Echo and Narcissus (Ovid Line)

Catalogue ID: 02-olympian-gods/036-echo-narcissus-ovid-roman

Cycle: Olympian gods / local metamorphosis — Echo; Narcissus

Version line: Roman transmission (Ovid) — Echo cursed by Hera; composite with Narcissus (distinct from Pausanias’s Thespian Narcissus)

Sources: Ovid, *Metamorphoses* 3.339–510 (**Roman**); cf. Conon, *Narratives* 24 (Narcissus without Echo); Pausanias 9.31.7–9 (Thespiae—twin-sister variant, no Echo)

Source file: /workspace/greek-myth-catalogue/02-olympian-gods/036-echo-narcissus-ovid-roman.md

Characters

Amores — those Narcissus scorned before the pool
Artemis — curses Echo for covering Zeus’s affairs
Cephisus — river-father of Narcissus
Echo — nymph; cursed by Hera to repeat speech; loves Narcissus; reduced to voice
Liriope — nymph-mother; consults Teiresias
Narcissus — son of Cephisus and Liriope; rejects Echo; loves his reflection; becomes the flower
Teiresias — prophet of the “know himself” condition

Places

Boeotian woodland — Narcissus’s hunting ground
Clear pool — mirror of self-love; site of transformation
Mountain slopes — Echo’s wasting and residual voice
Ocean’s streams — Pausanian locale of the non-Ovidian Narcissus (entry 002)

Themes

Narrative

Ovid joins two strands. Echo, a talkative mountain nymph, distracted Hera with chatter while Zeus dallied with other nymphs; Hera cursed her to repeat only the last words of others’ speech. Echo then saw Narcissus—son of the river Cephisus and the nymph Liriope—whose beauty Teiresias had prophesied would live long “if he never know himself.” She burned with love but could only echo his replies; when he cruelly rejected her (“Hands off! May I die before you have me!”—“Have me,” she returned), she wasted to bones and voice among the rocks—an echo still. Narcissus, after scorning many, came to a clear pool and fell in love with his own reflected image, taking it for a companion. Unable to embrace or leave the vision, he pined away; Echo mourned him in repeated cries. His body vanished; in its place grew the narcissus flower. The Ovidian tale thus etiolates both the acoustic echo and the flower from one Boeotian youth’s self-regard, whereas Pausanias’s local Thespian version (entry 002) denies the pool-romance and offers a twin-sister consolation instead. Catalogued separately as Ovid-labeled Roman transmission of a Greek metamorphosis cluster.