The Myth of Narcissus

At a Glance

• Central figures: Narcissus, son of the river god Cephissus and the nymph Liriope, renowned for his beauty and cruelty toward those who loved him; Echo, a nymph cursed by Hera to repeat only the last words she heard; and Nemesis, goddess of retribution.
• Setting: Ancient Greece - forests, mountain caves, and a still woodland pool; drawn from the Greek mythological tradition and retold at length by Ovid.
• The turn: Nemesis leads Narcissus to a clear pool where, kneeling to drink, he sees his own reflection and falls in love with it, not knowing it for what it is.
• The outcome: Narcissus wastes away at the water’s edge, unable to touch what he desires, and dies there; Echo, already fading in the mountains, is reduced to nothing but a repeating voice.
• The legacy: Where Narcissus died, a flower grew by the pool - the narcissus - which the nymphs who loved him found in place of his body when they came to bury him.

Narcissus was born of a river god’s passion for a nymph, and from the first he was given looks that turned every head in Hellas. His father was Cephissus, the river; his mother was Liriope. When Liriope asked the seer Tiresias whether the boy would live to old age, Tiresias said he would - provided he never knew himself. Nobody understood what that meant at the time. They understood later.

He grew into the kind of young man who attracted love without effort and deflected it without grief. Men and women both came to him. He turned them all away, cold and certain of his own worth, convinced that no one who offered themselves could possibly deserve him. This went on for years, and the gods watched.

Hera’s Punishment of Echo

Before Narcissus ever came to the pool, there was Echo - a mountain nymph who had once been voluble, charming, a nymph who could fill a forest clearing with chatter. Hera ended that. Zeus had been pursuing other nymphs in the hills, as Zeus did, and Echo had kept Hera talking, holding the goddess at conversation while Zeus escaped. When Hera worked out what had happened, she stripped Echo of the power to speak first, to say anything new, to do anything with language except return the last words she heard. A mirror made of sound. That was what she became.

Echo was in the forest the day Narcissus came hunting. She watched him through the trees, and whatever she felt then, it overwhelmed what she had left of reason. She followed him, keeping to the shadows, listening. When Narcissus called out to his companions - Is anyone here? - Echo could only answer back: Here. Here. He called again. She answered again. He came toward the sound, she came toward him, and she opened her arms.

Narcissus stepped back. He told her he would rather die than let her have him. Echo, who could not answer with anything new, could only repeat the last words back into the silence he left behind. She withdrew into the mountains and hid in caves. She stopped eating. She stopped caring about anything except the grief, and the grief ate through her until her bones turned to stone and only her voice remained - still there, still answering, still repeating the last thing anyone says.

Nemesis at the Pool

Nemesis heard the prayers of those Narcissus had spurned. She did not need many prayers - what he had done to Echo alone was enough. She arranged things.

One afternoon Narcissus pushed through the trees and found a pool, perfectly still, cold and clear, fed by springs and undisturbed by cattle or by birds. He was thirsty from the hunt. He knelt at the edge. He looked down to drink.

And there was a face.

He had never seen his own reflection clearly before - not like this, not motionless, not with the water smooth as polished bronze and the light falling just so. He saw a young man of extraordinary beauty looking back up at him. He did not know it was himself. He reached down, and the face leaned toward him. He withdrew his hand, and the face stayed, patient and perfect, waiting just beneath the surface.

He was lost before he understood what was happening to him.

The Water That Would Not Hold Him

He tried to embrace the figure. His hands broke the surface and the face dissolved into ripples, fragments of light, nothing. He pulled back. The water stilled. The face returned.

He called to it. He wept at it. He told it - in the same voice that had dismissed Echo, that had turned away every man and woman who had come to him in honest feeling - that he burned for it, that he could not leave it, that nothing in the world mattered but the face in the water. He lay down at the pool’s edge and stared down through the surface and did not move.

He saw the figure cry when he cried. He saw it reach back when he reached. He came to understand, eventually, that the face was his own - and that understanding made it worse, not better. He could not possess himself. He could not step inside the water and hold what he saw. He was the thing he wanted and the wanting would not stop.

The Flower by the Pool

He stopped eating. He stopped sleeping. The hunters who came looking did not find him at the camp. He lost weight. The color went out of him. He remained at the water’s edge, wasting, and the pool reflected back his wasting face with perfect fidelity.

In some tellings, Narcissus recognized toward the end what he was and grieved for Echo - Alas, in vain beloved - calling out a lament that she, somewhere in her mountains, could only send back to him in fragments. In others he simply diminished until there was nothing left to diminish. Some say he finally threw himself into the water. What is agreed is that he died there, by the pool, of what he had brought on himself.

The nymphs who had loved him came to find him and perform the burial rites. They found no body. Where he had lain, at the water’s edge, a flower had come up - white petals around a yellow center, the kind that still grows near streams and springs. They called it the narcissus. Down at the surface of the pool, in the Underworld’s dark water, the flower bends and gazes at its own reflection, just as it always did.