ABSTRACT
Edward Kenney sees Apuleius' narrative as a struggle between two versions of Aphrodite, whom Pausanias distinguishes and opposes in Plato's Symposium: the pandemos and the Uranian. In his Apology, Apuleius summarizes Pausanias' speech and evokes a vulgaria Venus who presides on popularis amor, as well as a celestial Venus, who inspires an optimal love. In On Plato and his Doctrine, Apuleius puts the reality that can be seen through the eyes and touched by hand opposite a completely different kind of reality. Psyche remains entrapped in the former experience of knowledge: that which combines the eyes and the hands, vision and touch. Psyche learns something Platonic but her success, as a character in a novella that ends happily, cannot be mapped onto the ethical values of Plato's metaphysics. The fable of Cupid and Psyche narrates the calamities of being beautiful, and the discovery of what desire really is, for a very simple soul.
