Cupid and Psyche - Apuleius - Full Audiobook

This is Apuleius' Cupid and Psyche, an episode from his proto-novel The Golden Ass, or Metamorphoses. Apuleius was a North African Roman writing in the second century AD, and in his Cupid and Psyche many discrete influences, from high parody, Platonic philosophical allegory, cult magic and fairytale trope meet.
Walter Pater, one of the most serious heads on the subject of beauty Of All Time, writes that, within the Metamorphoses, "set as one of the episodes in the main narrative, a true gem amid its mockeries, its coarse though genuine humanity, its burlesque horrors, came the tale of Cupid and Psyche, full of brilliant, life-like situations, speciosa locis, and abounding in lovely visible imagery (one seemed to see and handle the golden hair, the fresh glowers, the precious works of art in it!), yet full also of a gentle idealism, so that you might take it, if you chose, for an allegory. With a concentration of all his finer literary gifts, Apuleius had gathered into it the floating star-matter of many a delightful opportunity."
Outside of the aesthetes and Neoplatonists, this story is further interesting, in my view, as one of the oldest authored occurences of so many cliches familiar to the Western child accustomed to fairytales. Two wicked, ugly sisters scheme to separate the fairest and youngest from her wonderful husband, then the girl is saved from unbreakable sleep by true love's attentions, and from a wicked queen by her diligence and indsustry, with the help of talking animals who come to her aid. The Brothers Grimm be as they may, it is shocking to see the narratives continually reinvigorated by Hans Christian Andersen or Walt Disney drawing from a source common to a man born in Africa in 125 AD. For information on Apuleius' own sources, we see he references often the genre of the "Milesian tale".
Content Warnings may apply for violence, though less unsettling than in the version of the story Ovid provides, and an occasional but vicious misogyny.
This version is the one from the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics Series, edited by E.J. Kenney.