Before I start with Ovid’s Narcissus and Echo from Metamorphoses, I would like to mention that the version I read is from the following website: http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/students/mmarassa/mythology/echo.html
“…Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible…” -Maximilien de Robespierre
After reading Ovid’s Narcissus and Echo, I gathered that the purpose behind it was to prove that being vain and cruel could lead to terror, by terror I refer to the aforementioned quote. This is evident in the actions of Narcissus. Narcissus’s vanity leads Echo to pursue a love that would be unrequited. His rejection of Echo’s love is cruel because it leads to her physical form to wither away. Meanwhile, Narcissus stumbles upon a pool where he caught a glimpse of his own reflection so beautiful and captivating that he desired a love similar to the love Echo and all mortals alike felt for Narcissus
I feel as though the terror he was plagued with was indeed proper. In a sense he had a taste of his own medicine, in this case, his vanity. However, I may have taken a very direct approach to this myth. If you feel the message was similar or completely different, I’d love to read your opinions!
That’s absolutely right Oneek. I felt too that “teaching a lesson” to Narcissus was one aspect of the message transmitted by Ovid in this extract from “Metamorphoses.” But while showing us where vanity or cruelty may take you, I think he might also be giving us a lesson in the life process in general. Like Narcissus we are born,we live our lives but the things we do in our lives (like Narcissus’ vanity) all have consequences. Taking it further isn’t he also telling us through this myth that death itself is not the end?
It seems clear that vanity leads nowhere good. I fully agree with the first two posts. Furthermore, I feel like both Echo and Narcissus’ desires for external beauty when it came to falling in love, directly leads to both their demise.
Echo allows herself to be so captured by Narcissus’ appearance it then leads to so much hurt and rejection, that she could not bare. She knows very little about him when she first lays eyes on him and yet she gives her whole heart to him in that very moment. That desire and lust for physical beauty had grave consequences. This teaches us to not make external beauty so important (not be vain) because from that moment onwards she just goes into an unhealthy depression and dies lonely craving him. Same goes for Narcissus so vain and caught up in external beauty, it takes away his logic and blinds him in noticing he was lusting over himself at the pool. Tiresias’ prophecy “If he shall himself not know” comes full circle and makes sense because it could be interpreted as for as long as he does not see and fall in love with himself, he would have long life. The moment he first saw what he looked like to others; unknowing it was just his own reflection he too just marveled at his beauty and allowed vanity to get the best of him.