Narcissus (mythology)

Narcissus (Greek Νάρκισσος, Latin Narcissus) In Greek mythology, the beautiful son of the river god Kephissos and Leiriope, who fell in love with his own reflection.

Myth

In Thespiai the river god Kephisos had the water nymph Leiriope entwined with its meanders and then pregnant, whereupon Narcissus was born, which the seer Teiresias only predicted a long life, he should not even recognize ( " si se non noverit ").

He was courted by young men and girls alike, but was met by a defiant pride in his own beauty and dismissed all his devotees and admirers back heartless. This offense happened also to the mountain nymph Echo and the importunate applicants Ameinios, the Narcissus gave to a sword. Although Ameinios brought nor on the doorstep with the resulting sword, but not without first to call the gods to avenge his death. Nemesis (according to other sources of Artemis) heard the prayer and punished Narcissus with an insatiable love of self: When he settled in the untouched nature with a water source, he fell in love with his own reflection.

Ovid continues: Narcissus recognized the impossibility of his love, without that there is something availed him: he pined and pined away in front of his likeness to the death. His last words echo repeated: " Oh, you hopelessly beloved boy, farewell! " Instead his body the dryads found a daffodil.

Pausanias narrated: One day Narcissus sat down at the lake to enjoy its mirror image, and then a leaf fell through divine intervention into the water and so the generated waves his image tarnished - shocked by the supposed knowledge that he was ugly, he died. After his death he was transformed into a narcissus.

Another version says: Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection; Not realizing that it is his own, he wishes to be reunited with this reflection and drowns.

Representation in art

Narcissus was a favorite subject of visual arts in ancient times. Thus, representations of the Narcissus found on engraved stones, late reliefs and particularly on sarcophagi. Best known are the fifty murals depicting the Narcissus, which were found in Pompeii. They show him in different variations as a hunter sitting on the water and its mirror image ( not always shown) looking.

At the turn of the 20th century is Narcissus ( Narcissus speaks ) especially among the French writers André Gide ( Treatise of Narcissus ) and Paul Valéry the personification of a purely self-referential poetry, as it is intended in the modern times.

A new theory on the origin

Because of unpublished inscriptions from Eretria on Euboea and of neglected evidence of the ancient historian Denis Knoepfler suspected recently that the origin of the myth of Narcissus not in Boeotia, but in the sanctuary of Narkittos in Amarynthos at Eretria, so further south, was to settle. Unlike the Hellenistic- Roman sources, who consider narcissist as a young pretty boy, he is represented there as powerful nature deity. In this same mythical figure appears to be addressed, which is known as hyacinth otherwise, worshiped in the Greek region Amyklai and influence area of Sparta.