Narcissus and Echo
In brief
- Echo had been punished by Hera with the loss of ordinary speech: she could only repeat the last words said to her.
- She fell in love with Narcissus and could not tell him so, and after he turned her away she faded until nothing was left but the voice.
- In answer to the prayer of another he had scorned, Narcissus was made to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool, and could not bring himself to leave it.
Echo talked too much, and once used it to cover for Zeus, keeping Hera in conversation while the god finished his business elsewhere. When Hera worked out what the chatter had been for, she left her the power of speech and took the use of it: from then on Echo could say nothing of her own, only give back the ends of other people's sentences.
She saw Narcissus hunting in the hills near Thespiae and followed him without being able to call out. When he became aware of somebody in the trees and shouted "is anyone here?", all she could return was "here". They circled each other through several exchanges like that, until she came out with her arms open and he stepped back. He would rather die, he said, than let her have him. What came back to him was "have me".
She went into the caves and stopped eating. Her body wasted until only bones were left, and then the bones went to stone, and only the voice remains, still answering anyone who calls into the right kind of valley.
Someone else Narcissus had turned away prayed that he might love and not have what he loved, and Nemesis heard it. He knelt to drink at an untouched pool and saw a face in the water. He reached for it and it broke; he waited and it came back. He stayed there talking to it, understanding eventually what he was looking at and unable to stop, until he wasted where he lay. Where they came to collect him there was a flower.
