Narkissos

Narcissus (nar-SIS-us), in Greek Νάρκισσος (Narkissos), is the beautiful youth of Boeotia who fell hopelessly in love with his own reflection in a pool of water, and, unable ever to possess the image he desired, wasted away gazing at himself until he died — and in the place where he had lain sprang up the flower that still bears his name. His is one of the most quietly terrible of all Greek stories: not a hero cut down by a monster or a god, but a boy destroyed from within, by nothing crueller than his own beauty and his own cold heart, undone by a love that could never be answered because it was aimed at himself.

Narcissus is remembered as the great cautionary figure of Greek myth — the emblem of vanity, of pride that will not love, and of the self-regard that turns inward until it consumes the one who feels it. He was a youth so beautiful that everyone who saw him, boys and girls and nymphs alike, longed for him; and he spurned every one of them with the same cold contempt, until a scorned lover's prayer reached Nemesis, the goddess of divine retribution, who fitted the punishment exactly to the crime: the one who could love no one else was made to love the one thing he could never have, his own unreachable self.

His story has outlived almost all the others in a strange and modern way. The flower that grew where he died is a real and common plant, and his name has passed into the language of psychology as narcissism — the clinical and everyday word for excessive self-love, self-absorption, and the incapacity to see others as anything but a mirror. Few mythical figures have left so precise a mark on how we speak and think today; to call someone a narcissist is to reach back, knowingly or not, across two thousand years to a Boeotian boy bent over a spring, dying of love for the face in the water.

The child of the river and the nymph, and the prophecy of Tiresias

Narcissus was born in Boeotia, in the country around Thespiae beneath Mount Helicon, the son of the river-god Cephissus — the stream that runs through the Boeotian plain — and the water-nymph Liriope, whom the river had caught and encircled in his waters and there overpowered. When the child was born, so beautiful even in the cradle that he was already worth a nymph's love, Liriope went to the great blind seer Tiresias to ask whether her son would live to see a ripe old age. The prophet gave one of his famous riddling answers, the more haunting for how strange it sounded before the event: the boy would live long, Tiresias said, "if he never knows himself" (si se non nouerit). No one could make sense of so odd a saying — until, long after, the manner of Narcissus's death, and his madness, and the strange truth of his end proved the prophecy exactly. It is the first of the great Greek warnings turned on its head: where the god at Delphi commanded "know thyself," for Narcissus self-knowledge is precisely the thing that kills.

The cold and beautiful youth

Narcissus grew to be a youth of sixteen, at the trembling border between boy and man, and his beauty was such that he might have been taken for a boy or a girl, and everyone who looked on him desired him — the young men of Thespiae, the girls, and the nymphs of the hills and streams. But with the beauty came a pride as cold and hard as it was famous: he would have none of them. "In that slender form," the story says, "was a pride so unyielding that no youth, no girl, could touch him." He spurned every lover who came to him, boys and girls alike, with the same indifference, taking his pleasure in the hunt and in his own untouchable solitude, and leaving behind him a trail of the wounded and the humiliated. His beauty drew all hearts; his coldness broke them; and he cared for none of it. This is the flaw the whole myth turns upon — not lust or cruelty of the ordinary kind, but a self-sufficiency so complete that it cannot love, a heart that returns nothing.

Echo, and the voice that wasted away

(Content note: this strand ends in a lover's slow wasting and death.) The most famous of those he spurned was the mountain-nymph Echo (whose own story is told elsewhere), and her fate is bound up with a punishment she already carried. Echo had once been a full-voiced nymph, but she had used her gift of chatter to distract the goddess Hera with long talk while Zeus's other loves, the mountain-nymphs, slipped away — and when Hera discovered the trick, she crippled Echo's speech, leaving her able only to repeat the last words of whatever was said to her, never to speak first or of her own will. In this state Echo saw Narcissus hunting in the hills and fell desperately in love, following him through the woods, longing to call out to him but unable to say anything he had not said first. When at last, separated from his companions, he called "Is anyone here?" — she could answer "Here!"; when he called "Come!" she answered "Come!"; and when she rushed from the trees to throw her arms about him, he recoiled in horror and cried, "Hands off! May I die before you have your way with me!" — and all she could answer, broken-hearted, was "…have your way with me." Rejected, ashamed, she crept away into caves and lonely places, and there pined for love of him until her body wasted utterly away: her flesh shrank, her bones (the poets said) turned to stone, and nothing was left of her at all but her voice — the disembodied echo that still answers, from cliffs and empty valleys, repeating the last words of those who call, and never able to speak first.

The prayer of the scorned, and the vengeance of Nemesis

Echo was only one of many. One of the others Narcissus had cruelly spurned — a youth in Ovid's telling, one of the boys who had loved him — lifted his hands to heaven at the last and prayed a bitter prayer: "So may he himself love, and so may he never possess what he loves!" And the goddess Nemesis (whose page tells her own story) — the divine power of retribution who levels the proud and answers the arrogance that goes too far — heard the just prayer and granted it. The whole disaster that follows is her doing: the punishment is not random cruelty but exact, measured justice, the crime of loving no one turned back on itself as the doom of loving what cannot be loved. Narcissus, who had returned nothing to any who wanted him, was made at last to want, with all the anguish of every lover he had scorned, something that could return nothing to him — himself.

The clear pool and the fatal reflection

There was, in the hills, a pool of water perfectly clear and still, silver-bright, untouched by shepherd or beast or falling leaf, ringed with grass that the water kept green, shaded and cool. Here Narcissus, worn out and thirsty from the hunt, lay down to drink — and as he bent to the water, he saw a face looking up at him, and fell in love with it on the instant, not knowing (this is the heart of the horror) that what he saw was his own reflection. He took the image in the water for a real being, a beautiful boy dwelling in the pool, and he was seized with a longing as fierce and hopeless as any he had ever inflicted. He gazed, motionless, at his own bright eyes, his hair worthy of a god, his flushed cheeks; he reached to embrace the boy in the water and the boy reached back, and vanished the moment he touched the surface, reforming only when the water stilled. He begged the image to stay, spoke to it, wept, and could not understand why it wept when he wept and smiled when he smiled and yet fled his touch and gave him nothing. "Whoever you are, come out to me!" he pleaded to the thing that was himself.

Knowing himself, and pining away

At last the terrible knowledge came, and with it the fulfilment of Tiresias's riddle: "I am he," Narcissus cried, understanding at the last that the beloved was his own reflection — iste ego sum, "that one is I" — "I have felt it, and my own image no longer deceives me: I burn with love of myself, I kindle the flames I bear." To know himself was to be undone, exactly as the prophet had foretold. But the knowledge could not free him; he could no more leave the image than possess it, for to leave the pool was to leave what he loved, and what he loved was inseparable from himself, so that he was at once the lover and the beloved, the fire and the fuel, wanting and wanted and forever denied. He would not eat or sleep or move from the water's edge; he wept, and beat his breast, and wasted slowly away, consumed by the fire within him just as Echo had wasted for love of him — the punishment run full circle. His beauty melted from him, the bloom and strength that all had loved, until there was almost nothing left, and Echo, though he had scorned her, grieved for him, and answered his last cries — "Alas!" with "Alas!", and his last "Farewell" with "Farewell." He laid down his weary head on the green grass, and death closed the eyes that had so loved their own reflection; and even as he crossed into the underworld, the poets say, he bent over the Stygian water to gaze at himself once more.

The flower on the empty ground

When the nymphs of the wood, and the grieving Echo, came to gather his body for the funeral fire, they found no body at all: it had vanished from the place where it lay. In its stead they found a flower — white petals set about a heart of yellow — growing where the beautiful youth had died, and this is the flower that has been called narcissus ever after. So the transformation that gives the myth its shape and its name: the boy who bent over the water forever becomes the nodding flower that still leans, in gardens and by streams, as if to look at its own reflection in the pool below.

The Boeotian variant — a lost twin, and the doubting of Pausanias

Ovid's is the version the world remembers, but it is a Roman literary telling, the fullest and most artful, and not the only shape the story took. The traveller Pausanias (Description of Greece 9.31.7), describing the spring of Narcissus on Mount Helicon in his native Boeotia, preserves a darker and quite different local tale — and adds a rare note of open scepticism. In this Boeotian version Narcissus had a twin sister, his exact double in looks, whom he loved dearly; and when the girl died, the grieving Narcissus took to visiting a spring, and there, seeing his own reflection, he consoled his grief by imagining that he saw not himself but his lost sister looking back at him. Pausanias, the rationalist, rejects even this softened account, and dismisses the whole idea of a man not knowing his own reflection as sheer folly — remarking drily that a person old enough to fall in love is surely old enough to tell a real face from an image in the water. The mythographer Conon (Narrations 24) gives yet another version, set at Thespiae, in which a rejected male lover named Ameinias, driven to despair by Narcissus's cruelty, kills himself with a sword Narcissus had sent him and calls down a curse with his dying breath — after which Narcissus, seeing himself in a spring, falls in love, despairs in turn, and takes his own life; and from his blood springs the flower. These older Greek versions are grimmer and less tender than Ovid's, closer to a simple morality-tale of cruelty punished, and it is worth remembering that behind the exquisite Roman poem lies a harder local legend of pride and its price.

A figure of story, not of cult

Narcissus was not a god and received no worship: he belongs to the class of mythical mortals — beautiful, doomed youths transformed at death — whose place in Greek religion is not the altar but the story, the landscape, and the flower. There was no temple of Narcissus, no festival, no priesthood; what the ancients kept of him was a tale told to explain a plant and to point a moral, and a place or two in Boeotia that claimed his memory. His function in the ancient imagination was that of a warning-figure and an origin-story rolled together: the youth whose fate accounts for the narcissus flower, and whose ruin illustrates, more sharply than any sermon could, the cost of pride and the danger of self-love.

The spring on Helicon

Where Narcissus came nearest to cult was in the landscape of Boeotia, his home country. Pausanias, touring the region in the second century AD, was shown the spring of Narcissus on Mount Helicon, near Thespiae, where the local people said the youth had gazed at his reflection and died — the very pool of the legend, pointed out to travellers as a real place. To be attached to an actual spring in this way is the mark of a figure who lived in local memory and local pride: the Boeotians claimed Narcissus as their own, tied his story to their own hills and waters, and told his tale (in its grimmer local form) to those who came to see the spot. Such local landmarks — a hero's tomb, a nymph's spring, the flower on a certain hillside — were the ordinary furniture of Greek myth in the countryside, keeping the old stories rooted in places people could visit and touch.

The flower and its associations

The narcissus flower itself carried associations in ancient cult that gave the youth's story a deeper resonance. The flower — heavy-scented, said to be linked by its very name to a drowsy numbness (narkē) — was one of the blooms associated with the underworld and the dead: in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter it is the narcissus, deliberately grown by Earth as a snare, that Persephone reaches out to pluck at the moment the ground opens and Hades carries her down. A flower already tinged with death and the underworld made a fitting emblem for a youth who died of a fatal enchantment and was changed into it; and the narcissus's place among the flowers of the grave and of the chthonic gods gave the transformation at the heart of the myth an added weight the ancient hearer would have felt.

The word that swallowed the myth

Of all the figures of Greek myth, Narcissus has left perhaps the single most precise mark on the modern world, and it is a word: narcissism. Drawn straight from his name, it is the ordinary and the clinical term for excessive self-love, self-absorption, and vanity — a whole grammar of the self built on a Boeotian boy at a pool. The usage owes much to psychology: the term was taken up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and made central by Sigmund Freud, whose 1914 essay "On Narcissism" turned the myth into a technical concept for the libido directed at the self, and it survives today in narcissistic personality disorder, a recognised diagnosis, and in the everyday label "narcissist" for the self-obsessed. When we call someone a narcissist we are, without often realising it, retelling the myth in a single word — pronouncing the same judgement the ancient story pronounced, that a love turned wholly inward is a kind of doom.

The flower, still nodding at the water

The plainest legacy is the one you can grow in a garden. The narcissus — the botanical genus that includes the daffodil and the jonquil — is a real and common spring flower, and it carries the youth's name in every language of botany, so that the transformation at the end of the myth is, in a sense, permanent and everywhere: the boy really did become a flower, and the flower is still here. The old fancy that the narcissus bends over streams and pools as if gazing at its own reflection has clung to it ever since, and gardeners and poets alike still read the drooping bloom as the image of the self-regarding youth frozen forever at the water's edge.

An enduring emblem in art and thought

Beyond the word and the flower, Narcissus has remained one of the most painted, written, and thought-about of all the myths. Painters from Caravaggio — whose famous canvas shows the youth and his reflection joined in a single dark circle — to the Pre-Raphaelites and the Surrealists (Salvador Dalí's "Metamorphosis of Narcissus") have returned again and again to the image of the boy at the pool; poets and essayists have used him as the type of self-love, of the artist's self-absorption, of the age of the mirror and the selfie. He endures because the thing he stands for never dates: the hunger to be admired, the difficulty of truly loving another, the trap of seeing in other people only a reflection of oneself. The Golden Thread keeps him as the tradition kept him — beautiful, cold, and doomed, the great warning at the water's edge, from whose ruin came a flower and a word we still cannot do without.