ABSTRACT
Narcissus was beauty personified. He attracted others, but he himself scorned love. And in relation to himself? Tiresias the soothsayer had predicted to his mother and father that he would live to a ripe old age if he did not know who he was. We know the rest of the story. Narcissus remained insensitive to the charms of all the suitresses and notably to those of Echo, the nymph who could do nothing but repeat. The vengeance of those spurned led him to gaze upon himself in the water of a spring. He fell in love with his own image and let himself die. Where is narcissism? In beauty? In the personality of the young man? In the rejection of the candidates for his love? In the mirror of the spring? In death, which seems to conclude the story? In the prediction of the soothsayer?
