Narcissus

Narcissus was a beautiful young hunter in Greek mythology, the son of the river god Cephissus and the nymph Liriope. He rejected every lover, including the nymph Echo, until a rejected suitor prayed that he too would love and not gain the one he loved. Narcissus then fell in love with his own reflection in a spring and wasted away, and a flower grew where he died (Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.339–510).

Early Life and Fateful Beauty

Liriope was a nymph whom the river Cephissus enclosed in his winding stream and overpowered; she bore a child so beautiful that even then the nymphs could have loved him, and she named him Narcissus (Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.342–346). She asked the seer Teiresias, famous in the cities of Boeotia, whether her son would live to a ripe old age. The seer answered, “If he does not come to know himself” (3.346–348).

At sixteen Narcissus could pass for a boy or a young man, and many youths and many girls desired him, but there was such hard pride in his tender beauty that none of them touched him (3.351–355).

Narcissus and Echo

The nymph Echo saw Narcissus driving deer into his nets and fell in love with him. Echo could neither stay silent when someone spoke nor speak first herself. This was the work of Hera (Juno in Ovid), whom Echo had kept talking with long stories so that the nymphs whom Zeus was with could escape; in anger Hera took away most of Echo’s voice, so that she could only repeat the last words of what was said to her (Metamorphoses 3.356–369).

When Narcissus, separated from his companions, called out “Is anyone here?”, Echo answered, and when she came out of the wood to throw her arms around him, he fled, saying he would die before he gave her power over him. Echo could only repeat the end of his words, “give you power over me” (3.379–392). She hid in the woods, and her love and sorrow wore her body away until only her voice and her bones remained, and the bones, they say, turned to stone (3.393–399).

The Curse and Reflection

The Punishment of Narcissus

Echo was not the only one he had scorned. A youth he had rejected raised his hands to heaven and prayed, “May he himself love in this way, and may he in the same way not gain the one he loves!” Nemesis, called Rhamnusia in the poem, granted the just prayer (Metamorphoses 3.402–406).

Tired from hunting and from the heat, Narcissus lay down beside a clear spring that no shepherd, goat or bird had troubled (3.407–414). While he drank, he fell in love with the image he saw, mistook the reflection for a body and stared at it, motionless, like a statue of Parian marble (3.415–419). In Ovid he finally understands: “I am he; I have felt it, and my image does not deceive me” (3.463–464).

The Death of Narcissus

Narcissus did not take his own life in Ovid. He melted away with love as wax melts before a gentle fire or frost in the morning sun, and his colour, strength and body wore away (Metamorphoses 3.486–493). Echo, though still angry, pitied him and repeated his last cry, “Alas, boy loved in vain!”, and his farewell to the pool. Then he laid his head down on the green grass and death closed his eyes, and even in the underworld he gazed at himself in the water of the Styx. His sisters the Naiads cut their hair for him and the Dryads mourned him; when they prepared the pyre there was no body, but a yellow flower with white petals around its centre (3.494–510).

Other Versions of the Story

Pausanias knew the Narcissus of the spring at Donacon in the territory of Thespiae in Boeotia, who fell in love with his own reflection and died of love at the water, but he dismissed the tale as foolish, since a man old enough to fall in love could tell a man from his reflection (Pausanias 9.31.7). He reports a less popular version: Narcissus had a twin sister who looked exactly like him, dressed like him and hunted with him; he loved her, and when she died he came to the spring, knowing that he saw his own reflection, but finding some relief in imagining it was his sister (Pausanias 9.31.8). Pausanias also thought the flower older than the youth: the poet Pamphos, born long before Narcissus the Thespian, said that the Maid, the daughter of Demeter, was lured into being carried off while gathering narcissus flowers (Pausanias 9.31.9).

Narcissus Sources

Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.339–510. Pausanias 9.31.7–9.

See Also: Echo, Nemesis, Hera, Teiresias, Cephissus, Zeus