Narcissus

NARCISSUS was a Thespian, the son of the blue Nymph Leiriope, whom the River-god Cephisus had once encircled with the wings of his streams, and ravished. The seer Teiresias told Leiriope, the first person ever to consult him: ‘Narcissus will live to a ripe old age, provided that he never knows himself.’ Anyone might excusably have fallen in love with Narcissus, even as a child, and when he reached the age of sixteen, his path was strewn with heartlessly rejected lovers of both sexes; for he had a stubborn pride in his own beauty.
b. Among these lovers was the nymph Echo, who could no longer use her voice, except in foolish repetition of another’s shout: a punishment for having kept Hera entertained with long stories while Zeus’s concubines, the mountain nymphs, evaded her jealous eye and made good their escape. One day when Narcissus went out to net stags, Echo stealthily followed him through the pathless forest, longing to address him, but unable to speak first. At last Narcissus, finding that he had strayed from his companions, shouted: ‘Is anyone here?’
‘Here!’ Echo answered, which surprised Narcissus, since no one was in sight. ‘Come!’
‘Come!’
‘Why do you avoid me?’ ‘Why do you avoid me?’ ‘Let us come together here!’
‘Let us come together here!’ repeated Echo, and joyfully rushed from her hiding place to embrace Narcissus. Yet he shook her off roughly, and ran away. ‘I will die before you ever lie with me!’ he cried.
‘Lie with me!’ Echo pleaded.
But Narcissus had gone, and she spent the rest of her life in lonely glens, pining away for love and mortification, until only her voice remained.

c. One day, Narcissus sent a sword to Ameinius, his most insistent suitor, after whom the river Ameinius is named; it is a tributary of the river Helisson, which flows into the Alpheius. Ameinius killed himself on Narcissus’s threshold, calling on the gods to avenge his death.
d. Artemis heard the plea, and made Narcissus fall in love, though denying him love’s consummation. At Donacon in Thespiae he came upon a spring, clear as silver, and never yet disturbed by cattle, birds, wild beasts, or even by branches dropping off the trees that shaded it; and as he cast himself down, exhausted, on the grassy verge to slake his thirst, he fell in love with his reflection. At first he tried to embrace and kiss the beautiful boy who confronted him, but presently recognised himself, and lay gazing enraptured into the pool, hour after hour. How could he endure both to possess and yet not to possess? Grief was destroying him, yet he rejoiced in his torments; knowing at least that his other self would remain true to him, whatever happened.
e. Echo, although she had not forgiven Narcissus, grieved with him; she sympathetically echoed ‘Alas! Alas!’ as he plunged a dagger in breast, and also the final ‘ah, youth, beloved in vain, farewell!’ expired. His blood soaked the earth, and up sprang the white narcissus flower with its red corollary, from which an unguent balm is now distilled at Chaeronea. This is recommended for affections of the ear (though apt to give headaches), and as a vulnerary, and for the cure of frost-bite.
1. The ‘narcissus’ used in the ancient wreath of Demeter and Persephone (Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus), and also called leirion was the three-petalled blue fleur-de-lys or iris: sacred to the Triple-goddess, and worn as a chaplet when the Three Solemn Ones, or Erinnyes, were being placated. It flowers in late autumn, shortly before the ‘poet’s narcissus’, which is perhaps why Leiriope has been described as Narcissus’s mother. This fanciful moral tale- incidentally accounting for the medicinal properties of narcissus-oil, a well-known narcotic,  as the first syllable of ‘Narcissus’ implies-may be deduced from an icon which showed the despairing Alcmaeon, or Orestes, lying crowned with lilies, beside a pool in which he has vainly tried to purify himself after murdering his mother; the Erinnyes having refused to be placated. Echo, in this icon, would represent the mocking ghost of his mother, and Ameinius his murdered father.
g. But-issus, like-inthus, is a Cretan termination, and both Narcissus and Hyacinthus seem to have been names for the Cretan springflower-hero whose death the goddess bewails on the gold ring from the Mycenaean Acropolis; elsewhere he is called Antheus a surname of Dionysus. Moreover, the lily was the royal emblem of the Cnossian king. In a painted relief found among the Palace ruins, he walks, sceptre in hand, through a lily-meadow, wearing a crown and necklace of fleur-de-lys.