Reading Notes: Apuleius's Cupid and Psyche Part A

This week I chose to read the Roman story of Cupid and Psyche. While I have heard of this story before, I have never read the whole thing so this was very interesting for me. I am way more familiar with the Greek mythology and how they tell the stories, but it is really interesting how the Romans and Greeks parallel each other in many ways. For example, they have the same gods but with different names. In the first section of this part of the reading, they talk about praying to Mars, which is the Roman god, while in Greece it parallels as Aries, the god of war, which is who more people are familiar with. Then also later introduces us to Venus, who is a Roman goddess, who parallels to the Greek goddess of beauty Aphrodite. After the reading so far, I feel like there isn't as much personality within the Roman gods, which may be a reason that the Greek mythology is more popular and well known. You can really tell that the Romans got a lot of their mythology ideas from the Greeks. I also did not know the the temple of Apollo makes an appearance in this story.

One thing I noticed was that it was cool to see how this was a story within a story. Many of the things I have read so far in this class seem to follow this pattern. I wonder why this is such a common theme within writing. It is really intriguing that the connection to Beauty and the Beast was made. It really makes you begin to look at how many stories follow the same patterns, yet they are so different. I've talked previously about how I am familiar with the monomyth way of telling a story. This week for my story I want to follow this outline and tie it in with the storyline about Cupid.

Bibliography: The story of Cupid and Psyche from the Roman novel, The Golden Ass, by Apuleius; translated from Latin by Tony Kline

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