by her jealous sisters that her unseen husband must be the monster the oracle had described, Psyche brought a lamp and a knife to bed intending to kill him, and instead found Eros himself sleeping beside her. Leaning in too close, she let a drop of hot oil fall from the lamp onto him; he woke, burned, and fled, telling her only that love cannot survive without trust.
Source: Apuleius, Metamorphoses 5.22-23
What were the four tasks Aphrodite set for Psyche?
Sort an enormous heap of mixed grains before nightfall, gather wool from vicious golden sheep, fill a crystal jar with water from a dragon-guarded Stygian stream on an unclimbable cliff, and travel to the underworld to bring back a portion of Persephone's beauty sealed in a box. Psyche completes all four only with unearned help: ants, a river reed, Zeus's eagle, and a talking tower's advice.
Source: Apuleius, Metamorphoses 6.10-21
How does the story end?
Psyche opens the underworld box out of curiosity despite being warned not to, and falls into a deathlike sleep. Eros, healed and free again, finds and wakes her, then pleads with Zeus for their marriage. Zeus grants it, has Psyche made immortal by drinking ambrosia, and the gods attend a wedding Aphrodite could no longer block; the couple's daughter is named Voluptas, Pleasure.
Source: Apuleius, Metamorphoses 6.23-24
Why would people neglecting Aphrodite's temples to admire a mortal provoke this much anger from her?
Aphrodite's claim on worship went back to her own origin: Hesiod's Theogony has her carried by the sea directly to Cyprus at her birth, making the island - and by extension her general claim to reverence - older than any mortal beauty could challenge. Apuleius's story presupposes exactly this kind of long-established, jealously guarded divine honor.
Source: Hesiod, Theogony 188-206
Where Accounts Differ
- whether Apuleius invented the tale or reworked an older, now-lost story
- No Greek original of this story survives, and none is independently attested; it is known only from Apuleius's 2nd-century-CE Latin novel. This page uses the Greek names Eros, Aphrodite, Zeus and Persephone for consistency with the rest of the site; Apuleius's own Latin calls them Cupid, Venus, Jupiter and Proserpina. Hesiod's Theogony is cited for Aphrodite's own long-established claim to worship, which this story's premise presupposes; it does not narrate Psyche's story itself, which survives only in Apuleius.
Sources
- Apuleius, Metamorphoses 4.28-31
- Apuleius, Metamorphoses 4.32-35
- Apuleius, Metamorphoses 5.22-23
- Apuleius, Metamorphoses 6.10-21
- Apuleius, Metamorphoses 6.23-24
- Hesiod, Theogony 188-206
- Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth (1993)