How The Golden Ass drew on Phaedrus

A documented line of influence: Apuleius demonstrably engaged Plato’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.

Plato · c. 370 BCE

Apuleius · c. 170

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On The Golden Ass’s page

Beneath the donkey jokes runs Plato — Apuleius maps Lucius's fall and recovery onto the chariot allegory of the Phaedrus
The unruly black horse of the soul becomes Lucius the ass; the white horse Candidus that surfaces near the end nods back to Plato's steed drawing the soul upward
Read the Phaedrus on the winged, fallen soul first and Psyche's ascent reads as the myth turned into story

Plato's chariot of the soul — the white horse straining upward, the dark horse dragging it down — became the secret architecture of a Roman comic novel
Lucius, turned into an ass for his appetites, is Plato's unruly dark horse made flesh; the white horse Candidus that returns at the end echoes the steed that draws the soul toward the divine
The Phaedrus's myth of the winged, fallen soul climbing back to heaven is what Apuleius dramatizes through Psyche's ascent