These stories, as presented by Ovid, Musaeus, and Apuleius, are intended to entertain. The gods, who make appearances in some of these tales, are simply fictional devices, not religious beings. Here we see myth degenerated into yarn-spinning. Ovid's "Pyramus and Thisbe" and Musaeus' "Hero and Leander" show two sets of lovers that commit suicide. The purpose is sentimental, but the effect is bathetic, since each lover dies stupidly. Passion is inflated to grotesque proportions and utterly lacking in reason or prudence. In Ovid's "Pygmalion" love becomes' pathological, morbid, as the hero idolatrizes his own statue after rejecting all real women. "Vertumnus and Pomona" is a silly treatment of the hardhearted woman with the ardent suitor theme, in which Ovid asserts the value of handsome nudity over fatuous persuasion. In each of these tales there is something effeminate and decadent. Ovid's "Baucis and Philemon" is a different matter, however. While it is sentimental it is touchingly so, for one feels affection for the humble elderly couple still very much in love.
Apuleius uses fairy tale motifs to suggest allegorical meanings in "Cupid and Psyche." There are the familiar devices of the serpent-human lover, the envious elder sisters, the magic prohibition, the wicked mother-in-law, the series of perilous tasks, the descent to the underworld, and the happy ending. Yet the story can be read as the soul's passage through hard discipline from carnal love to spiritual love. It also hints that a heavenly estate awaits the soul that patiently endures long trials in the service of love. Such ideas were not foreign to the cult of Isis, of which Apuleius was an initiate.
If the patriotic legend revealed the hard backbone of Roman culture, the love story tended to show its vulnerable belly. The elevation of passion into a ruling principle, the mixture of sentimentality and cynicism, the emphasis on metamorphoses and feminine psychology all suggest a decadent stage of civilization, a loss of nerve and vigor. Where erotic love excludes other realities it becomes effete and self-destructive. The tales of lovers who seal their union in death operate by this logic. The point is that when the old heroic legends lose their attraction one finds an obsession with love cropping up, and it means a culture has gone soft.
