"My beauty must have been growing less through these weeks of trouble and fright," she thought, "and perhaps if my husband saw me now he would not love me. It can do no harm for me to borrow just a little of the contents of this box."
She raised the lid, but from the box there came, with a rushing sound, the spirit of sleep. This spirit seized upon Psyche and laid her by the roadside in a sleep resembling death, and here she might have slept for all time, had not Cupid, wandering by, spied her. Bending over her, he kissed her; then he wrestled with the spirit of sleep until he had forced it to release Psyche, and to enter again the little casket from which her curiosity had loosed it.
[Illustration: CUPID SPIED PSYCHE SLEEPING]
"Psyche," he said, turning to his wife, who lay speechless with happiness at beholding him again, "once through thy curiosity I was lost to thee; this time thou wast almost lost to me. Never again must I leave thee; never must thou be absent from my sight."
Together, then, they hastened to Olympus, the dwelling of the gods: together they bowed before Jupiter's throne. The king of the gods, looking upon Psyche and seeing that she was beautiful as a goddess, listened favorably to their petition, and, calling for a cup of ambrosia, presented it to her and said:
"Drink, Psyche; so shalt thou become immortal, and fit wife for a god."
Venus, touched by her son's happiness, forgave his bride, and the young lovers, who had gone through so many griefs and hardships, lived happily forever in the beautiful palace presented to them by the king of the gods.
The myth of Cupid and Psyche is of much later date than most of the other myths; in fact, it is met with first in a writer of the second century of the Christian era. Many of the myths are material—that is, they explain physical happenings, such as the rising of the sun, the coming of winter, or the flashing of the lightning; but the myth of Cupid and Psyche has nothing to do with the forces of nature—it is wholly spiritual in its application.
Cupid is Love, while Psyche represents the soul; and thus the story, in its descriptions of Psyche's sufferings, shows how the soul, loved by heaven, and really loving heaven, is robbed of its joy through its own folly. Only by striving and suffering, the story tells us, is the soul purified and made fit for joy everlasting.
Psyche's descent into the regions of the dead signifies that it is only after death that the soul realizes its true happiness. Even if we did not know just when this myth originated, we might guess from this teaching that the myth was a late one, for the earliest Greeks and Romans did not believe in a real happiness after death. They believed in existence after death, but it was a very shadowy existence, with the most negative sort of pleasures. Later, the Romans, even before they accepted Christianity, had their beliefs more or less modified by their contact with Christians.