Narcissus

The pool lay in a fold of the hills above Thespiae, at a place the Boeotians called Donacon, the reed-bed, where the water ran clear and cold and no herdsman had driven his flock to trouble it. A boy knelt at its edge. He had come in hot from hunting and bent to drink, and now he could not rise. Something in the water had caught him, a face lifting toward his own out of the bright surface, its lips parting when his parted, its eyes fixed on his with exactly the hunger he felt himself. He reached down. The face reached up. Their fingers met and broke the water into rings, and the beautiful stranger scattered into light, and the boy waited, shaking, for the surface to still and hand him back.

He was sixteen, and he had never loved anyone.

His father was the river Cephissus, who had once caught the blue nymph Leiriope in a bend of his current and wound around her until she bore a son. When she carried the child to the blind prophet Tiresias and asked the ordinary anxious question, whether the boy would live to see a long old age, the answer came back bent the way such answers are always bent: he would, so long as he never came to know himself. It meant nothing to a mother holding a baby. Prophecies about self-knowledge tend to sleep for years before they wake.

The boy grew into the most beautiful creature in Boeotia, and the beauty was a kind of weather that others walked into and could not walk out of. Boys and girls followed him through the hills while he hunted, keeping their distance, hoping to be noticed. He noticed none of them. He moved through his own admirers the way a stag moves through long grass, aware of them and untouched, and left each one standing in the field of his indifference with nothing to show for the wanting. There was a hardness in him that his face hid completely.

One of those who trailed him was the nymph Echo, and her story is stitched so tightly to his that the two are hard to tell apart, though the join is Ovid’s own work and the older versions know nothing of her. She had a voice once, and used it badly, covering for the god Zeus with long bright chatter while he slipped away among the other nymphs. When Hera understood the trick she took the voice down to a stub, so that from then on Echo could only give back the last words spoken to her. She saw Narcissus in the woods and burned for him and could not say so. When he called out, separated from his companions, “Is anyone here?”, she could only answer here, and when at last she ran to him with open arms he recoiled as from something unclean. She crept away into the caves and the lonely rock faces and let her body waste until only the voice was left, still lying in wait to repeat the end of whatever you say.

She was not the only one he broke. A young man named Ameinias loved him past sense and past pride, and Narcissus, tired of him, sent him a sword. Ameinias carried it to the doorway of the house that had refused him, prayed that the beautiful boy might one day love and be refused in turn, and killed himself on the threshold. The prayer did not fall on nothing. Nemesis, who keeps the accounts no one else will keep, heard it and agreed.

So the goddess drew him, hot and careless, to the untouched pool at Donacon. He bent to drink and met the face in the water, and every cruelty he had handed out came home in a single afternoon. He begged the lovely thing to stay, and it mouthed his begging back at him. He wept, and it wept. For a long while he did not understand, and then, in the worst moment the story has, he did. That is me. The knowing changed nothing. Aware now that the boy in the water was his own reflection, he still could not leave him, could not eat or sleep or lift his head, could only lie on the bank and stare, worn thinner by the hour, calling farewell across the surface to a face that shaped the word and gave it back.

He died there, or something close to dying. When the naiads and the wood-nymphs came to build his pyre they found no body on the bank, only a flower growing where he had lain, a ring of white petals around a cup of gold, nodding on its stem above the water. The tellings divide on how it came. In Ovid the wasting boy simply turns into the bloom. In the harsher and probably older accounts, the ones set down by Conon and preserved on a torn scrap of papyrus from an earlier Greek poet, there is no Echo and no slow melting: the boy takes the sword to himself, and the narcissus springs from the ground his blood has soaked. Either way the same pale, sweet-scented flower leans out over still water, and the Greeks were not surprised that it was the same flower Hades scattered to lure Persephone down into the dark.

Pausanias, walking through Boeotia centuries later and disliking the whole business, offered a version he found less foolish. In it Narcissus had a twin sister, his exact double, who hunted at his side and whom he loved, and who died. Afterward he went to the pool not because he mistook the reflection for a stranger but because looking at his own face was the nearest he could come to seeing hers. It is a sadder story and a smaller one, and it has never been the one people remember.

Of his actual appearance the sources say less than the fame of it would suggest. He is a hunter in his sixteenth year, unlined and unhardened, his skin flushed from running, his hair the kind other people wanted to reach out and touch; ivory and roses is the shorthand Ovid keeps returning to, a face with no flaw in it for a flaw to catch on. That face was his only power, and it was enormous. It bent nymphs and grown men and the favor of gods toward him without his lifting a hand, and it killed several of them. It was also the whole of his weakness. The beauty that undid everyone who looked at it undid him the moment it was turned around, because the one thing it could not do was let him hold what he saw. He could not keep the face in the water. He could not stop looking at it either. For everyone else, knowing Narcissus was the danger; for Narcissus, coming to know himself was the end, exactly as the blind man had said over the cradle.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Narcissus in Greek mythology?

Narcissus is a beautiful young hunter from Thespiae in Boeotia, the son of the river god Cephissus and the water nymph Leiriope. He is famous for his extraordinary beauty and for the pride with which he rejected everyone who loved him. He is best known for falling in love with his own reflection in a pool and dying beside it.

How did Narcissus die?

Narcissus died beside a still pool after the goddess Nemesis caused him to fall in love with his own reflection, which he could neither possess nor stop staring at. In Ovid’s version he simply wastes away and turns into the narcissus flower; in older versions recorded by Conon he kills himself with a sword and the flower springs from his blood.

What is the story of Echo and Narcissus?

Echo was a mountain nymph punished by the goddess Hera so that she could only repeat the last words spoken to her. She fell in love with Narcissus but could not tell him, and when he rejected her she wasted away until only her voice remained. The pairing of Echo with Narcissus was introduced by the Roman poet Ovid and does not appear in the earlier Greek versions of the myth.

Why did Narcissus fall in love with his reflection?

Narcissus fell in love with his reflection because the goddess Nemesis punished him for his cruelty to his suitors, granting the dying wish of a rejected lover named Ameinias that Narcissus might love and never be able to have what he loved. Drawn to an untouched spring, he mistook his own image for a beautiful stranger, and even after realizing the truth he could not tear himself away.

Where does the narcissus flower come from?

In the myth the narcissus flower first grew where Narcissus died beside his pool, a white-petaled bloom with a golden cup nodding over the water. The Greeks linked it to death and the underworld, noting that it was the same flower Hades used to lure Persephone before he abducted her.

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Nemesis, Adonis, Daphne, Aphrodite, Apollo, Persephone, Hades, Medusa, Orpheus, Sisyphus, Naiad, Nymph, Dryad