Echo Before Narcissus: The Nymph Who Became a Voice

In the archaeological museum at Naples stands a slim bronze youth found at Pompeii, his head bent and one hand lifted as if he were attending to a sound far away. Nineteenth-century viewers called him Narcissus and imagined him hearing Echo. Many scholars now think he is a young Dionysus or a satyr, but the old name has stuck, and it says something true about the myth: the boy can be cast in bronze or carved in marble, while the nymph can only be implied. Sculptors have made Narcissus again and again. Nobody has made a convincing Echo. In the poem that joined their stories, that is exactly what happened to her.

The nymph who talked too well

Ovid tells the tale in the third book of the Metamorphoses, and before he lets Narcissus near the pool he gives Echo a past. She is a mountain nymph with a gift for conversation, one who can neither keep quiet when someone else speaks nor speak first herself. Ovid is careful to say that she still had a body then, and was not yet merely a voice.

Her offence was a kind of loyalty. Whenever Juno might have caught Jupiter with the nymphs on the mountainside, Echo would hold the goddess back with long, charming talk until the nymphs had escaped. Juno saw through it, and her sentence fits the crime: the tongue that fooled her would have little power, and the briefest use of speech. From then on Echo could only repeat the end of what she heard and hand back the words of others.

As far as we know, no earlier text tells this part of the story, and Ovid may well have invented it. If so, it is a pointed invention. The queen of the gods punishes the go-between rather than her husband, as Hera does so often elsewhere in Greek myth; the Libyan queen Lamia suffers a far crueller version of the same jealousy.

A conversation made of leftovers

Narcissus enters as a sixteen-year-old whom many young men and women desire and none can touch. One day, separated from his hunting companions, he calls out in the woods. Echo, who has been following him, finally has her chance, and Ovid writes the scene as a technical challenge: every reply must be the tail of Narcissus’s own sentence, and must also mean something new in her mouth.

“Is anyone here?” he had said, and “Here!” answered Echo. Astonished, he looked in every direction and shouted, “Come!” She called the caller back.

Ovid, Metamorphoses (our rendering)

The game tightens. When he proposes, innocently, that they meet in that spot, the Latin verb he uses can also mean “let us come together”, and Echo seizes it gladly and runs out to embrace him. He flees, crying that he would rather die than let her have power over him; she answers with the last part of his sentence, which on its own says that she gives him power over her. Ovid has built a declaration of love out of a refusal.

Stone and sound

Rejected, Echo hides in the woods, covers her ashamed face with leaves and lives in lonely caves. Her love does not fade; it grows with the pain. Sleepless care wastes her body, her skin shrinks, the moisture of her flesh drifts into the air. Only voice and bones remain, and the bones, people say, took on the shape of stone. She hides in the forests and is seen on no mountain, but everyone hears her. It is sound, Ovid says, that lives in her.

For readers of marble this is a striking turn. Statues are bodies that have lost their voices; Echo is a voice that has lost its body. She is the rare figure in Ovid who turns to stone and keeps on speaking.

Nor does she leave the story. Narcissus, punished at last through Nemesis for the hearts he has broken, wastes away beside his pool, and Echo, still angry and still grieving, is there at the end. Each time he sighs “alas”, she sighs it back. His final word to his reflection is “farewell”, and she returns it. When the nymphs of the springs and trees mourn him, she answers their laments. His body vanishes, and in its place they find a flower with a saffron centre ringed by white petals.

Other ways to lose a voice

Ovid is not the only teller, and the other versions differ from his in revealing ways. In the Homeric Hymn to Pan, echo is not yet a character, only the sound that moans around the mountain peak while the god plays his pipes at evening. Euripides gave Echo a speaking role in his lost Andromeda of 412 BCE, answering the chained princess from the rocks, and a year later Aristophanes parodied the scene in Women at the Thesmophoria, with Euripides himself playing Echo and maddening a Scythian guard by repeating everything he says.

Longus, writing his pastoral novel Daphnis and Chloe in the Roman imperial period, gives the harshest account. His Echo is a nymph raised by Nymphs and taught by the Muses to play every instrument and sing every song. She avoided all males, and Pan, jealous of her music, drove the shepherds mad; they tore her apart and scattered her limbs, still singing, across the earth. The Earth hid them as a favour to the Nymphs, and they imitate everything, even Pan’s own piping.

Pausanias, visiting the spring near Thespiae where Narcissus was said to have seen his reflection, found the usual story silly: how could a grown man fail to tell a person from a reflection? He preferred a version in which Narcissus had a twin sister, loved her, and after her death gazed into the water to see her face in his own. His Narcissus is a mourner, and there is no Echo at all.

In Ovid, then, Echo is the narrator’s strangest double: a speaker who can only rearrange words that already exist, and still makes them say what she means. The poet himself did much the same with old myths, as his portrait of Arachne at her loom suggests. Renaissance carvers went on giving Narcissus a body, Benvenuto Cellini among them, in the marble now in the Bargello in Florence. Echo never got her statue. She would have answered it, though, if you had called out loudly enough in the gallery.