![]() Instead, Narcissus’ crime was his indifference to others rather than his love of his own beauty, which only came later, and then only because Nemesis tricked him into seeing his own reflection. If we apply the concept of hamartia to Narcissus, then self-love was definitely not his flaw, because his crimes – the ones which made Nemesis decide to punish him – preceded his own knowledge of how beautiful he was. The ancient Greeks talked of hamartia: the tragic flaw, if you will, that was the chink in a hero’s armour, the detail that would lead to his downfall. Note that this is not the same as saying that self-love in and of itself was his downfall. ![]() What’s the moral of the story of Narcissus? It’s summed up succinctly in the wonderfully informative The Wordsworth Dictionary of Mythology (Wordsworth Reference) : Narcissus died because he was unwilling to give himself to others. The editors point out that ‘Echo’ was used in ancient Greek literature long before the nymph of the Echo and Narcissus story came along – so, Echo was named after echoes rather than vice versa. Regarding the origins of Echo’s name, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the termination -ώ (found at the end of ‘Echo’ in the original Greek, ἠχώ) was common in Greek female names. Distraught at seeing her beloved destroyed like this, Echo pined away until, eventually, only her voice remained. Echo loved Narcissus, but she obviously found it hard to tell Narcissus how she felt about him, because she had already been cursed so that she could only repeat what others said, rather than speak for herself.Īccording to Ovid, after she was shunned by Narcissus she witnessed his demise after he saw his own reflection: in Ovid’s version, Narcissus fades away rather than drowns.
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