Narcissus

Ovid gives Narcissus the fullest ancestry. His mother was Liriope, a nymph, and his father the river-god Cephisus, on whose banks she bore him. Liriope asked the seer Tiresias whether her son would reach old age. The answer, that he would if he never came to know himself, is where Ovid's story of Narcissus and Echo begins.

By Ovid's account he grew into a youth whom many young men and girls desired, and his pride kept every one of them away. He spent his days hunting stags with nets. One of the young men he scorned lifted his hands to heaven and prayed that Narcissus might love and never win what he loved. Nemesis heard the prayer and granted it. The full narrative, with Echo's part in it, belongs to the story page; this page follows the figure through the versions that disagree with it.

The Greek writers place him in Boeotia. Pausanias saw the spring of Narcissus at Donacon, a reed-bed in the territory of Thespiae, and calls him "Narcissus the Thespian". Conon, a mythographer of Ovid's own generation, also sets the story at Thespiae, near Mount Helicon. His Narcissus is dismissive of both lovers and Eros.

Conon's version names the rejected suitor. A youth called Ameinias kept pleading after every other lover gave up, and Narcissus sent him a sword. Ameinias killed himself with it at Narcissus's door, calling on the god to avenge him. Narcissus later saw his own shape in a spring and fell in love with it. Judging that he suffered justly for what he had done to Ameinias, he killed himself.

Ovid and Conon end the same youth in two different ways. In Ovid he wastes away at the water's edge and dies. Even among the shades he keeps gazing at himself in the water of the Styx. His sisters the Naiads mourn him and prepare a pyre, but his body has gone, and a flower with white petals around a yellow centre stands in its place. In Conon the flower springs from the ground where his blood was spilt.

A papyrus found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt adds a third early witness. Published in 2005 as P.Oxy. 4711, it preserves short Greek poems on metamorphoses, including Narcissus. Its editor, W. B. Henry, suggested they come from the Metamorphoses of Parthenius of Nicaea, but other scholars dispute the attribution and date the verses later. As in Conon, the boy sheds his own blood on the earth.

Pausanias rejects the whole reflection story. He calls it utter stupidity to think a man old enough to fall in love could not tell a man from his own reflection. He prefers a less popular Thespian tradition. In it, Narcissus had an identical twin sister who hunted with him. After she died he went to the spring knowing the face was his own, and took comfort in imagining it was hers.

Pausanias also denies that the flower was named after the youth. He points to the older poet Pamphos, who said Persephone was lured away by a narcissus, not by violets. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells the same scene: Earth grew a radiant narcissus at the will of Zeus, as a snare for the girl, and Hades seized her when she reached for it. On that reading the flower is older than the boy.

His worship at Thespiae belongs to Eros, not to him. Pausanias says the Thespians honoured Eros above all gods from the beginning, with an ancient image of unworked stone, and admits he does not know who began the custom. Conon supplies an answer: the Thespians came to honour Eros especially because of what happened to Narcissus. Later still, the fifth-century AD poet Nonnus gives him a different father, Endymion, the mortal bridegroom of Selene.

The youth's name passed into medicine at the end of the nineteenth century. Freud's essay On Narcissism (1914) opens by saying the term was chosen by the psychiatrist Paul Näcke in 1899. Näcke used it for a person who treats his own body as one would the body of a sexual partner. Havelock Ellis later claimed a share of the credit for his 1898 phrase "Narcissus-like". The everyday sense of narcissism grew out of that clinical term, not out of any ancient text.