Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Pausanias, visiting Helicon and Thespiae, reports the Boeotian story of Narcissus. Narcissus was a beautiful Thespian youth who rejected all lovers. One rejected admirer (Ameinias in Conon’s related summary) killed himself and called on the gods for vengeance. Narcissus then saw his own reflection in a spring, fell into unappeasable desire for the image, and killed himself in despair—or, in Pausanias’s preferred rationalizing note, Narcissus had a twin sister whom he loved; when she died, he found comfort gazing at his reflection as if at her, and wasted away. From his blood, or at the place of his death, grew the narcissus flower. Pausanias explicitly doubts the Echo version popular in poetry: he says it is nonsense that Narcissus could not distinguish a man from a reflection, and he denies that Echo’s story belongs with the Thespian Narcissus—thereby marking the Echo romance as a different poetic tradition. Conon’s Greek narrative has Narcissus melt with desire for his reflection after Ameinias’s curse, and the flower spring up. Together these sources give a classical Greek Narcissus without requiring Ovid’s Echo subplot.