Keep your own name, and demand the gods say it.
What makes a myth endure: the truth it holds, or the lie it comforts us with? Psyche of Crete is determined to marry with greater happiness than her sisters. But when her beauty threatens the influence of Venus, the goddess of love dispatches her son Cupid to intervene. It is the story everyone knows - the beauty, the monster, the lamp, the wedding on Olympus.
It has never been the story that happened.
Psyche returns to the oldest surviving version of Cupid and Psyche - Apuleius's second-century Metamorphoses, with its Roman names intact - and recovers what two thousand years of retelling have smoothed over: that it was written as satire, and that the great love story is the version that Olympus would have wanted told.
