Le nozze funebri di Psiche - Apuleio, Met. IV 33-34 alla luce del folklore romeno
Psyche's Funeral Wedding - Apuleius, Met. IV 33-34 in the Light of the Romanian Folklore

Summary/Abstract: While folklorists believe that in the tale of Cupid and Psyche, very similar to the European folk tales of the ATU 425 B type, Apuleius reworked an oral source, in the area of Classical Philology the dominant tendency is to exclude the contribution of folklore in favor of a literary approach. Recently, Emmanuel and Nedjima Plantade have provided convincing contributions to the exegesis of Apuleius’s text starting from the ethnographic documentation of North African folklore. This interdisciplinary article compares a specific episode of the story of Cupid and Psyche and the Romanian and Balkan tradition of the “wedding of the dead”, showing that despite the chronological, geographical and cultural distance, ethnographic data from South-Eastern Europe can contribute to throwing new light on a famous text from classical antiquity. The comparative reading of Metamorphoses IV, 33-34 (the Oracle of Miletus and Psyche’s “funeral wedding”) with the Romanian ethnographic documentation about the “wedding of the dead” traditions, the funeral lament and the famous Miorița carol allows us to recognize the mythical-ritual implications of the Latin text, in a broad comparative and anthropological horizon.

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