Narcissus- Greek FigureMortal

The Beautiful Youth

Narcissus was the son of the river god Cephissus and the nymph Liriope, born near Thespiae in Boeotia after Cephissus embraced his mother in his winding streams. When Liriope brought her son to the blind prophet Tiresias and asked whether the boy would live long, Tiresias answered: "If he never knows himself."

Narcissus grew into a youth of cold and consuming beauty. By sixteen, Ovid tells us, he could be taken for either a boy or a man, and his beauty drew the desire of both. Men and women, mortals and nymphs pursued him. He wandered the woods outside Thespiae, hunting, never looking back at those who followed. Not one of them ever touched him.

Echo

Among those who loved Narcissus was the nymph Echo, already cursed by Hera for keeping the goddess distracted with long conversations while Zeus pursued his affairs with other nymphs. Hera's punishment was precise: Echo could never speak first, only repeat the last words spoken to her. She followed Narcissus through the forest, desperate to declare her love but able only to echo his voice back to him.

When she revealed herself, arms outstretched, Narcissus recoiled. "May I die before you have me!" he cried. "Have me!" was all Echo could answer. He fled. She withdrew to caves and mountainsides, her body consumed by grief. Ovid says her bones turned to stone, her flesh wasted to air. Nothing remained but her voice, an echo in empty places.

The Pool

Narcissus left many such wounded lovers. One rejected suitor raised his hands to heaven and prayed: "May he fall in love, and never possess his beloved!" Nemesis heard the prayer.

She led Narcissus to a pool in the forest, ringed by trees that kept the sun from warming the water. Its surface lay perfectly still, never troubled by shepherd or wind. Exhausted from hunting, Narcissus bent to drink and saw his own face. Not knowing it was his reflection, he fell in love with the youth in the water. He reached out to embrace the vision, but it dissolved at his touch. He waited for the water to still and saw it return. He spoke to it, pleaded with it, tried to kiss those perfect lips. Each attempt shattered the image.

"What you seek is nowhere," Ovid writes. "What you see is the shadow of a reflected form. It has nothing of its own. It comes with you, it stays with you, and it will go with you, if you can only go."

The Wasting

Narcissus understood at last that the beloved was himself. "I am he!" he cried. But the knowledge brought no relief. He could not stop looking, and he could not touch what he loved. "Now I know what others have suffered from me," he wept, "for I burn with love of my own self. What should I do? Be asked, or ask? What I want, I have. My riches make me poor."

Tears fell into the water and broke the image. He begged it not to leave. He lay by the pool, forgetting to eat or drink, his beauty fading, his strength ebbing. His color drained. His body wasted. All the beauty that had once delighted Echo melted away like frost in morning sun.

When the nymphs and dryads came to prepare his body for the funeral pyre, they found only a flower: white petals surrounding a yellow center, drooping over the water as if still gazing at its own reflection. Even in the underworld, Ovid tells us, Narcissus bent over the Styx, still staring at his image in the dark water below.

Other Traditions

Other traditions survive. Pausanias records a local Boeotian account in which Narcissus had a twin sister whom he loved deeply. When she died, the grieving youth went to the pool not out of vanity but to see her face reflected in his own, and found comfort in the resemblance. Pausanias himself found this version unlikely but preserved it as a tradition of Thespiae.

Conon's telling is darker. In his version, the youth Ameinias was Narcissus's most devoted suitor. When Narcissus rejected him and sent him a sword as a contemptuous gift, Ameinias killed himself on Narcissus's doorstep and called on the gods for vengeance. Narcissus saw his reflection in a spring, fell in love with it, and killed himself with the same sword. From his blood sprang the narcissus flower. The people of Thespiae honored Eros more devoutly thereafter.

The flower had older ties to death. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Zeus commanded Gaia to grow a narcissus of extraordinary size as a lure for Persephone. The girl reached for the blossom, which had a hundred heads sprung from a single root, and the earth split open beneath her. Hades rose in his golden chariot and carried her below. Sophocles calls the narcissus the "ancient crown of the Great Goddesses," and the Greeks planted it on graves and wove it into funeral garlands. Its heavy scent brought drowsiness; from it the ancients derived the word "narcotic."