Although Cupid is never seen, when the weather conditions are exactly right, both of these planets can be seen in the sky after dark or whenever a planetarium is open to visitors. In contemporary popular culture, Cupid is shown drawing his bow to inspire romantic love, often as an icon of Valentine's Day. It concerns the overcoming of obstacles to the love between Psyche ("Soul" or "Breath of Life") and Cupid, and their ultimate union in marriage. Psyche, who had been heavy with child even as she received the harsh, almost impossible punishments of Venus, bore the Roman god Cupid a fine goddess. It was a relationship disdained by his mother, who had in fact instructed the Roman love god to ruin the girl by making the beautiful mortal lust after the ugliest of creatures.

Actresses like Clara Bow punctuated black and white cinema with their gothic lips and powdered skin. Daemon fornicationis in Isidore of Seville, moechiae daemon in Theodulf of Orleans; Jane Chance, Medieval Mythography: From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, A. Cupid sows love in one’s heart, the most basic of love; the carnal, romantic ardor; the raw, almost animalistic passion of lovers. Thus was the result of the love between Cupid and Psyche, the fruit of the marriage between Love and the Mind.

But who can blame Psyche, not having seen the creature lying beside her in bed, unknowing whether it was a man or a monster? Not until Psyche finished several labors as perilous as Hercules’ to appease Venus — including getting the secret box from Hell — were Psyche and Cupid joined in wedlock. In the Roaring Twenties, flappers painted their lips into extreme, often unrealistic shapes, with arching cupid’s bows in dark colors. Those people have good reason to, since Greek and Roman mythology have been an inextricable pair, with the Romans finding equivalents of their gods in Greek mythology.

Backstage at New York Fashion Week, makeup assistants pat gloss into or above cupid’s bows to create the illusion of a fuller upper lip. Cupid is winged, allegedly because lovers are flighty and likely to change their minds, and boyish because love is irrational. The image of Cupid as a bee is part of a complex tradition of poetic imagery involving the flower of youth, the sting of love as a deflowering, and honey as a secretion of love. On gems and other surviving pieces, Cupid is usually shown amusing himself with adult play, sometimes driving a hoop, throwing darts, catching a butterfly, or flirting with a nymph. Albeit not in his former glory as the Roman god of love, Cupid is alive in people’s thoughts, especially on February 14 each year.

Janet Huskinson, Roman Children's Sarcophagi: Their Decoration and Its Social Significance (Oxford University Press, 1996), passim; Joan P.