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sgimmel

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Echo

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been received into the infernal abodes, he used to look at himself in

the Stygian waters. His Naiad sisters lamented him, and laid their

hair, 77 cut off, over their brother; the Dryads, too, lamented him,

and Echo resounded to their lamentations. And now they were preparing

the funeral pile, and the shaken torches, and the bier. The body was

nowhere to be found . Instead of his body, they found a yellow flower,

with white leaves encompassing it in the middle.

EXPLANATION.

If this story is based upon any historical facts, they are entirely

lost to us; as all we learn from history concerning Narcissus, is the

fact that he was a Thespian by birth. The Fable seems rather to be

intended as a useful moral lesson, disclosing the fatal effects of

self-love. His pursuit, too, of his own image, ever retiring from his

embrace, strongly resembles the little reality that exists in many of

those pleasures which mankind so eagerly pursue.

Pausanias, in his Bœotica, somewhat varies the story. He tells us that

Narcissus having lost his sister, whom he tenderly loved, and who

resembled him very much, and was his constant companion in the chase,

thought, on seeing himself one day in a fountain, that it was the

shade of his lost sister, and, thereupon, pined away and died of

grief. According to him, the fountain was near a village called

Donacon, in the country of the Thespians. Pausanias regards the

account of his change into the flower which bears his name as a mere

fiction, since Pamphus says that Proserpina, when carried away, long

before the time of Narcissus, gathered that flower in the fields of

Enna; and that the same flower was sacred to her. Persons sacrificing

to the Furies, or Eumenides, used to wear chaplets made of the

Narcissus, because that flower commonly grew about graves and

sepulchres.

Tiresias, who predicted the untoward fate of Narcissus, was, as we are

informed by Apollodorus, the son of Evenus and Chariclo, and was the

most renowned soothsayer of his time. He lost his life by drinking of

the fountain of Telphusa when he was overheated; or, as some suppose,

through the unwholesome quality of the water. As he lived to a great

age, and became blind towards the end of his life, the story, which

Ovid mentions, was invented respecting him. Another version of it was,

that he lost his sight, by reason of his having seen Minerva while

bathing. This story was very probably based either upon the fact that

he had composed a Treatise upon the Animal Functions of the Sexes, or

that he had promulgated the doctrine that the stars had not only souls

(a common opinion in those times), but also that they were of

different sexes. He is supposed to have lived about 1200 years before

the Christian era.