These old stories of the Greeks are frequently best known to the modern world through their appearance in Ovid's Metamorphoses. This gifted writer of the very beginning of the Christian era and end of the old brought together a great variety of stories out of the old mythology. Many of these have familiar folktale motifs, and all of them contain marvels of a kind; for the general principle determining his choice of stories is the presence of some transformation which accounts for present-day conditions in the lives of animals or men. [450] Yet with all this affinity to folk belief, Ovid is far removed in his narrative manner from the traditional folktale. He has taken old myths, themselves perhaps sophisticated reworkings of older folklore, and has brought them back into a new secular atmosphere even farther removed from what they must once have been.

Nor can real folktales be found in Virgil. The visit to the lower world in the sixth book of the Aeneid is little more than an imitation of a similar journey in the Odyssey. If Virgil knew about story-telling among Italian shepherds of his day, he gives no sign of it in his Eclogues.

We must come down a full century after these Augustan writers before we find the track of a real folktale, and then Latin literature does give us one beautiful example of a story widely known in present-day folklore. This is the tale of Cupid and Psyche, which appears in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, who wrote in the early part of the second century of our era. This tale appears in a framework of adventures which itself is common in folklore. The hero is transformed into an ass, but keeps his human intelligence, and has many interesting and exciting adventures before he is finally restored. [451] Among other things, he hears an old woman tell the tale of Cupid and Psyche—how Venus is incensed at the beauty and fame of Psyche, how she brings a curse upon the marriage of her son Cupid to the girl, and of how, after long wandering, the couple are reunited. [452] The tale has most of the elements of [p. 282] the present-day folk story: the jealous sisters, the prohibition against seeing the miraculous husband, the dripping candle, the tasks which must be performed by the heroine, and the helpers she meets on the way. But this whole folk story is taken over into the atmosphere of ancient mythology so that, if we did not have our analogues in the folklore of today, we might never guess that we have here what certainly appears to be a real tale of the Italian countryside during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. It is an interesting question whether just this process of transformation of authentic folktales into myths through the efforts of priests and poets may not have been of prime importance in the development of the great mythologies.

However this may be, Apuleius was certainly familiar with the folk tradition, and bears witness to the existence of at least one highly developed tale in his generation. For the later centuries of the ancient Roman Empire, however, we have nothing more of the kind. It is only with the rise of the power of the Christian church and the growth of its legends of saints and martyrs that we again begin to see signs in literature of the presence of old and persistent narrative tradition among the common folk.

It is not the purpose of this study to enter into a discussion of the great literary collections of tales. Much of the narrative activity among the learned of the Middle Ages can be fairly well guessed by the contents of various kinds of written tale compilations. Some of these go back to the Orient, such as the various derivatives of the Panchatantra, the cycle of the Seven Sages, and some of the material we now know in the Thousand and One Nights. Many Oriental themes also appear elsewhere, mingled with strictly western material. Some of the special literary forms of the Middle Ages particularly adapted to the use of folklore were the saints' legends; the exempla, used by priests for illustrations of their sermons; the fabliaux; the novelle; and the somewhat later jestbooks.

Not only many influences of the folktale, but also occasionally actual versions of such tales appear in some of the earlier medieval literary classics written in the vernacular. From this point of view particularly interesting to the folktale student are the Old English poem of Beowulf, many of the Icelandic sagas, and a considerable number of the medieval romances, particularly the so-called Breton Lais. But in all these literary treatments, folk tales are merely taken as bases for artistic reworking, now in one narrative style and now in another. This attitude towards the folktale persists even in such a good collection of authentic popular tales as Basile's in the seventeenth century, and gave way to faithful recording of the actual words of the traditional story-teller only about a hundred years ago.