ABSTRACT
Son of the River Cephissus in Boeotia and the nymph Liriope. When he was a baby, his mother asked the seer Tiresias if her son would live a long life. Tiresias answered ‘He will, if he never knows himself’: an enigmatic response that nobody understood at the time. As a youth Narcissus was so beautiful that many lovers, both men and women, courted him, but he repulsed them all. Then the nymph Echo fell in love with him; but she, whose constant chatter had warned Zeus of Hera’s approach as he made love to other nymphs, had incurred the punishment of the goddess, who had taken away from her the power of speech, with the sole exception that she could repeat the last syllable of any word she heard. Narcissus ignored her, and she wasted away to a mere voice. The youth, however, was eventually requited for his cruelty. A lover rejected by him prayed to
Nemesis, who condemned Narcissus to the contemplation of his own beauty reflected in a pool on Mount Helicon. The more he looked, the deeper he fell in love with himself. This futile passion held him in its grip, as he lay day after day beside the pool, until he wasted away and died. The gods turned him into the narcissus flower. See AMEINIAS.
