Narcissus and Pygmalion: Illusion and

Spectacle in Ovid's Metamorphoses

Rosati
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Narcissus and Pygmalion
 Narcissus and
Pygmalion
Illusion and Spectacle in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses

GIANPIERO ROSATI

1
 3
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 Contents

Introduction 1
1. Narcissus or Literary Illusion 19
1. The myth: origins and developments 19
2. Echo and Narcissus: the deception of the reflection 38
3. Literary fiction and poetic narcissism 56
2. Pygmalion or the Poetics of Fiction 64
1. The outline of the myth 64
2. Pygmalion and Narcissus 71
3. A poetics of literariness 79
3. The Spectacle of Appearances 102
1. The trap of illusions 102
2. The spectacle of metamorphosis 133
3. The spectacle of the word 156
4. Conclusions 170

Bibliography 175
Index Locorum 185
General Index 194
 Introduction

1) Narcissus and Pygmalion today

This book is the English version of a work first published in Italian in 1983
and reprinted in 2016. It originated from my tesi di laurea in Latin literature
completed a few years earlier at the University of Florence under the
supervision of Antonio La Penna, and followed the tenets of that disciplin-
ary sphere, as was customary in Italian academia at the time: it focused on
the philological dimension of Ovid’s text, the framing of the individual
episode within the structure of the immediate context and the poem as a
whole, and analysis of language and style. The main aim of the work was to
interpret the two important episodes of Narcissus and Pygmalion—i.e.
Ovid’s rewriting of the respective myths—and to highlight the author’s
poetics, in response to the considerable interest that had grown in the latter
decades of the twentieth century (documented, and greatly bolstered, by
G.B. Conte’s influential 1974 essay Memoria dei poeti e sistema letterario,
which activated critical categories like poetic memory, allusion, and inter-
textuality).¹ The theme of illusion, central to both episodes, was thus chosen
as the key to penetrating the text and mechanisms of the poem; and to this
the third and longest chapter of the book was dedicated.² Additionally, the
aestheticization of the female or ephebic body and its representation as a work
of art—an obviously central aspect in Pygmalion, but also highly relevant in
Narcissus—served to shed light on a crucial feature of Ovid’s writing: its
congenitally ecphrastic nature, which the book pondered (especially with
regard to episodes like those of Perseus and Medusa), and which reveals a
cultural and psychological attitude that says much about Ovid’s readers. The
intense visuality of the poem—the pleasure of the spectaculum—was the
premise for an analysis of the spectacularity of Ovid’s language and style,

¹ Published in an English version in Conte 1986.

² The theme’s relevance to all of Ovid’s poetry, in a critical perspective enhanced by the
contribution of contemporary ideas (especially Lacan and Derrida), would become a focus of
Hardie’s important 2002 work.

Narcissus and Pygmalion: Illusion and Spectacle in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Gianpiero Rosati,
Oxford University Press. © Gianpiero Rosati 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198852438.003.0001
2   

largely built on the split between reality and illusion, the plurality of surfaces
or levels, and various effects of visual and linguistic ‘reflection’ and ambiguity,
such as the gap between literal meaning and figurative meaning.
It is evident that the general approach of the book, and especially its entire
apparatus of notes and bibliography, seem quite dated today, particularly
after the prodigious development of studies in this second aetas Ovidiana of
the past few decades, and also due to the increased importance of critical
categories linked to the names of Narcissus and Pygmalion, not only in
classical studies, but in various fields, from literature to art history to
psychology. In light of these developments in the critical discourse on
Ovid, the book would have required a radical revision or rather rewriting.
Not being able to write a different book, I just add these few introductory
pages which are intended to take stock of the enduring usefulness of the
theses discussed in Narciso e Pigmalione (henceforward N&P), and to shed
some light on the developments of these past decades with regard to the
main themes the book touches on, as well as possible stimuli for the further
growth of Ovidian studies.³
A first point that now seems worthy of more in-depth reconsideration,
particularly in light of lines of research that have come to the fore in recent
decades, is the legitimacy, or the convenience, of reading the two myths, and
the two Ovidian texts, in association with one another. The idea is obviously
not a new one: the juxtaposition and contrasting of the two myths dates back
to at least the thirteenth century, with the ‘Roman de la Rose’. The author of
the first part of that poem, Guillaume de Lorris, narrates Ovid’s story of
Narcissus very early on in his text, while Jean de Meun, who wrote the much
longer second part about forty years later, counters with the story of
Pygmalion towards the end. The shared Ovidian origin of the tales is in fact
the explicit motivation for the contraposition of the two myths, intended to
emphasize the different degrees of futility of the respective love objects
(Pygmalion himself, in his monologue, asserts that Narcissus’ is a greater
and more destructive folly than his own).⁴ The association, by analogy or by
contrast, between the two mythical figures and their respective psychological
states has been repeatedly brought into play by authors (for example, in

³ In addition to works I will discuss further below, among the most important contributions
have been Bettini 1999 and Bettini-Pellizer 2003 (the latter, after Vinge’s more strictly literary
1967 point of view, reviews the many versions and reprises of the myth in western culture).
⁴ The intentional and calculated nature of the symmetrical arrangement of the two episodes
in the ‘Roman’ is not questioned (cf. e.g. Agamben 1977, p. 78 n. 2).
  3

J. Starobinsky’s essay ‘The Living Eye’, cf. below p. 77) even in recent years,
and here I will try to discuss the most interesting of them.
The scholarly trend on visuality that saw vigorous development beginning
in the last decades of the twentieth century, particularly in the sphere of art
history, gave a fresh boost to an in-depth analysis of the Narcissus myth
(beyond that of Pygmalion). Jaś Elsner, one of the protagonists of this
research line,⁵ made the two myths—albeit independently from one
another—central to his reflection on Roman art, precisely due to their
visuality which exemplifies the importance of the gaze in Roman culture
(a ‘highly ocular culture’), and on how the gaze functions in the construction
of subjectivity. Although N&P also focused on the importance of visuality in
Ovid’s poem, it does not expound on the matter beyond the too-generic idea
of ‘spectacle’, or at most of the gaze conditioned by artistic models (the
aspect that fuelled the hunt for lost or presumed-lost works in the past), or
real objects seen or conceived as ‘artistic’, through what I called Ovid’s
‘ecphrastic eye’.⁶ The theme of visuality as a cultural construct was certainly
insufficiently dealt with in N&P, and from this point of view there is still a
great deal of work to do, in terms of both text analysis and comparison of the
two episodes, and as a theme of central relevance to the entire poem (as
noted here below). An aspect that should certainly be studied in greater
depth is the relationship between the act of gazing and the psychological and
intersubjective dynamics activated by the interplay of gazes, in the two
episodes most extensively dealt with here.
For example, the relationship between Echo and Narcissus needs to
be read in a less schematic way, abandoning Fränkel’s formula in which
Echo is ‘pure difference’ and Narcissus ‘pure identity’.⁷ Echo in fact does
not have a purely passive function; her behaviour determines Narcissus’
reaction and also influences his self-perception, almost offering him an
external eye through which to see himself. There is, for example, the striking
metaphor of ‘heating up,’ used to describe the effect the sight of Narcissus
has on the nymph (3.371–2 vidit et incaluit . . . flamma propiore calescit
[when she saw . . . Echo’s heart was fired . . . the nearer flamed her love]): an
eminently Pygmalionic metaphor (10.281 visa tepere est [she seemed warm])
that makes her in some way an ‘active’ woman capable of acting on her own
erotic initiative, but one who is frustrated, condemned to pure ‘reaction,’ to

⁵ Cf. Elsner 2007 (but the chapter ‘Intimations of Narcissus’, 132–76 is in large part from
1996).
⁶ Cf. especially Rosati 2017. ⁷ Fränkel 1945, 84.
4   

the point that she ends up turning into cold stone (the inverse fate of
Pygmalion’s statue, which turns from stone/ivory into flesh) and serves
solely as an echo, a mirroring response to Narcissus’ gestures.
We should also lend greater importance to the active function of reflec-
tion: the reciprocity of the actions of Narcissus and his reflected image,
insistently replicated in linguistic and stylistic terms (415, 417, 421, 424–30,
436–7, 441–2, 446, 450–2, 457–62, 504), confirms the idea of the reciprocity
of functions between the two figures—who swap roles and become inter-
changeable, in a sort of closed circle (Caravaggio’s Narcissus naturally comes
to mind)—and the need for an outside gaze, an active and passive role, or
rather a doubly active role. And the lexicon of specularity, so typical of
Narcissus, has its own analogy in Pygmalion’s language of reciprocity
(10.291–4 oraque tandem/ore suo non falsa premit, dataque oscula virgo/
sensit et erubuit timidumque ad lumina lumen/attollens pariter cum caelo
vidit amantem [at last his lips pressed real lips, and she, his girl, felt every
kiss, and blushed, and shyly raised her eyes to his and saw the world
and him]), a reciprocity that is not illusory but real, in which the senses of
sight and touch (282–9 temptat temptatum mollescit . . . positoque rigore
subsidit digitis ceditque . . . remollescit tractataque . . . flectitur . . . retractat . . .
saliunt temptatae [caressed . . . beneath his touch . . . grew soft . . . hardness
vanishing . . . yielded . . . softens and is shaped . . . the pulse beat]) play an
essential role as instruments for perceiving one another. Today, this leads
us to (among other things) a ‘parallel’ reading of the two myths, rather than
one in which they are exclusively contrasted.
The fruitfulness of an approach attentive to the active role of the ‘mirror’
is demonstrated, for example, in Victoria Rimell’s work Ovid’s Lovers,⁸
which brings an important contribution to the discussion. Taking a different
tack from established, more traditional readings that see in Narcissus a poet-
Narcissus, pleased with his own technical virtuosity (as proposed in N&P),
or (from a feminist standpoint) that see in both Narcissus and in Pygmalion
‘the male viewer who spurns woman and/or (re)creates her as artwork and
fetish’ (1), Rimell views the dialogue between Echo and Narcissus as an
example of the interaction of desire and seduction between two different
subjectivities. Rimell is interested in observing how a monologue can
become dialogue, how female subjectivity resists and disengages from the
masculine ‘monological’ pretension to claim its own voice and autonomy,

⁸ Cf. Rimell 2006, ‘Introduction (Narcissus and Medusa: Desiring subjects and the dialectics
of Ovidian erotics)’, 1–40.
  5

but also how real and imaginary worlds interweave, and how simulacra attain
concreteness and enter into actual reality, populating it and influencing its
developments. ‘Even in relationships which appear to be self-contained,
Ovidian sex depends on multiplications, triangulations, substitutions, go-
betweens, which inevitably render mirroring interactions much more com-
plex than the Narcissus–Echo, subject–object (male–female) prototype would
suggest’ (5).
A theme that has now become unavoidable is Ovid’s attentiveness to the
woman’s construction of her own image; he does not confine her to
the purely passive role she is often assigned. This is clearly demonstrated
by the importance lent to the mirror as an instrument of self-knowledge, a
means of looking at oneself ‘from the outside’ and acquiring self-awareness
(Ars 3.135–6). Today, the discourse on Narcissus and Pygmalion, as on
other important episodes of the poem that revolve around female/male
conflicts, must interlink with analysis of these themes in the rest of Ovid’s
work, particularly his early elegies. In this sense, Ovid’s Lovers opened an
important line of research that could shed light on little-explored territories
and offer a global view of Ovid’s erotica.
The same year as Rimell’s volume appeared saw the publication of
another, more properly philosophical, work that put Narcissus at the centre
of a reflection on the gaze: The Mirror of the Self by Shadi Bartsch.⁹ Taking
the story as the realization of Tiresias’ initial prophecy (Ov. met. 3.346–8),
Bartsch reads the Ovidian myth of Narcissus within a perspective that
combines vision, ethics, and sexuality, against a background of Plato’s
Phaedrus and its reflection on mirrors, eros, and self-knowledge, as well as
the Lucretian theory of simulacra.¹⁰ Narcissus is the victim of his own
illusion, and his gaze and self-enamourment have a certain philosophical
value: Narcissus hews to the Lucretian model rather than that of the Platonic
Phaedrus, and instead of achieving greater insight through beauty, falls
victim to the deceptions that Lucretius had shown to be the source of
perpetual suffering and frustration for lovers. Because, as Bartsch observes,
Narcissus is simultaneously on both ‘sides’ of the ancient mirror: one side is
a noble philosophical instrument of self-knowledge, but at the same time,
and most importantly, the other side is a feminine tool of deception, illusion,
vanity. And the risks linked to an inopportune use of the mirror are
confirmed, according to Bartsch, in the story of Hostius Quadra related by

⁹ Bartsch 2006, chpt. 2 (‘The Eye of the Lover’).

¹⁰ Bartsch builds on Hardie’s seminal 1988 article (cf. here below).
6   

Seneca in his Naturales Quaestiones, which demonstrates the abuses and

sexual perversions for which this instrument of self-knowledge can be
employed. Thus, ‘Narcissus and Hostius embody a negative and reactive
development in the role of eros in the project of self-knowledge’ (113).
Bartsch’s reading proves all the more stimulating in light of the growing
importance in our digital world of ‘screenology’, which focus on the function
of the screen as an instrument of mediation in cognitive processes. Narcissus
is the first to experience the screen, the visual surface—the device that is
today an omnipresent support for the most varied of visual phenomena.
Obviously, in Ovid’s Narcissus we also see the identification and depiction of
what is now perceived as a psychological phenomenon, namely the indis-
tinguishability of these interfaces from actual reality, as well as the arduous
process of disengaging from the image/screen (that is, the recognition of its
illusory immateriality) on the cognitive–intellectual level, but not on the
emotional one, which continues to hold us in its thrall.

2) Simulacrum and the power of the gaze

An important development in the interpretation of Ovid’s Narcissus was

marked by a 1988 article by one of the greatest modern scholars of Ovid. In
that article, which was later incorporated into his crucial 2002 essay, Philip
Hardie reconstructed the literary background of the Ovidian Narcissus
episode. Love for an image—a theme that we know was crucial to courtly
‘fol amour’,¹¹ and was central to the episode in Ovid—is associated with the
idea of simulacrum, the basis of the Epicurean–Lucretian theory of sensa-
tions. According to Hardie, Ovid’s Narcissus should be read as the poet’s
response to the ‘void’ Lucretius (‘the great poet of the void’, 150) had
created, tearing down the illusory presences in human experience. Ovid
reacts to Lucretius’ cold rationalism by stimulating ‘the sophisticated
reader’s nostalgia for a dream landscape where nature answers human
desires’, and also responds ‘to ancient philosophical discussions of illusion
and reality with reference both to the senses of hearing and seeing and to the
psychology of desire’ (150). The simulacra Lucretius exposed in all their
deceptive inconsistency, which fuel vain amorous desire, are the premise

¹¹ Cf. again Agamben 1977, part III.

  7

that explains the frustration of that desire in Echo and Narcissus.¹² Reacting
to Lucretius, ‘Ovid creates a mythological drama out of a psychological
account of the delusions of the senses of sound and sight’ (156), and the
comedy of misunderstandings that characterizes the stories of the two
frustrated lovers illustrates the deceptive mechanisms hidden in sensorial
perception of reality, as well as in the lovers’ illusory fantasies.
According to Hardie, this ‘poetics of illusion’ inspires not only the
Metamorphoses, but can be found in all of Ovid’s work, underlying his desire
to create the illusion of a presence, or an ‘absent presence’ in the Lacanian
sense of a perpetually fleeting presence of an object of desire; an illusory
presence generated largely through words and images. If we consider that
Ovid cogently theorizes the mechanism of desire (Quod licet, ingratum est;
quod non licet, acrius urit [what one may do freely has no charm; what one
may not do pricks more keenly on], am. 2.19.3), and if we accept the premise
that desire is ‘the master-term for an understanding of Ovid’s poetics of
illusion’ (11), then we can understand why Hardie recognizes the myth
of Narcissus as so central to a reading of the poem—and, as we shall see,
that of Pygmalion as well. In Narcissus (chpt. 5 ‘Narcissus. The mirror of the
text’, 143–72) Hardie sees the ‘paradigm for the beholder of a work of art, for
there is a narcissistic quality in the ancient rhetorical formulation of
response to realist works of art’ (147), deriving from the confusion between
the reader/viewer’s fantasies of a work of art and his desire to believe in the
reality of the text or the image reproduced. The ephemeral nature of the
image corresponds to the unrealizability of desire, and the surface of water is
the Lacanian mirror that separates the Self from the Other. The impossible
dialogue between Echo and Narcissus is thus the emblem of the Lucretian
‘comedy of the senses’ we mentioned above, that is, of the deceptive nature
of the reflection of an image or a sound that feeds the idea of imaginary
presences and ends up engendering the agonizing frustration of desire.
Hardie’s Lucretian key to the Narcissus narrative astutely grasped the
centrality of the simulacrum in Ovid, and opened the path to a reading of the
episode built on the idea of absent presence (Derrida) and on the import-
ance of the gaze in defining the structure of desire. Making use of this theme
of the gaze as expression and exercise of power, an implicit comparison
between the myths of Narcissus and Pygmalion is constructed by the

¹² In Lucretius’ parallel treatises on two phenomena of reflection, the optical imago and the
acoustic one, Hardie sees confirmation of the hypothesis that Ovid was the first to combine the
stories of Echo and Narcissus (Hardie 2002, 152–4).
8   

classical art historian Jaś Elsner, the author of one of the most in-depth
discussions on the theme of seeing and the inter-subjective relations of
which it is the expression. For him, Ovid’s Pygmalion myth is an allegory
of the act of reading (chpt. 5 ‘Viewing and Creativity. Ovid’s Pygmalion as
viewer’, 113–31): while he, like others, sees Pygmalion/sculptor as a symbol
of the artist/writer (and of the tensions intrinsic to his work, which explores
problems of naturalism in art), he views the observer/lover who eventually
sees his dream come true as a symbol of the reader, of the reactions he might
have when faced with the impression of reality produced by a work of art, of
his own avid or minimal involvement in the act of fantasy and desire that
reading entails.
Elsner goes on to dedicate a particularly exhaustive analysis to the myth of
Narcissus (chpt. 3 ‘Viewer as Image. Intimations of Narcissus’, 132–76),
which he sees as ‘a fundamental paradigm for the inseparability of self from
representation, and for the inextricability of desire from either’ (132).¹³ In
the many variants of the myth, the central theme remains ‘the question of
self and its objectification’ (133): what is the degree of autonomy between
the observer’s eye and the object he sees? Narcissus believes his reflected
image is a real person (this is the desire of naturalism, the same desire
Pygmalion has), and falls in love with it; according to Elsner, this explains
Greco-Roman art theoreticians’ interest in the myth of Narcissus and its
dynamics, ‘which reflect with such acuteness on the desires of naturalism’
(137). Narcissus is in fact ‘naturalism’s limit-case: the viewer whose success
in believing that the imitation is real (that a reflection is its prototype) is
tragically engulfed by his failure to see that the prototype he loved was not
an other but himself ’ (142). Roman culture’s fascination with the figure of
Narcissus, evidenced by the myth’s widespread diffusion during the Imperial
era in painting and various forms of private material culture, focuses on the
theme of seeing and the dynamic of gazes revolving around him, the object
of desire. A Narcissus at the centre of a painting and of the world, intro-
verted and indifferent to any form of social interaction, any voyeuristic gazes
and attention aimed at him, trapped as he is in the web of his own image
and disinclined to look at anyone but himself. This intense orchestration of
the view staged around him, a procedure whose full self-awareness is
indicated by the choice of Narcissus as subject, thus translates—in Elsner’s
reading of the myth—the dynamics of intersubjective relations, of which

¹³ Although he states that he is not focusing specifically on Ovid’s text (Elsner 2007, 137 n. 12),
but on antique figurative texts and ecphrastic illustrations.
  9

the Roman house was a sort of theatre, and the power relations between
inhabitants and visitors.
Seeing and being seen is in fact a crucial element in defining the social
identity of the first-century Roman citizen, who controls the world around
him and is at the same time subject to its gaze, who sees and is seen. Social
visibility, with the complex network of power relations it signals and affirms,
is a requisite and a condition of primary importance for the Roman élite,
and the widespread presence of the myth of Narcissus in domestic and
private spaces is one of many clues to the widespread sensitivity to this
experience.
Attention to the theme of seeing, of the gaze as instrument and exercise of
power, proves to be an important key to understanding the construction of
Ovid’s poem as well. In the Metamorphoses, not only is the act of looking
particularly frequent (and this would merit a study of its own), but it is an
instrument through which the reader monitors the dynamics of the relations
between characters as an outside observer, and is also involved in them, even
to the point of having his own superiority and emotional stability called into
question. In short, looking confers power, but can also be a source of anxiety.
For example, the recurrent process in the poem in which the reader is
invited to ‘look at someone who is looking’—a process that aligns the
reader’s gaze with that of a character staring at the object of his or her desire
(usually a mortal woman, a nymph, or a boy), establishing a sort of com-
plicity with the character—corresponds to the mechanism of ‘mimetic
desire’ explicated by Réné Girard.¹⁴ The most famous mythological episodes
of divine love—one of the most frequent and typical literary subjects of the
Metamorphoses, and also divulged in a vast array of expressions of visual
culture—are the perfect representation of the mediated nature of desire,
which finds both ethical legitimization and aesthetic ennoblement of reality
in lofty models produced by art and literature. The ‘loves of the gods’ are
thus models of mediation of desire through the gaze, projections of fantasy
elaborated thanks to literature and its iconographic expressions, of which
visual perception (internal and external to the text) becomes the instrument.
Looking at a painting, or a fresco in a domestic setting, that reproduces the
loves of Jove or other male deities or great figures of myth means arousing
the imagination of the observer (or the reader) and intensifying his emo-
tional experience. If it is true that ‘all desire is a desire for being’, a

¹⁴ Cf. above all Girard 1965.

10   

metaphysical desire, then this stimulation of imagination contains an impli-

cit invitation to the male beholder/reader to identify with the ‘predator’ god
(the ‘mediator of the desire’), intensifying the thrill of desire. As in
Narcissus, the gaze and eros are closely connected, but they can produce a
fatal outcome.

3) Narcissism and intertextuality

If it is true that, as August Wilhelm Schlegel said, ‘Every poet is Narcissus’, it

is particularly valid for Ovid. The narcissistic nature of Ovid’s poetry was
noted by critics in antiquity: Quintilian, for example, the great Flavian-era
rhetorician, criticizes the poet’s unrelenting pursuit of expressive effects and
the virtuosity of the devices that inspire the narrative syntax of the poem,
dictated by his drive to solicit readers’ applause (4.1.77). According to
Quintilian, Ovid’s attitude is complacently narcissistic: calling him nimium
amator ingenii sui ([too fond of his own gifts] 10.1.88), he alludes to the
poet’s narcissism not only in terms of exhibition of awareness, but also in the
modern, psychological sense of self-admiration, gratification in his own
ingenium, his technical ability shown off to elicit the admiration of his
readers. In what only seems a superficial paradox, narcissism is self-
admiration that also demands admiration from others (as is the case of
the peacock: AA 1.627–8 Laudatas ostendit avis Iunonia pinnas:/si tacitus
spectes, illa recondit opes [When you praise her the bird of Juno displays her
plumes: should you gaze in silence she hides away her wealth]); it is a form of
‘self-enclosure’ that nonetheless needs the ‘other’ (the paradox noted by
Starobinski; cf. below p. 77). Ovid himself confirms this in works from his
exile, when he laments the vain futility of composing poetry without readers
to admire it: Pont. 4.2.33–6 in tenebris numerosos ponere gestus/quodque
legas nulli scribere carmen idem est:/excitat auditor studium laudataque
uirtus/crescit et inmensum gloria calcar habet [making rhythmic gestures
in the dark and composing a poem which you may read to nobody are one
and the same thing. A hearer rouses zeal, excellence increases with praise,
and renown possesses a mighty spur].
This was one of the focal points of N&P, which illustrates a text that tells
the story of Narcissus in a form that mimes the concept of reflection or
mirroring, demonstrating the duality of language, the ambiguity between
proprium and metaphor. This point, it seems to me, is still a valid one: the
character of Narcissus, an emblem of both illusion and self-awareness, lent
  11

itself to interpretation as the symbol of a complacently reflected poetics that

made its dualism (i.e. the intrinsically intertextual nature of Ovid’s poem,
which readily reveals the model-texts in which the characters have already
had a literary existence)¹⁵ a strong point and an expression of cultural
modernity. Studies focusing on formal analysis in recent decades have
examined various aspects (language, style, metrics, semantic fields, narrative
form and structure, mise en abyme, narrating voices, etc.) of the self-
reflecting nature of Ovid’s poem, its continuous reference to its own literary
dimension, its innately ‘dual’ make-up—a trait that helps to explain the
renewed esteem for the poet today.
The poetics of reflexivity is in fact the hallmark of modern (and post-
modern all the more) literature, (cf. Barth 1967; Hutcheon 1984; Ercolino
2010),¹⁶ and obviously, the figures of Narcissus (and Echo) and Pygmalion
have been widely employed by critics and scholars in the past few decades
with regard to the concepts of repetition, reflection, mirroring, reproduc-
tion, allusion, and memory. In this perspective, the phenomenon of the echo
has been indicated as a self-evident trope of allusiveness,¹⁷ even insinuating
itself into our everyday language (in locutions like ‘to be an echo of ’ or to
‘echo’ someone or something). Alessandro Barchiesi in particular has
explored Latin poetic tradition¹⁸ to highlight the fact that in it, the echo is
‘an icon of repetition and poetic memory’ (139). In the narration of the myth
of Hylas, the beautiful youth lured away by nymphs, whom Hercules
repeatedly calls in vain (and who is transformed into an echo), ‘echo effects’
serve to create an intertextual chain that runs from Theocritus to Virgil to
Propertius to Valerius Flaccus, along with the likely-important passage from
Nicander said to have introduced Hylas’ metamorphosis into an echo
(which would thus be the aition, the origin of this metapoetic image).¹⁹

¹⁵ For an overall view and an historical reconstruction of the growth of interest in studies on
this aspect of Ovid’s poetry, cf. Casali 2009.
¹⁶ Rimell 2006, 2: ‘His (i.e. Narcissus’) myth offers a neat allegory for the move from naïvety
to knowingness, nature to art celebrated by postmodernism, a field of thinking owed much of
the credit for Ovid’s flight to stardom at the end of the second millennium’.
¹⁷ In particular John Hollander’s well-known, important essay on Renaissance poetry: cf.
Hollander 1981. Another notable contribution to the study of repetition in Latin poetry is Wills
1996.
¹⁸ Cf. Barchiesi 1995 (then in Barchiesi 2001), with previous bibliography.
¹⁹ Cf. Bonanno 1990, 196, and Bonadeo 2003, 70. If such were the case, the Echo episode
inserted into the myth of Narcissus would be Ovid’s rewriting of the aition of the echo, which is
rendered more fitting to its nature as imago vocis, a reflection of sound, opportunely set in the
mountains (instead of by or in a fountain), and structurally ‘mirroring’ the episode of Narcissus’
self-enamourment.
12   

Stephen Hinds, for his part, showed that Ovid did not forgo the opportunity
to exploit the words of Echo herself (in met. 3.501), making them echo a
verse from Virgil’s Eclogues (3.79), so that Virgil himself becomes a further
intertextual echo.²⁰ Following Barchiesi and Hinds, Mark Heerink’s work on
the topos of the echo of Hylas’ name in Hellenistic and Roman poetry
confirmed this ‘natural’ tendency of the echo to serve as a figure of inter-
textuality, or of the relationship between a word (especially when it is
artistically formulated) and its repetition—a relationship of love/admiration,
the same sentiment that dominates in Echo’s voice until the end, i.e. until
Narcissus’ death, and even beyond: Ov. met. 3.501, 508. But all late-antique
echoic poetry (like the Pentadius verses we will discuss below), built around
the technique of echolalia, or ‘echoed word’, is not only a sophisticated
intertextual product, but an act of expressly declared admiration and long-
ing for the great models of the past.
So it is hardly surprising that Narcissus, the archetypal symbol of love for
a reflection, is also viewed as a figure of intertextuality, of attraction to a text
one admires and identifies with, from which one cannot or does not want to
disengage. An exemplary case of this attitude seems to me Statius’ silva 2.3,
the Flavian poet’s birthday homage (genethliakon) to his friend and patron
Atedius Melior, which recounts the origin of the strange shape of a plane
tree on the bank of a pond in his garden. It is the mythical tale, built on a
typically Ovidian schema, of Pan’s pursuit of the nymph Pholoe, who, to
escape the erotic assault, plunges into the pond and melds with its water; the
frustrated god can do nothing but leave a sign of his presence in that spot,
protecting his beloved nymph beneath the fronds of a tree he plants there as
a symbol of his eternal love. The plane tree’s branches stretch out over the
water and then curve skywards from the middle of the pond:

Sic ait. Illa dei veteres imitata calores

uberibus stagnis obliquo pendula trunco
incubat atque umbris scrutatur amantibus undas.
Sperat et amplexus, sed aquarum spiritus arcet
nec patitur tactus
(2.3.53–7)
[His speech complete, the god’s old warmth is mirrored
as tree trunk bends to fertile pool and leans

²⁰ Cf. Hinds 1998, 5–8.

  13

with loving shade to penetrate the water.

It wants embraces too, but these the sprite
averts, nor will she let herself be stroked]
(transl. B.R. Nagle)

The image of the tree, a metonym of Pan, bending lovingly over the pond
towards the unreachable object of its desire—a water that ‘averts’ contact—
evokes, or I might say mirrors, that of Ovid’s Narcissus bending to admire
his own tantalizing yet literally untouchable beauty (met. 3.427–9, 475–9,
etc.). As Françoise Morzadec rightly observes, ‘Statius makes the techniques
of reflections and mirrors the sign of his poetics; in the reflection he signals
the source of his inspiration’,²¹ and after having clearly alluded to the
Ovidian model of the episode (2.3.24–6, a reference to the numerous stories
of rape in the Metamorphoses) in the image of the tree bending in vain over
the water towards its unattainable love object, Statius evokes the gesture
typical of Narcissus, the symbol of the Ovidian model-text, but also of the
narcissistic poetics Statius himself shares. ‘A reflexive figure, Narcissus is a
mise en abîme of the self-conscious poet in his poem’:²² a poet who mirrors²³
his model, the much-loved and admired Ovidian text.
But alongside this ‘direct’ and immediate form (a text mirroring another
text that is its declared or evident model), there are various other and more
complex modes of narcissism. For example, the ‘cultural narcissism’ Jaś
Elsner²⁴ individuates as typical of the late-antique Virgilian cento (fifth–
sixth century) entitled Narcissus, transmitted by the same codex Salmasianus
that also contains Pentadius’ echoic verses (fourth century?), as if the
narration of the myth of Narcissus were delegated to the ‘voice of Echo’
(265 Riese): two texts that share the principle of repetition—albeit achieved
using different techniques—and the same intent found in Ovid’s Narcissus
to reflect the content of the tale in its form. The cento is presented as a
rewriting of the Ovidian story of Narcissus’ self-love condensed into sixteen
hexameters, but reconstructed through a clever reutilization of segments of
Virgilian text: Elsner reads it as an exercise in cultural ‘narcissism’ (p. 177),
‘an interrogation of feelings of identification and highly valued emotional
experience in a moment when the once vibrant presence of the ancient past
was receding into the distance of a series of figures reflected in the pool’
(p. 176). The figure of Narcissus acts as the symbol of a world in which the

²¹ Cf. Morzadec 2009, 323. ²² Morzadec 2009, 324.

²³ On the meaning of scrutari cf. Cancik 1965, 55. ²⁴ Cf. Elsner 2017.
14   

poet—whose era and context, fifth- to sixth-century Christian North Africa

under the Vandals, is far removed from the classical world—seems to carry
out an ‘exercise of cultural nostalgia as narcissism’ (p. 178), mirroring and
emulating a distant, longed-for model.

4) Self-love, construction of the other: the primacy

of the simulacrum

Although Ovid’s Narcissus is not in itself a discussion on art, it does contain

a few explicit suggestions in this sense: Narcissus poses and, his body
immobile, bent over his reflected image, admires himself as if he were a
statue (3.418–19 adstupet ipse sibi vultuque inmotus eodem/haeret, ut e Pario
formatum marmore signum [spellbound he saw himself, and motionless lay
like a marble statue staring down]);²⁵ he sees himself as a Bacchus or an
Apollo, whose iconography is obviously familiar to readers, contemplates
his ivory-smooth neck (421–2 et dignos Baccho, dignos et Apolline crines/
inpubesque genas et eburnea colla [his hair worthy of Bacchus or Apollo, his
face so fine, his ivory neck]), and strikes his chest with ‘hands of marble’
(481 nudaque marmoreis percussit pectora palmis [and beat his pale cold fists
upon his naked breast]). In short, Narcissus’ attitude reveals a clear analogy
with Pygmalion’s: he admires himself, but as one admires a statue, a work of
art that he represents, which is the expression of his identity.²⁶ The text
focuses on the simultaneous activity and passivity of the gaze (424 cunctaque
miratur, quibus est mirabilis ipse [all he admires that all admire in him]), in
which the gaze of the ‘other’ is not merely a reflection of Narcissus’ gaze
but—as we noted above (p. 4)—also has an active, creative function, some-
how contributing to ‘shaping’ the self-image Narcissus is constructing (430–1
quid videat, nescit; sed quod videt, uritur illo,/atque oculos idem, qui decipit,
incitat error [not knowing what he sees, he adores the sight; that false face
fools and fuels his delight]). If he did not feel that he was seen and admired,
Narcissus certainly would not react as he does to that incitement (incitat).
As has been repeatedly observed, the Ovidian myth of Narcissus broaches
the theme of the relationship between reality and representation (that is,

²⁵ ‘He is his own simile’: Hardie 2002, 146.

²⁶ ‘There is a parallel between Narcissus (the man who gazes at a reflection, loves the image,
and “becomes” a work of sculpture) and Pygmalion, who creates a statue, falls in love with it,
and finds that it eventually becomes a “real” woman’: Elsner 2007, 145 n. 45.
  15

between nature and art), and with its focus on the act of gazing and the
illusion of truth that the image transmits, it has always stimulated interpret-
ations oriented within that perspective. In the De pictura, Leon Battista
Alberti (1435) saw in Narcissus the inventor of painting, but long before
Alberti, two Greek writers of the Second Sophistic (second–fourth century),
Philostratus and Callistratus, used this myth, reproduced as artwork in the
ecphrases they described, to discuss naturalism—the difference between
the real person and his image—as well as eroticism, the amorous attraction
the image arouses in its observer.²⁷
The association between a work of art (in the form of an extraordinarily
attractive body) and enamourment, which is present in the myth of
Narcissus, is obviously central to the myth of Pygmalion, especially the
Ovidian version, which replaces the conventional story of agalmatophilia
(the perverse ‘love for a statue’ attested by other classical authors) with that
of the artist’s enamourment with his own work. Ovid’s Pygmalion does not
love an already-existing statue, but a statue he himself is sculpting out of
ivory (10.248 sculpsit ebur), the material used for the prosthesis that restores
Pelops’ mutilated body (6.405),²⁸ and one that is often a source of illusion (as
in the famous ivory gates that appear in Homer, Od. 19.564–7 and later in
Virgil, Aen. 6.893–8). This of course (just as the myth of Narcissus func-
tioned as the foundational myth of painting with its evanescent, incorporeal,
superficial image, so does that of Pygmalion for sculpture, image as body in
all its plasticity) demonstrates that images created by man are devices of his
desire, and also shows the intrinsically narcissistic nature implicit in the
myth of Pygmalion, in which the artist falls in love with a work that is a
projection of himself, created in his image.
Shifting the focus from both the widespread idea of Pygmalion as cham-
pion of illusionistic art and the conception that dominated studies of the
myth several decades ago of Pygmalion as an emblem of male desire’s
appropriation of the feminine, i.e. the woman constructed as the mirror
image of male desire (‘womanufacture’²⁹), Victor Stoichita, in a key work on
the myth of Pygmalion in the history of European culture (The Pygmalion
Effect, 2008), proposes a decidedly innovative reading. His interpretation

²⁷ Cf. Elsner 2007, 132–52.

²⁸ Which makes Pelops’ body even more beautiful, sparking Poseidon’s infatuation (Pindar,
Ol. 1.25 ff.); on the theme of ivory as an instrument of deception cf. Elsner 2007, 126–7.
²⁹ Cf. Sharrock 1991, who sees in Pygmalion an allegory of the creative work of the elegiac
poet-lover who first creates his domina and then falls in love with her.
16   

focuses on the centrality of the simulacrum,³⁰ of which the Ovidian myth

would seem to be the originating text, thus debunking the widespread belief
that the simulacrum is a creation of post-modern culture linked to the ideas
of Baudrillard and the virtual world (2–3). While the ‘Pygmalionian obses-
sion’ (55) that runs through art history of the early modern era consecrated
him as the paradigm of the perfect artist who achieves the mirage of mimesis
habitually celebrated in ecphrases, that is, the illusion that a work of art is
alive (quam uiuere credas, 10.250), the Pygmalion story would actually be
the earliest example in Western art history (later populated with many of its
avatars) of an image—the statue he sculpted—that exists in and of itself, and
not as a banal imitation of a pre-existing person or object. In Stoichita’s
interpretation (which corrects the widespread opinion that the myth ‘is an
illustration of the illusionistic power of art’, N&P p. 76), Pygmalion goes
beyond and against mimesis, improving on the traditional conception of the
artwork as imitation of an already-existing model to demonstrate the cre-
ative energy and allure of the simulacrum, i.e. of the image perceived as real.
His is the story of the artist who fulfils his own creative fantasies by
constructing an object of desire that ordinary reality cannot give him.
The critical gain is evident and fruitful: seen from this perspective, the
Ovidian Pygmalion episode (which illustrates how the simulacrum, a mere
mental construction, attains concreteness and becomes effective reality) is
not an isolated artistic product, but the coherent—and in all likelihood
original—realization, and translation into origin myth, of a conception
specific to Ovid: art as a creative act liberated from the function of imitating
reality. In this sense, the interpretation offered by Stoichita, who obviously
privileges the art-history dimension and is not interested in analysing Ovid’s
poetics as a whole, can be combined and integrated with the one proposed in
N&P. In summary, while the Church fathers saw this myth (in the trad-
itional tale of agalmatophilia documented by Philostefanus of Cyrene)³¹ as a
perverse manifestation of idolatry, Ovid retells it as the origin myth of an
aesthetic principle, the primacy of the simulacrum over reality. This con-
ception elaborated by Ovid was ground-breaking in the world of antiquity³²
and, as the ‘history of the simulacrum’ alongside or on the heels of the
predominant history of mimesis, was destined to have a vital, dynamic

³⁰ The subtitle of the French edition (Genève 2008) reads Pour une anthropologie historique
des simulacres.
³¹ Cf. N&P pp. 68–9.
³² On the importance and originality of this conception, see not only the second chapter of
N&P (‘A poetics of literariness’), but especially Rosati 1979.
  17

influence in Western art and culture. If Stoichita’s ‘Pygmalion effect’ entails

‘revers[ing] the hierarchy between model and copy’ (5), and the myth of
Pygmalion encapsulates the passage from mimesis to its opposite, then it can
be recognized as the foundation of this anti-mimetic, anti-naturalistic aes-
thetic that Ovid not only ‘invents’ but hands down to later generations. We
can thus comprehend, especially in light of the sweeping perspective offered
by Stoichita’s work, the relevance and fruitfulness of Ovid’s development of
an anti-mimetic, anti-naturalistic aesthetic centring on the primacy of the
simulacrum over the real.
The classic locus of expression of this principle, on which I will not go
into detail here, is the depiction of the grotto of Diana in 3.157–60, where it
is said that nature, endowed with ingenium, imitated art: simulaverat artem/
ingenio natura suo (cf. here below p. 82). The assertion that nature has its
own ingenium and uses it to imitate art is a subversion of the terms of the
classical aesthetic of mimesis, and entails focusing on the creative power of
fantasy and desire, opening a pathway to a great innovation in Western
imagination. When, for example in Statius’ Silvae, we read of a landscape
endowed with its own artistic qualities even before man intervenes to lend it
those qualities (1.3.15–16 ingenium quam mite solo, quae forma beatis/ante
manus artemque locis! [how gentle the nature of the ground! What beauty in
the blessed spot before art’s handiwork!]), or of an ingenium of nature that
competes with that of a sophisticated villa owner (2.2.44–5 locine/ingenium
an domini mirer prius? [should I marvel first at the place’s ingenuity or its
master’s?]) in the shared ambition to find models in art, we are clearly
dealing with the Ovidian theoretical presupposition of natura aemula
artis, and with the simulacrum’s primacy over reality.³³ The importance of
all of this should be systematically explored in literary tradition as well (a
‘Pygmalion effect’ in literature), in which only occasional, albeit meaningful,
instances have been noted to date.
To conclude, just these few introductory pages with my rapid review of a
few of the works that have contributed in recent decades to scholarly debate
(and not only about Ovid) seem to confirm the opportuneness of continuing
to read the two myths in connection with one another, due to the numerous

³³ Hinds 2002 analyses the tradition, extremely widespread in European culture, of garden-
ing and landscape architecture as a privileged form of application of the Ovidian principle of
natura aemula artis. He demonstrates how the aestheticization, and especially the mythologiza-
tion of the landscape interacts with coeval visual arts, and the degree to which such practices are
indebted to the Metamorphoses, which had an early influence on a wide range of expressions of
European visual culture. Cf. also Rosati 2014 and 2017.
18   

analogies between them and between the themes they implicate. For us,
living in an era in which the digital revolution is redefining our relation-
ships with the Self and the world, our complex visual perception of reality
and the central function of simulacra in that perception, the myths of
Narcissus and Pygmalion can once again constitute a useful lens through
which to examine modes, effects, and consequences of our visual and
intellectual experience.
 1
Narcissus or Literary Illusion

1. The myth: origins and developments

The myth of Narcissus is universally known. The story of the boy who bends
rapt over the mirror of a pool of water in vain admiration of his own beauty
has proven vastly popular in western art and culture.¹
The origin of the myth is unknown: in all probability, it dates back to
Hellenistic literature, but references to it in art and literature have been
found no earlier than the end of the first century . Ovid, in the third book
of the Metamorphoses, offers us the most important version from a literary
point of view, as well as the most complex, and this version was thus
destined to transmit to European culture the captivating tale of the illusion
‘ch’accese amor tra l’omo e ’l fonte’ [that kindled love between the man and
the fountain] (Dante).

Ille per Aonias fama celeberrimus urbes

340 Inreprehensa dabat populo responsa petenti;
Prima fide vocisque ratae temptamina sumpsit
Caerula Liriope, quam quondam flumine curvo

¹ On the myth of Narcissus and its reception we have a truly excellent study: L. V, The
Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early 19th Century, Lund 1967,
exemplary in terms of completeness, depth, and clarity of analysis. Vinge analyses all of the re-
workings of the myth up to the romantic era with a balance and methodological thoroughness
that is particularly notable in a field—Stoffgeschichte, or thematology, the study of recurrences of
a given theme in various types of literature and in different eras—often viewed with diffidence
due precisely to the risks of artificiality and distortion to which it can be subject. Also on the
reception and popularity of the myth in various applied arts, but simply a list, H. H,
Lexicon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie mit Hinweisen auf das Fortwirken antiker
Stoffe und Motive in der bildenden Kunst, Literatur und Musik . . . , Wien 1959, pp. 265 f. On the
figurative arts, see especially G. H, Zauber des Spiegels. Geschichte und Bedeutung des
Spiegels in der Kunst, München 1951, pp. 69 ff. On the history of the myth in classical antiquity,
F. W, Narkissos. Eine kunstmythologische Abhandlung nebst einem Anhang über die
Narcissen und ihre Beziehung im Leben, Mythos und Cultus der Griechen, Göttingen 1856 is as
ever very useful, particularly for the wealth of material gathered. Good summaries in entries by
S. E in RE, XVI 2 (1935), 1721–33 and by W. G in the Lexicon by W.H. Roscher, III 1
(1897–1902), 10–21.

Narcissus and Pygmalion: Illusion and Spectacle in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Gianpiero Rosati,
Oxford University Press. © Gianpiero Rosati 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198852438.003.0002
20   

Inplicuit clausaeque suis Cephisos in undis

Vim tulit. Enixa est utero pulcherrima pleno
345 Infantem nymphe, iam tunc qui posset amari,
Narcissumque vocat; de quo consultus, an esset
Tempora maturae visurus longa senectae,
Fatidicus vates ‘si se non noverit’ inquit.
Vana diu visa est vox auguris, exitus illam
350 Resque probat letique genus novitasque furoris.
Namque ter ad quinos unum Cephisius annum
Addiderat poteratque puer iuvenisque videri:
Multi illum iuvenes, multae cupiere puellae;
Sed (fuit in tenera tam dura superbia forma)
355 Nulli illum iuvenes, nullae tetigere puellae.
Adspicit hunc trepidos agitantem in retia cervos
Vocalis nymphe, quae nec reticere loquenti
Nec prius ipsa loqui didicit, resonabilis Echo.
Corpus adhuc Echo, non vox erat; et tamen usum
360 Garrula non alium, quam nunc habet, oris habebat,
Recidere de multis ut verba novissima posset.
Fecerat hoc Iuno, quia, cum deprendere posset
Sub Iove saepe suo nymphas in monte iacentis,
Illa deam longo prudens sermone tenebat,
365 Dum fugerent nymphae. Postquam hoc Saturnia sensit,
‘Huius’ ait ‘linguae, qua sum delusa, potestas
Parva tibi dabitur vocisque brevissimus usus’.
Reque minas firmat; tamen haec in fine loquendi
Ingeminat voces auditaque verba reportat.
370 Ergo ubi Narcissum per devia rura vagantem
Vidit et incaluit, sequitur vestigia furtim,
Quoque magis sequitur, flamma propiore calescit,
Non aliter quam cum summis circumlita taedis
Admotas rapiunt vivacia sulphura flammas.
375 O quotiens voluit blandis accedere dictis
Et molles adhibere preces! natura repugnat
Nec sinit incipiat; sed, quod sinit, illa parata est
Exspectare sonos, ad quos sua verba remittat.
Forte puer comitum seductus ab agmine fido
     21

380 Dixerat ‘etquis adest?’ et ‘adest’ responderat Echo.

Hic stupet, utque aciem partes dimittit in omnes,
Voce ‘veni!’ magna clamat: vocat illa vocantem.
Respicit et rursus nullo veniente ‘quid’ inquit
‘Me fugis?’ et totidem, quot dixit, verba recepit.
385 Perstat et alternae deceptus imagine vocis
‘Huc coeamus!’ ait, nullique libentius umquam
Responsura sono ‘coeamus!’ rettulit Echo,
Et verbis favet ipsa suis egressaque silva
Ibat, ut iniceret sperato bracchia collo.
390 Ille fugit fugiensque ‘manus conplexibus aufer!
Ante’ ait ‘emoriar, quam sit tibi copia nostri!’.
Rettulit illa nihil nisi ‘sit tibi copia nostri!’.
Spreta latet silvis pudibundaque frondibus ora
Protegit et solis ex illo vivit in antris;
395 Sed tamen haeret amor crescitque dolore repulsae:
Et tenuant vigiles corpus miserabile curae,
Adducitque cutem macies, et in aera sucus
Corporis omnis abit; vox tantum atque ossa supersunt:
Vox manet; ossa ferunt lapidis traxisse figuram.
400 Inde latet silvis nulloque in monte videtur,
Omnibus auditur: sonus est, qui vivit in illa.
Sic hanc, sic alias undis aut montibus ortas
Luserat hic nymphas, sic coetus ante viriles;
Inde manus aliquis despectus ad aethera tollens
405 ‘Sic amet ipse licet, sic non potiatur amato!’.
Dixerat: adsensit precibus Ramnusia iustis.
Fons erat inlimis, nitidis argenteus undis,
Quem neque pastores neque pastae monte capellae
Contigerant aliudve pecus, quero nulla volucris
410 Nec fera turbarat nec lapsus ab arbore ramus;
Gramen era circa, quod proximus umor alebat,
Silvaque sole locum passura tepescere nullo.
Hic puer et studio venandi lassus et aestu
Procubuit faciemque loci fontemque secutus,
415 Dumque sitim sedare cupit, sitis altera crevit,
Dumque bibit, visae conreptus imagine formae
22   

Spem sine corpore amat, corpus putat esse, quod unda² est.
Adstupet ipse sibi vultuque inmotus eodem
Haeret ut e Pario formatum marmore signum;
420 Spectat humi positus geminum, sua lumina, sidus
Et dignos Baccho, dignos et Apolline crines
Inpubesque genas et eburnea colla decusque
Oris et in niveo mixtum candore ruborem,
Cunctaque miratur, quibus est mirabilis ipse:
425 Se cupit inprudens et, qui probat, ipse probatur,
Dumque petit, petitur pariterque accendit et ardet.
Inrita fallaci quotiens dedit oscula fonti!
In mediis quotiens visum captantia collum
Bracchia mersit aquis nec se deprendit in illis!
430 Quid videat, nescit, sed, quod videt, uritur illo,
Atque oculos idem, qui decipit, incitat error.
Credule, quid frustra simulacra fugacia captas?
Quod petis, est nusquam; quod amas, avertere, perdes!
Ista repercussae, quam cernis, imaginis umbra est:
435 Nil habet ista sui: tecum venitque manetque,
Tecum discedet, si tu discedere possis.
Non illum Cereris, non illum cura quietis
Abstrahere inde potest, sed opaca fusus in herba
Spectat inexpleto mendacem lumine formam
440 Perque oculos perit ipse suos paulumque levatus,
Ad circumstantes tendens sua bracchia silvas
‘Etquis, io silvae, crudelius’ inquit ‘amavit?
Scitis enim et multis latebra opportuna fuistis!
Etquem, cum vestrae tot agantur saecula vitae,

² It is not without some hesitation that I opt for the reading unda, much better documented
in the manuscript tradition (and accepted by nearly all modern editors) than the variant umbra.
The meaning is certainly tolerable, but umbra is definitely more efficacious in opposition to
corpus (which, however, in a certain sense also renders it lectio facilior, so the hypothesis of its
possible genesis due to the corruption or erroneous transcription of an original unda seems
more likely than the contrary hypothesis): cf. for ex. 14.358 and 362, where umbra is used in
reference to effigiem nullo cum corpore falsi . . . apri [a fictitious, disembodied image of a wild
boar]; or 3.434, a few verses after our passage; or 11.660 inveniesque tuo pro coniuge coniugis
umbram [and in place of your groom you shall find his shadow]; or 9.460, where umbra is used
in the sense of ‘appearance’ (and cf. also 4.443; other parallel passages with umbra in the sense of
‘reflection’, from later authors, are gathered by D.R. S B in Cl. Quart., n.s., 6,
1956, p. 86, in which, however, the uncertainty of the two Ovidian passages, Her., 14.93 and
Met., 3.417 should be noted). Conversely, the passages customarily mentioned in favour of unda
are not overly probative: in Her., 14.93, Met., 1.640 and 3.200 we always find in unda, i.e. the
reference is always to the reflection ‘in the water’, and not to the reflected image itself.
     23

445 Qui sic tabuerit longo meministis in aevo?

Et placet et video, sed quod videoque placetque,
Non tamen invenio: tantus tenet error amantem!
Quoque magis doleam, nec nos mare separat ingens
Nec via nec montes nec clausis moenia portis:
450 Exigua prohibemur aqua! cupit ipse teneri!
Nam quotiens liquidis porreximus oscula lymphis,
Hic totiens ad me resupino nititur ore;
Posse putes tangi: minimum est, quod amantibus obstat.
Quisquis es, huc exi! quid me, puer unice, fallis?
455 Quove petitus abis? certe nec forma nec aetas
Est mea, quam fugias, et amarunt me quoque nymphae!
Spem mihi nescio quam vultu promittis amico,
Cumque ego porrexi tibi bracchia, porrigis ultro;
Cum risi, adrides; lacrimas quoque saepe notavi
460 Me lacrimante tuas; nutu quoque signa remittis
Et, quantum motu formosi suspicor oris,
Verba refers aures non pervenientia nostras.
Iste ego sum! sensi, nec me mea fallit imago:
Uror amore mei, flammas moveoque feroque!
465 Quid faciam? roger anne rogem? quid deinde rogabo?
Quod cupio, mecum est: inopem me copia fecit.
O utinam a nostro secedere corpore possem!
Votum in amante novum: vellem, quod amamus, abesset!
Iamque dolor vires adimit, nec tempora vitae
470 Longa meae superant, primoque exstinguor in aevo.
Nec mihi mors gravis est, posituro morte dolores:
Hic, qui diligitur, vellem diuturnior esset!
Nunc duo concordes anima moriemur in una.’
Dixit et ad faciem rediit male sanus eandem
475 Et lacrimis turbavit aquas, obscuraque moto
Reddita forma lacu est. Quam cum vidisset abire,
‘Quo refugis? remane nec me, crudelis, amantem
Desere!’ clamavit ‘liceat, quod tangere non est,
Adspicere et misero praebere alimenta furori!’.
480 Dumque dolet, summa vestem deduxit ab ora
Nudaque marmoreis percussit pectora palmis.
Pectora traxerunt roseum percussa ruborem,
Non aliter quam poma solent, quae candida parte,
Parte rubent, aut ut variis solet uva racemis
24   

485 Ducere purpureum nondum matura colorem.

Quae simul adspexit liquefacta rursus in unda,
Non tulit ulterius, sed, ut intabescere flavae
Igne levi cerae matutinaeque pruinae
Sole tepente solent, sic adtenuatus amore
490 Liquitur et tecto paulatim carpitur igni,
Et neque iam color est mixto candore rubori,
Nec vigor et vires et quae modo visa placebant,
Nec corpus remanet, quondam quod amaverat Echo.
Quae tamen ut vidit, quamvis irata memorque
495 Indoluit, quotiensque puer miserabilis ‘eheu!’
Dixerat, haec resonis iterabat vocibus ‘eheu!’,
Cumque suos manibus percusserat ille lacertos,
Haec quoque reddebat sonitum plangoris eundem.
Ultima vox solitam fuit haec spectantis in undam:
500 ‘Heu! frustra dilecte puer!’ totidemque remisit
Verba locus, dictoque vale ‘vale!’ inquit et Echo.
Ille caput viridi fessum submisit in herba;
Lumina mors clausit domini mirantia formam.
Tum quoque se, postquam est inferna sede receptus,
505 In Stygia spectabat aqua. Planxere sorores
Naides et sectos fratri posuere capillos,
Planxerunt dryades: plangentibus adsonat Echo.
Iamque rogum quassasque faces feretrumque parabant:
Nusquam corpus erat; croceum pro corpore florem
510 Inveniunt foliis medium cingentibus albis.
Cognita res meritam vati per Achaidas urbes
Adtulerat famam, nomenque erat auguris ingens.
(Ov., Met., 3.339–512)
So blind Tiresias gave to all who came
faultless and sure reply and far and wide
through all Boeotia’s cities spread his fame.
To test his truth and trust the first who tried
was wave-blue water-nymph Liriope,
whom once Cephisus in his sinuous flow
embracing held and ravished. In due time
the lovely sprite bore a fine infant boy,
from birth adorable, and named her son
Narcissus; and of him she asked the seer,
     25

would he long years and ripe old age enjoy,

who answered ‘If he shall himself not know’.
For long his words seemed vain; what they concealed
the lad’s strange death and stranger love revealed.
Narcissus now had reached his sixteenth year
and seemed both man and boy; and many a youth
and many a girl desired him, but hard pride
ruled in that delicate frame, and never a youth
and never a girl could touch his haughty heart.
Once as he drove to nets the frightened deer
a strange-voiced nymph observed him, who must speak
if any other speak and cannot speak
unless another speak, resounding Echo.
Echo was still a body, not a voice,
but talkative as now, and with the same
power of speaking, only to repeat,
as best she could, the last of many words.
Juno had made her so; for many a time,
when the great goddess might have caught the nymphs
lying with Jove upon the mountainside,
Echo discreetly kept her talking till
the nymphs had fled away; and when at last
the goddess saw the truth, ‘Your tongue’, she said,
‘with which you tricked me, now its power shall lose,
your voice avail but for the briefest use.’
The event confirmed the threat: when speaking ends,
all she can do is double each last word,
and echo back again the voice she’s heard.
Now when she saw Narcissus wandering
in the green byways, Echo’s heart was fired;
and stealthily she followed, and the more
she followed him, the nearer flamed her love,
as when a torch is lit and from the tip
the leaping sulphur grasps the offered flame.
She longed to come to him with winning words,
to urge soft pleas, but nature now opposed;
she might not speak the first but—what she might—
waited for words her voice could say again.
It chanced Narcissus, searching for his friends,
26   

called ‘Anyone here?’ and Echo answered ‘Here!’

Amazed he looked all round and, raising his voice,
called ‘Come this way!’ and Echo called ‘This way!’
He looked behind and, no one coming, shouted
‘Why run away?’ and heard his words again.
He stopped and, cheated by the answering voice,
called ‘Join me here!’ and she, never more glad
to give her answer, answered ‘Join me here!’
and graced her words and ran out from the wood
to throw her longing arms around his neck.
He bolted, shouting ‘Keep your arms from me!
Be off! I’ll die before I yield to you.’
And all she answered was ‘I yield to you’.
Shamed and rejected in the woods she hides
and has her dwelling in the lonely caves;
yet still her love endures and grows on grief,
and weeping vigils waste her frame away;
her body shrivels, all its moisture dries;
only her voice and bones are left; at last
only her voice, her bones are turned to stone.
So in the woods she hides and hills around,
for all to hear, alive, but just a sound.
Thus had Narcissus mocked her; others too,
hill-nymphs and water-nymphs and many a man
he mocked; till one scorned youth, with raised hands, prayed,
‘So may he love—and never win his love!’
And Nemesis approved the righteous prayer.
There was a pool, limpid and silvery,
whither no shepherd came nor any herd,
nor mountain goat; and never bird nor beast
nor falling branch disturbed its shining peace;
grass grew around it, by the water fed,
and trees to shield it from the warming sun.
Here—for the chase and heat had wearied him—
the boy lay down, charmed by the quiet pool,
and, while he slaked his thirst, another thirst
grew; as he drank he saw before his eyes
a form, a face, and loved with leaping heart
a hope unreal and thought image in water was real.
     27

Spellbound he saw himself, and motionless

lay like a marble statue staring down.
He gazes at his eyes, twin constellation,
his hair worthy of Bacchus or Apollo,
his face so fine, his ivory neck, his cheeks
smooth, and the snowy pallor and the blush;
all he admires that all admire in him,
himself he longs for, longs unwittingly,
praising is praised, desiring is desired,
and love he kindles while with love he burns.
How often in vain he kissed the cheating pool
and in the water sank his arms to clasp
the neck he saw, but could not clasp himself!
Not knowing what he sees, he adores the sight;
that false face fools and fuels his delight.
You simple boy, why strive in vain to catch
a fleeting image? What you see is nowhere;
and what you love—but turn away—you lose!
You see a phantom of a mirrored shape;
nothing itself; with you it came and stays;
with you it too will go, if you can go!
No thought of food or rest draws him away;
stretched on the grassy shade he gazes down
on the false phantom, staring endlessly,
his eyes his own undoing. Raising himself
he holds his arms towards the encircling trees
and cries ‘You woods, was ever love more cruel!
You know! For you are lovers’ secret haunts.
Can you in your long living centuries
recall a lad who pined so piteously?
My joy! I see it; but the joy I see
I cannot find (of so much folly my love is prey!)
and—to my greater grief—between us lies
no mighty sea, no long and dusty road,
nor mountain range nor bolted barbican.
A little water sunders us. He longs
for my embrace. Why, every time I reach
my lips towards the gleaming pool, he strains
his upturned face to mine. I surely could
28   

touch him, so slight the thing that thwarts our love.

Come forth, whoever you are! Why, peerless boy,
elude me? Where retreat beyond my reach?
My looks, my age—indeed it cannot be
that you should shun—the nymphs have loved me too!
Some hope, some nameless hope, your friendly face
pledges; and when I stretch my arms to you
you stretch your arms to me, and when I smile
you smile, and when I weep, I’ve often seen
your tears, and to my nod your nod replies,
and your sweet lips appear to move in speech,
though to my ears your answer cannot reach.
Oh, I am he! Oh, now I know for sure
the image is my own; it’s for myself
I burn with love; I fan the flames I feel.
What now? Woo or be wooed? Why woo at all?
My love’s myself—my riches beggar me.
Would I might leave my body! I could wish
(strange lover’s wish!) my love were not so near!
Now sorrow saps my strength; of my life’s span
not long is left; I die before my prime.
Nor is death sad for death will end my sorrow;
would he I love might live a long tomorrow!
But now we two—one soul—one death will die.’
Distraught he turned towards the face again;
his tears rippled the pool, and darkly then
the troubled water veiled the fading form,
and, as it vanished, ‘Stay’, he shouted, ‘stay!
Oh, cruelty to leave your lover so!
Let me but gaze on what I may not touch
and feed the aching fever in my heart.’
Then in his grief he tore his robe and beat
his pale cold fists upon his naked breast,
and on his breast a blushing redness spread
like apples, white in part and partly red,
or summer grapes whose varying skins assume
upon the ripening vine a blushing bloom.
     29

And this he saw reflected in the pool,

now still again, and could endure no more.
But as wax melts before a gentle fire,
or morning frosts beneath the rising sun,
so, by love wasted, slowly he dissolves
by hidden fire consumed. No colour now,
blending the white with red, nor strength remains
nor will, nor aught that lately seemed so fair,
nor longer lasts the body Echo loved.
But she, though angry still and unforgetting,
grieved for the hapless boy, and when he moaned
‘Alas’, with answering sob she moaned ‘alas’,
and when he beat his hands upon his breast,
she gave again the same sad sounds of woe.
His latest words, gazing and gazing still,
he sighed ‘alas! the boy I loved in vain!’
and these the place repeats, and then ‘farewell’,
and Echo said ‘farewell’. On the green grass
he drooped his weary head, and death closed his eyes
while they were still looking at their master’s beauty.
Then still, received into the Underworld,
he gazed upon himself in Styx’s pool.
His Naiad sisters wailed and sheared their locks
in mourning for their brother; the Dryads too
wailed and sad Echo wailed in answering woe.
And then the brandished torches, bier and pyre
were ready—but no body anywhere;
and in its stead they found a flower—behold,
white petals clustered round a cup of gold!
News of this story brought the prophet fame,
well merited, in all the towns of Greece.
[transl. by A.D. Melville, slightly modified]

The Ovidian version of the myth of Narcissus is the only one that recounts
(or, we might say, depicts) the decisive moments of the youth’s fate with a
wealth of detail and specifically ‘artistic’ aims. But different versions of the
myth were also known in antiquity, like, for example, the one found in
30   

Conon, a Greek writer active in Ovid’s day who published a collection of

mythological tales.³
In his version, Narcissus is a strikingly handsome youth from Thespiae, in
Boeotia, indifferent to and contemptuous of the god Eros and of the many
young peers who are charmed by his beauty. One in particular—Ameinias,
the most persistent of them—is the victim of his haughty disdain: Narcissus
rebuffs his advances cruelly, and sends him a sword, with which the des-
pondent boy kills himself, calling on the god of love to avenge him. That
vengeance comes in the form of the illusion of the mirror: Narcissus sees his
reflection in the water, falls madly in love with himself, and in the end,
acknowledging the justice of his punishment, kills himself, like the lover he
had so cruelly spurned. The inhabitants of Thespiae, who from then on
intensified their participation in the cult of the god Eros, believed that from
the soil bathed in his blood sprang the homonymous flower, the narcissus.
As we can see, aside from a few elements in common (the Boeotian
location, the contemptuous indifference with which Narcissus reacts to the
frustrated passion of those who love him, the punishment inflicted by the
deity, the origin of the narcissus flower), the structure (and the meaning) of
the story is much different in Ovid than in Conon. The latter focuses on the
guilt/vengeance dichotomy manifested in the perfectly parallel destinies of
Ameinias, the rejected lover, and Narcissus, the scornful beloved, who both
commit suicide, but completely omits the essential aspect of Ovid’s version,
i.e. the analysis of Narcissus’ paradoxical self-love (Conon does not even
explicitly tell us that Narcissus recognizes himself). Conon’s moralistic
intent is patently evident: his Narcissus is aware of his punishment, which
he acknowledges as a just one, while Ovid’s Narcissus never establishes a
link between his vain passion and the unrequited passion of his scorned
lovers.⁴
The question becomes more complex in another, later source of the myth,
Pausanias. In the ninth book (dedicated to Boeotia) of his Description of
Greece⁵ he offers us two versions of the myth: first, a brief synopsis of the
contemporary version (Narcissus sees his reflection in the water of a spring
and, without recognizing himself, falls in love with his image and dies as a
result)—which the author considers too preposterous to be credible—, and

³ Conon frg. 24 in Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, ed. F. Jacoby, Berlin 1923, Bd. 1,
pp. 197 f. A meticulous analysis of the Conon text (also in relation to Ovid) in B. M,
Narcissus bei Konon und Ovid (Zu Ovid, Met. 3, 339–510), Hermes, 103, 1975, pp. 349–72.
⁴ M, art. cit., p. 363. ⁵ Paus. 9.31.7.
     31

then, in greater detail, another version, ‘less well known than the first,’ but in
his opinion more plausible. In this latter version, which is clearly a ration-
alized form of the more common one, Narcissus had had a twin sister with
whom he had fallen in love. After her death, he consoles himself in the face
of this irreparable loss by contemplating his own beauty reflected in the
spring, in which he consciously evokes the beauty of his beloved sister. In
keeping with his tenacious rationalism, Pausanias concludes by refuting
another element of the customary version of the myth, the origination of
the narcissus flower from the homonymous youth. The aspect of the com-
mon version that Pausanias cannot accept as believable is Narcissus’ ingenu-
ousness (inconceivable, for Pausanias, in a nearly-adult person), his inability
to recognize himself in the mirror of the pool. Thus he presents a different,
ostensibly more plausible version that eliminates the motif of mistakenness
and rationalizes the theme of reflection: Narcissus admires himself in the
watery mirror because he knows that he is in fact admiring another beauty,
that of the girl he had loved and lost.
It is not easy to establish any dependent relationship among the various
versions of the myth, but based on Pausanias, we can reasonably deduce that
the original version was the one he himself did not ‘understand’, i.e. that in
which Narcissus does not recognize himself in the reflected image, and falls
prey to a fatal deception.⁶ The myth probably had its roots in the province of
magic, perhaps linked to beliefs in the magical powers of reflections in
water,⁷ beliefs that eventually faded, giving rise to various attempts at
rationalization.
Narcissus thus becomes cognizant of his self-love. The first instance of
this attitude is in Ovid, but perhaps Conon’s version (in which it is not clear
whether Narcissus recognizes himself or not) was an earlier attempt to offer
a motive for an incomprehensible occurrence with the introduction of
divine punishment.⁸
Transformation into a flower, as we have seen, is a constant in the most
widely known versions, bringing our myth into the sphere of the numerous
Greek sagas of the metamorphoses of heroes and heroines into plants or
flowers to which they give their names: Adonis, Hyacinth, Crocus, Lotus,

⁶ Cf. M, art. cit., p. 351. Before this, the more specific P. Z, ‘ “Iste ego sum”.
Der naive und der bewusste Narziss’, Bonner Jahrbb., 166, 1966, pp. 152–70, who in addition to
literary sources also analyses the figurative arts and identifies the late-Hellenistic appearance
(Ovid being the first example) of the character’s self-awareness.
⁷ But cf. below, p. 18.
⁸ This is the hypothesis advanced by M, art. cit., pp. 352 f.
32   

Minthe, Mithras, etc.⁹ Common elements in the frequent allusions to the

myth and figure of Narcissus in ancient texts are his delicate beauty (pro-
verbial, like that of heroes such as Adonis, Hyacinth, Endymion, Ganymede,
and others with whom he is often associated) and his ‘coldness’. This latter
trait in particular, which reflects his ‘aquatic’ nature—he is the son of a river
and a spring nymph—, links him to the homonymous flower, which loves
water, grows in wet areas, and has a downward-bending calyx.¹⁰
An etymology known in antiquity linked the name of the flower (narkis-
sos) to narké [torpor],¹¹ due precisely to the soporific effects it produces: ‘the
daffodil is a flower with a heavy odour; the name evinces this, and it induces
a torpor in the nerves.’¹²
Its narcotic properties make it a seductive, enthralling flower commonly
associated with the sphere of death (it is, in effect, poisonous). In fact, this
seems to have been its most distinguishing trait in antiquity.¹³ Wreaths of
daffodils were customary ornaments in funerary rites, and even dreaming
about them was considered dangerous: ‘Wreaths of narcissus flowers are bad
for all, even if they are observed in season, and most of all [due primarily to
the myth] for those who make their living directly or indirectly from water,
and those who are about to set sail.’¹⁴ But in particular, the daffodil was a
constant attribute of Demeter and Persephone, the chthonic deities of
Eleusis, as Plutarch noted in reference to a passage from Sophocles’
Oedipus at Colonus: ‘The daffodil benumbs the nerves and causes a stupid
narcotic heaviness in the limbs, and therefore Sophocles calls it the ancient
garland flower of the great (that is, the earthy) gods.’¹⁵ And the daffodil is
also associated with the abduction of Persephone: the beauty and inebriating
fragrance of this ‘menace for the rosy-cheeked maiden’ entrance her,

⁹ Cf. E 1726, 40 ff. Many of these names, like that of Narcissus (cf. ibid. 1721, 43 ff.),
testify to the pre-Greek origin of the relative mythical personages.
¹⁰ A great deal of material in W, Narkissos cit., pp. 81 ff. and 123 ff. Cf. as well
P. H, ‘Le mythe de Narcisse et son interprétation par Plotin’, in Nouv. Rev. de Psychan., 13,
1976, pp. 82 ff., and E 1723. The types of Narcissus to which antique authors generally
allude in reference to our myth are those that botanists call Narcissus poeticus and Narcissus
Tazetta.
¹¹ Like, for ex., Pliny, Nat. Hist., 21.128: a narce narcissum dictum. Other passages in E
1721, 48 ff. There is no unanimity among modern linguists: some accept the etymology
(A. C, Dictionnaire étymologique des noms grecs de plantes, Louvain 1959, p. 185), others
are uncertain (Boisacq, Frisk), and others consider it a typical folk etymology (Hofmann and
especially Chantraine).
¹² Clement of Alex., Paed., 2.8.71.3. ¹³ Cf. W, Narkissos cit., pp. 9, 79 ff., 93 f.
¹⁴ Artemidoro, Oneir., 1.77 (transl. D. E. Harris-McCoy).
¹⁵ Plut., Quaest. conv., 3.1.647 B.
     33

affording Pluto the opportunity to snatch her and carry her away to Hades.¹⁶
Seduction and death are thus the characteristics associated with the narcis-
sus flower, and are also recurrent motifs in literary elaborations of the myth
(one can certainly understand the fascination it held for symbolist and
decadent poets). In a work by the most important Greek poet of Late
Antiquity, Nonnus of Panopolis, Dionysus uses a daffodil to seduce Aura
with his usual blend of charm and trickery: the flower and the water
alongside which it grows lull his beloved nymph to sleep (in this instance
Narcissus is said to be the son of Endymion, the beautiful youth who lives in
perpetual sleep).¹⁷ The relationship with the sphere of Dionysus here (and
recurring elsewhere as well) is interesting, perhaps suggested by an under-
lying affinity between the narcotic, chthonic nature of the flower and some
of the god’s traits, such as his power to produce enthrallment, hallucin-
ations, and fatal deception¹⁸ (as in the stories of Pentheus and the
Tyrrhenian sailors, for example, from the same third book of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses). Another sphere with which Narcissus is commonly asso-
ciated, but in terms of opposition or antagonism, is that of the god Eros, who
exacts a harsh revenge upon the youth.
Cold as the flower he will beget,¹⁹ proud of his independence and resistant
to love as a form of ‘self-concession’, Narcissus is punished by being made to
fall in love with and ardently yearn for a non-existent ‘other’, an insubstan-
tial shadow. His sad story is in fact used as an exemplary illustration of the
Greek proverb ‘many will hate you if you love yourself ’.²⁰
Punishment carried out by means of reflection in water leads us to
another sphere of beliefs concerning the psycho-physiological effects gener-
ated by the contemplation of reflective surfaces in which we might be
inclined to trace the myth’s roots and meaning.²¹ ‘Behold not yourself in a

¹⁶ Homeric Hymns, To Dem., 5 ff., as well as v. 425; cf. E 1727, 15 ff.
¹⁷ Cf. H, art. cit., pp. 88 ff.
¹⁸ Cf. V, op. cit., p. 31 and H, art. cit., p. 90. Less convincing, in my view, Hadot’s
insistence on the role of Artemis in the Narcissus myth.
¹⁹ Psychrótaton [freezing cold] is the descriptor used in the Geoponica, 11.25 (a work
compiled in Greek in the tenth cent. with writings by Greek and Latin authors on agronomy).
²⁰ Imparted by the lexicon Suda, IV n. 1934.
²¹ Cf. A. D, La catoptromancie grecque et ses dérivés, Liège 1932, p. 152 and E
1728, 18 ff. More recently, there is an insistence on this element as the key to interpreting the
myth in H. C, ‘Spiegel der Erkenntnis (Zu Ovid, Met., III 339–510)’, Der altsprachl.
Unterr., 10, 1, 1967, pp. 42 ff. But we must consider the strong arguments against this
interpretation offered by H, art. cit., pp. 96–8. Ample documentation of these beliefs,
which still thrive for example in Greek folklore, in Delatte and in A. W, ‘Narkissos oder
das Spiegelbild’, Archiv Orientální, 7, 1935, pp. 37–63 and 328–50.
34   

mirror by the light of a lamp,’ went one Pythagorean symbol; and another
warned, ‘Gaze not upon your reflection in the water of a river.’ Columella
even tells us of a curious belief: that mares who saw their own reflections in
water would be seized by a vain infatuation and would waste away as a result
of their unquenched desire.²² On the other hand, the oneiromancer
Artemidorus asserted that ‘seeing one’s reflection in water portends the
death of the dreamer himself or of a person near to him’.²³
As we have seen, in Ovid’s version of the myth, the most complete and
detailed rendering we have, there is no specific moralistic intent, nor any
trace of commentary or of an edifying interpretation of the story. But the
most important ancient-world interpretation of the myth, the neo-Platonic
one, moves precisely in that direction, towards an allegorical reading of
Narcissus’ fatal deception. Even before Plotinus, however, there had been a
couple of precedents in that sense: Lucian’s, and a more meaningful one by a
Christian author, Clement of Alexandria. In Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead²⁴
the figure of the youth (along with the equally proverbial ones of Hyacinth,
Nireus, and other heroes) is taken as a symbol of human beauty subordin-
ated to the inexorable law of death: death alone, which sets us all on the same
level, reveals the ephemeral vanity of human things. Clement of Alexandria
is even more explicit;²⁵ he deplores women’s habit of primping and preening
in front of the mirror, and admonishes them to forsake the false flattery of
appearances, recalling the fatal deception of Narcissus. The mythical youth
thus serves as the paradigm of the behaviour of those who allow themselves
to be seduced by exterior beauty, which the author naturally contrasts with
the moral obligation to seek out and revere the only sort of beauty that is not
deceptive and hollow, namely the beauty of the spirit. The core of the myth,
then, lies in the deception that makes illusory appearances seem true, and
the motif of vanitas²⁶ also provides the interpretive key to Plotinus’ reading
of it a few decades later.
In his treatise On Beauty, the philosopher reprises the famous theory
from Plato’s Symposium on the phases of the ideal path towards Absolute
Beauty.²⁷ The first phase in this process, which must be passed through in
order to attain beauty of the soul and, finally, transcendent beauty, is
constituted by the visible, perceptible beauty of bodies. As an example of

²² Colum., De re rust., 6.35. ²³ Artemid., Oneir., 2.7.

²⁴ Luc., Dial. mort., 5 (18). ²⁵ Paed., 3.2.11.3. ²⁶ Cf. V, op. cit., p. 36.
²⁷ In addition to V, op. cit., p. 37, we have an excellent, rich, and cogent analysis of the
Plotinian text in the already-cited article (cf. above note 11) by P. H, Le mythe de Narcisse
et son interprétation par Plotin.
     35

one who is unable to pass through this first phase, which is merely a tenuous,
distant reflection of supreme beauty, he introduces the case of Narcissus, who
succumbs to the deception of appearances: ‘In fact, one who pursues these
shapes in bodily forms, as if touching real things, is like he who sought to
grasp his own beautiful image playing on the water and—this is the meaning
of the story—sank into the depths, and disappeared into nothingness. And so
too, one who is held prisoner by material bodies and cannot break free from
them will plummet, not in body, but in soul, into the depths . . . .’²⁸ Narcissus
does not realize that the beautiful image that seduces him is an insubstantial
reflection, and above all he does not realize its origin; he does not understand
that it comes from him himself.²⁹ So, the soul that behaves like Narcissus,
mired in spiritual confusion, fails to understand that his body is merely a self-
generated reflection (because, according to Plotinus, the perceptible world is
a reflection of the soul in the mirror of matter). If the soul takes an interest in
and yearns for its own reflection, almost as if it were reality, then it distances
itself from its proper aim, from transcendent beauty. Its true path must be
one that leads inward, towards the supremacy of the Intellect, and not
towards exterior forms of the perceptible world.
The neo-Platonic interpretation of the Narcissus myth came up again
centuries later within the sphere of Florentine humanism. In his 1569
Comment on Plato’s Symposium—an important component of his untiring
effort to translate and interpret Platonic and neo-Platonic culture—,
Marsilio Ficino mentions the myth of Narcissus precisely with regard to
the notion that the human soul puts itself at great risk when it allows itself to
be seduced by corporeal beauty. In the Orphic source text he refers to,³⁰
Ficino perceives a specific allegorical intention: Narcissus represents the
misfortune of one who forgets the beauty of the soul and gives in to the

²⁸ Plot., Enn., 1.6.8.

²⁹ On this point in particular, from which significant consequences stem, see H, art.
cit., pp. 99 ff. Note especially the substantial difference he points out between Plotinus’ use of the
Narcissus myth and Gnostic cosmologies (particularly evident in the hermetic writing of
Poimandres) that explained the origin of the perceptible world from the archetypal man’s
‘narcissistic’ love for his own reflection mirrored in water (cf. D, op. cit., p. 154 and
E 1729, 21 ff.). Hadot rightly advises caution (p. 103) regarding the commonly suggested
(for example, in E 1729, 4 ff.) link between the death of Narcissus and the orphic myth of
Dionysius’ dismembering consequent to the shattering of the mirror in which the god had
observed himself.
³⁰ M F, Commentaire sur le Banquet de Platon, éd. par R. Marcel, Paris 1956,
p. 235.
36   

charms of physical beauty, and who is thus attached to the lowest realm, the
merest reflection of supreme beauty.³¹
The last link in this ideal chain of neo-Platonic readings of the myth of
Narcissus is in German romanticism. In his monumental Symbolik und
Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen (4 vols., 1810–12), one
of the emblematic works of that cultural milieu, Georg Friedrich Creuzer,
the ‘romantic among philologists’, proposed to reconstruct a presumed
primitive unity of religions: he believed that ancient myths contained traces
of a primordial symbolic language.³² The myth of Narcissus was, naturally,
no exception to such interpretation. Creuzer suggested it signified the
experience of the soul which, seeking itself in the memory of its original
nature (as part of God), mistakes its own individual existence—the reflection
of its essence—for its actual essence. In this search for the self (philautia),
the soul first dissolves and then is reborn as a flower of mourning, a funerary
blossom.³³
But while the Narcissus narrative has provided fodder for philosophers
and ‘moralizing’ treatises, it has had a truly vast impact in the field of
literature. That impact is, of course, in part attributable to the poet who
authored the Metamorphoses: his influence is immense (second only, and
only slightly, to Virgil’s), and covers an arc of time from the early centuries
of the last millennium (known as the aetas Ovidiana) to the romantics.
From troubadour poetry to the Roman de la Rose to Marino and beyond, the
myth of Narcissus pervades European literature, and even though Ovid’s
popularity declined markedly in the nineteenth century, the myth continues
to have a life of its own, becoming charged with new meanings. The history
of its reception in European tradition in fact constitutes a fascinating chapter
of cultural history, already richly described in Louise Vinge’s excellent book,
repeatedly cited here. In the history of the myth’s popularity, the dominant
motif, much more so than self-love, has been that of error, illusion, and
confusion between appearance and reality. Only in the eighteenth century
did this meaning come to be supplemented and later replaced by that of
man’s relationship with the Self, and in particular that of the artist with his

³¹ A detailed analysis of the text Ficino cites is in V, op. cit., pp. 123–7.
³² On Creuzer’s life and work see O. D in the Neue Deutsche Biographie, Bd. 3 (Berlin
1957), pp. 414 f., and M.M. M̈, La ‘Symbolique’ de Friedrich Creuzer, Paris 1976. V,
op. cit., pp. 315 ff. offers thoughtful consideration regarding an analysis of the method.
³³ In reality, this is just one—apparently the definitive one—of the interpretations proposed
by Creuzer (in the second ed. of the Symbolik). Partially different from that in the first ed. and
the one espoused in the introduction to Plotinus’ treatise On Beauty, published autonomously in
1814. On this matter cf. once again V, op. cit., pp. 317–22.
     37

work.³⁴ This latter significance accompanies the myth of Narcissus through

romantic culture and into symbolist and decadent literature.
In fact, the last great literary flowering of the myth of Narcissus is
associated specifically with the symbolist and decadent sphere.³⁵ With its
Stimmung of placid, drowsy languor, it is perfectly suited to the constellation
of symbolist themes: the motif of the double or doppelganger (mention of
Dorian Gray here is both unavoidable and superfluous), or that of cold,
sterile, motionless beauty (think of Mallarmé’s Hérodiade), or of ‘static’
existence that is absolute in its self-sufficient solitude, all recur obsessively
in fin-de-siècle literature. This focus on the motif of existence separate from
the world, often symbolically represented by the image of a circle (Rilke) or
of a crystal (Valéry), makes the Narcissus story (in which the motif of self-
love slips into the background) seem like an experience of spiritual discip-
line, or an intellectual and existential relationship with reality.³⁶ In this
decadent, aestheticizing representation of the myth, the figure of Narcissus
is taken up as a symbol of the poet, who, voluntarily solitary and detached
from the world, personifies the process of self-reflection which symbolist
poetry claims as its origin. As a symbolic mirror of its creator, the symbolist
work of art folds back upon itself in a self-sustaining cult of self-worship: the
image of an aesthetics (sometimes in the form of a narcissistic cult of the
word, as in Mallarmé or Stefan George),³⁷ but often also of the author’s
psychological condition and life choices.
But as we know, perhaps the main reason for the great popularity of the
Narcissus myth in contemporary culture lies in its implementation in the
sphere of modern analytical psychology as a paradigm of a significant
psychological phenomenon, namely narcissism. Based solely on the motif
of the mythical personage’s self-love, it is commonly linked to the idea of

³⁴ Cf. V, chp. XI passim.

³⁵ Cf. H. E-K, ‘Das Narziss-Thema in der Symbolistischen Lyrik’,
Arcadia, 15, 1980, pp. 278–94; H. M, Die Entwicklung des Narzissbegriffs, «Germ.-
Roman. Monatsschr.», 21, 1933, pp. 373–83; H. Z̈, Stilles Wasser. Narziss und Ophelia in
der Dichtung und Malerei um 1900, Bonn 1975 (mainly focused on German culture);
A. H, Mannerism: the crisis of the Renaissance and the origin of modern art, Engl. transl.
London 1965, pp. 118–20. More specific A. G, ‘Le symbole du miroir dans l’oeuvre de
Mallarmé’, Cahiers Ass. intern. ét. franç., 11, May 1959, p. 164, and J. F, Variations sur le
thème du miroir . . . , ibid., pp. 134 ff.
³⁶ The best-known literary texts that recast the figure of Narcissus are the Traité du Narcisse
by the young Gide (1891) and the three pieces Narcisse parle (1902), Fragments du Narcisse
(1922), Cantate du Narcisse (1938) by P. Valéry (on which cf. P. A, Mythes et mythologie
dans la littérature française, Paris 1969, pp. 173 ff.).
³⁷ Cf. M, art. cit., pp. 381 f.
38   

conceited self-sufficiency, gratifying self-love, and obsessive isolation, but its

precise conceptual definition is the object of an intense theoretical effort
documented by the now-inestimable bibliography on the subject.³⁸
The concept’s indeterminate and wavering semantic boundaries undoubt-
edly encouraged its now-established use and diffusion in non-specialist
spheres as well. But after these few brief and partial remarks on the myth’s
enduring popularity, it is time to return to Ovid’s text.

2. Echo and Narcissus: the deception of the reflection

As we have said, the Narcissus story is narrated in the third book of the
Metamorphoses. After an account of the world’s origination from primordial
chaos and the phases of the Urzeit comes the long section on the mythical
era (from 1.452 to 11.493, after which the author moves on to historical
events, from the Trojan War to the days of Augustus).³⁹ Here, in a succes-
sion organized in very loose chronological order and in fact determined by
thematic associations, Ovid narrates various and sundry tales of the gods
and heroes of myth. At the beginning of the third book we are in Boeotia,
where the young prince Cadmus—who will later found Thebes there—
arrives in search of his sister Europa, who has been seduced and abducted
by Jove. Thus begins the cycle of the Theban sagas. At a certain point we are
introduced to Tiresias who, asked to resolve a teasing and rather risqué
dispute between Jove and Juno, gives a response that displeases the latter,
who punishes him by striking him blind. Jove partially recompenses this
harsh punishment by granting the unfortunate fellow the gift of prophecy; as
the first test of his infallibility as a seer, the story of Narcissus is introduced.
Upon its conclusion, Ovid uses the figure of Tiresias to segue into the tale of
Pentheus, who will pay dearly for disregarding and mocking the seer’s

³⁸ A great deal of material is indicated in n. 13 of the ‘Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse’

entitled Narcisses (1976). Cf. also B. G, Narcissism. Psychoanalytic Essays, Engl.
transl. New York 1979. Often revised by Freud himself, ‘The term narcissism . . . was chosen . . .
to denote the attitude of a person who treats his own body in the same way in which the body of
a sexual object is ordinarily treated’ [transl. I. Smith, in Freud, Complete Works, online pdf
version (2000, 2007, 2010), p. 2931], but while he initially considered it a transitory phase of
childhood sexual development, he later also classified it as a structural phenomenon, perman-
ently fixed in the subject and not necessarily pathological.
³⁹ This is the division proposed by what is perhaps the most reliable of the many studies
dedicated to the structure of the poem, W. L, Struktur und Einheit der Metamorphosen
Ovids, Berlin 1965.
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Mr. Jervis, Vol. 2
(of 3)
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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Title: Mr. Jervis, Vol. 2 (of 3)

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Original publication: London: Chatto & Windus, 1894

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MR. JERVIS,

VOL. 2 (OF 3) ***
MR. JERVIS
 NEW NOVELS AT ALL
LIBRARIES.
AT MARKET VALUE. By Grant Allen. 2 vols.
RACHEL DENE. By Robert Buchanan. 2
vols.
A COUNTRY SWEETHEART. By Dora
Russell. 3 vols.
DR. ENDICOTT’S EXPERIMENT. By Adeline
Sergeant. 2 vols.
IN AN IRON GRIP. By Mrs. L. T. Meade. 2
vols.
LOURDES. By E. Zola. 1 vol.
ROMANCES OF THE OLD SERAGLIO. By H.
N. Crellin. 1 vol.
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vol.
THE SCORPION. A Romance of Spain. By E.
A. Vizetelly. 1 vol.

London: CHATTO & WINDUS, Piccadilly.

 MR. JERVIS
BY
B. M. CROKER
AUTHOR OF
“PRETTY MISS NEVILLE,” “DIANA BARRINGTON,” “A BIRD OF PASSAGE,”
“A FAMILY LIKENESS,” ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. II.

London
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1894
“Lord of himself, though not of lands;
And having nothing, yet hath all.”

Sir H. Wotton.
 CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
CHAPTER PAGE
XVII. “Take a Friend’s Advice” 1
XVIII. The Table of Precedence 23
XIX. Let us tell the Truth 44
XX. Miss Paske defies her Aunt 55
XXI. The Great Starvation Picnic 68
XXII. Toby Joy’s Short Cut 94
XXIII. Captain Waring’s Alternative 111
XXIV. “Sweet Primrose is coming!” 132
XXV. Sweet Primrose justifies her Reputation 150
XXVI. The Result of playing “Home, Sweet 176
Home”
XXVII. Mrs. Langrishe puts herself out to take 202
Somebody in
XXVIII. The Club is Decorated 216
XXIX. Mark Jervis is Unmasked 237
MR. JERVIS.
 CHAPTER XVII.
“TAKE A FRIEND’S ADVICE.”

Sarabella Brande was a truly proud woman, as she concluded an

inspection of her niece, ere the young lady started to make her first
appearance in public. There was not a fault to be found in that fresh
white dress, pretty hat, neat gloves, and parasol—except that she
would have liked just a bit more colour; but what Honor lacked in this
respect, her aunt made up generously in her own person, in the
shape of a cobalt blue silk, heavily trimmed with gold embroidery,
and a vivid blue and yellow bonnet. Two rickshaws were in
attendance, a grand new one on indiarubber tires, and four gaudy
jampannis, all at the “Miss Sahib’s” service. Mrs. Brande led the way,
bowling down the smooth club road at the rate of seven miles an
hour, lying back at an angle of forty-five degrees, her bonnet-
feathers waving triumphantly over the back of her vehicle. The club
was the centre, the very social heart or pulse of Shirani. It contained
rooms for reading, writing, dancing, for playing cards or billiards, or
for drinking tea.
Outside ran a long verandah, lined with ill-shaped wicker chairs,
overlooking the tennis courts and gardens, and commanding a fine
view of the snows.
The six tennis courts were full, the band of the Scorpions was
playing the last new gavotte, when Mrs. Brande walked up with head
in the air, closely followed by her niece and Captain Waring. She felt
that every eye, and especially Mrs. Langrishe’s eye, was on her, and
was fully equal to the occasion. Mrs. Langrishe, faultlessly attired in
a French costume, and looking the picture of elegant fastidiousness,
murmured to her companion, Sir Gloster Sandilands—
“Not a bad-looking girl, really; not at all unpresentable, but sallow,”
and she smiled with deadly significance, little supposing that her faint
praise attracted the baronet to Honor on the spot. Then she rose,
and rustled down with much frow-frowing of silken petticoats, and
accosted her rival with expressions of hypocritical delight.
“Where have you been?” she inquired. “We thought you were in
quarantine; but when I look at you, I need not ask how you are? Pray
introduce your niece to me. I hope she and Lalla will be immense
allies.” As she spoke, she was closely scrutinizing every item of
Honor’s appearance, and experiencing an unexpected pang.
The girl was a lady, she had a graceful figure, and a bright clever
face; and the old woman had not been suffered to dress her! Even
her captious eye could find no fault in that simple toilet.
“How do you do, Miss Gordon? Had you a good passage out?”
she asked urbanely.
“Yes, thank you.”
“You came out in the Arcadia, and most likely with a number of
people I know, the Greys, the Bruces, the Lockyers.”
“No doubt I did. There were three hundred passengers.”
“And no doubt you had a very good time, and enjoyed yourself
immensely.”
“No, I cannot fancy any one enjoying themselves on board ship,”
rejoined Honor, with a vivid recollection of fretful children to wash
and dress, and keep out of harm’s way.
“Oh!” with a pitying, half-contemptuous smile, “seasick the whole
way?”
Honor shook her head.
“Well, I see you won’t commit yourself,” with a playful air, “but I
shall hear all about you from the Greys,” and she nodded
significantly, as much as to say, “Pray do not imagine that any of
your enormities will be hidden from me!”
“Lalla!” to her niece, who was the centre of a group of men, “come
here, and be introduced to Miss Gordon.”
 Lalla reluctantly strolled forward, with the air of a social martyr.
“I think we have met before,” said Honor, frankly extending her
hand.
Miss Paske stared with a sort of blank expression, and elevating
her eyebrows drawled—
“I think not.” But she also made a quick little sign.
Unfortunately for her, she had to deal with a girl who could not
read such signals, who answered in a clear, far-carrying voice—
“Oh, don’t you remember? I met you the other morning before
breakfast up among the pine woods; you walking with Mr. Joy—
surely you recollect how desperately our dogs fought!”
Lalla felt furious with this blundering idiot, and hated her bitterly
from that day forth.
Mrs. Langrishe was made aware of Lalla’s early promenades for
the first time, and her lips tightened ominously. She did not approve
of these morning tête-à-têtes with an impecunious feather-head, like
Toby Joy.
“Ah, yes, now that you mention it I do recollect,” responded Miss
Paske, with an air which implied that the fact of the meeting required
a most exhaustive mental effort. “But you were in deshabille, you
see” (this was a malicious and mendacious remark), “and you look
so very different when you are dressed up! How do you think you will
like India?”
“It is too soon to know as yet.”
“I see you have the bump of caution,” with a little sneer; “now I
make up my mind to like or dislike a place or a person on the spot. I
suppose you are fond of riding?”
“I have never ridden since I was a child, but I hope to learn.”
“Then that mount on Captain Waring’s pony was your first attempt.
How ridiculous you did look! I’m afraid you are rather too old to learn
riding now. Can you dance?”
 “Yes, I am very fond of dancing.”
“How many ball dresses did you bring out?” demanded Miss
Paske.
“Only three,” replied the other, apologetically.
“Oh, they will be ample. India is not what it was. Girls sit out half
the night. Don’t let your aunt choose your frocks for you, my dear—
indeed, we will all present you with a vote of thanks if you will choose
hers. I’ve such a painful sense of colour, that a crude combination
always hurts me. Just look at that chuprassi, in bright scarlet,
standing against a blazing magenta background—of Bourgainvillia—
the contrast is an outrage. I must really ask some one to get the man
to move on. Here comes Sir Gloster. We will go and appeal to him
together,” and she walked off.
“I suppose that is the latest arrival?” said Sir Gloster, a big heavy-
looking young man, who wore loose-fitting clothes, a shabby soft felt
hat, and rolled as he walked.
“Yes—that is Miss Gordon, Mrs. Brande’s niece. She has half a
dozen, and wrote home for one, and they say she asked for the best
looking; and people here, who have nick-names for every one, call
her ‘the sample.’”
“Excellent!” ejaculated Sir Gloster, “and a first-class sample. She
might tell them to furnish a few more on the same pattern.”
“I expect we shall find one quite enough for the present,” rejoined
Miss Paske rather dryly.
“Have all the people nick-names?”
“Most of them; those who are in any way remarkable,” she
answered, as they paced up and down. “That red-faced man over
there is called ‘Sherry,’ and his wife—I don’t see her—‘Bitters.’
Captain Waring, who is abnormally rich, is called ‘the millionaire;’ his
cousin, the fair young man in flannels, who keeps rather in the
background, is ‘the poor relation;’ Miss Clegg is known as ‘the dâk
bungalow fowl,’ because she is so bony, and the four Miss
Abrahams, who always sit in a row, and are, as you notice, a little
dark, are ‘the snowy range.’”
“Excellent!” ejaculated Sir Gloster.
“That man that you see drinking coffee,” pursued the sprightly
damsel, “with the great flat mahogany face, is ‘the Europe Ham’—is
it not a lovely name? Those two Miss Valpys, the girls with the short
hair and immense expanse of shirt fronts, are called ‘the lads;’ that
red-headed youth is known as ‘the pink un,’ and the two Mrs.
Robinsons are respectively, ‘good Mrs. Robinson’ and ‘pretty Mrs.
Robinson.’”
“Excellent!” repeated the baronet once more. “And no doubt you
and I—at any rate I—have been fitted with a new name, and all that
sort of thing?”
“Oh no,” shaking her head. “Besides,” with a sweetly flattering
smile, “there is nothing to ridicule about you.”
She was certainly not going to tell him that he was called “Double
Gloster,” in reference to his size.
Sir Gloster Sandilands was about thirty years of age, rustic in his
ideas, simple in his tastes, narrow in his views. He was the only son
of his mother, a widow, who kept him in strict order. He was fond of
ladies’ society, and of music; and, being rather dull and heavy,
greatly appreciated a pretty, lively, and amusing companion.
Companions of this description were not unknown to him at home,
but as they were generally as penniless as they were charming, the
dowager Lady Sandilands kept them and their fascinations at an
impracticable distance. She trusted to his sister, Mrs. Kane, to look
strictly after her treasure whilst under her roof; but Mrs. Kane was a
great deal too much occupied with her own affairs to have any time
to bestow on her big brother, who surely was old enough to take care
of himself! He was enchanted with India; and the change from a
small county club and confined local surroundings, the worries of a
landlord and magistrate, to this exquisite climate and scenery, and
free, novel, roving life was delightful. He had spent the cold weather
in the plains, and had come up to Shirani to visit his sister, as well as
to taste the pleasures of an Indian hill station.
Meanwhile Mrs. Brande had introduced her niece to a number of
people; and, seeing her carried off by young Jervis, to look on at the
tennis, had sunk into a low chair and abandoned herself to a
discussion with another matron.
From this she was ruthlessly disturbed by Mrs. Langrishe.
“Excuse me, dear, but you are sitting on the World.”
“Oh no, indeed, I’m sure I am not,” protested the lady promptly,
being reluctant to heave herself out of her comfortable seat.
“Well, please to look,” rather sharply.
“There!” impatiently, “you see it is not here. I don’t know why you
should think that I was sitting on it.”
“I suppose,” with a disagreeable smile, “I naturally suspected you,
because you sit on every one!” And then she moved off, leaving her
opponent gasping.
“I never knew such an odious woman,” she cried, almost in tears.
“She hustles me about and snaps at me, and yet she will have the
face to write down and borrow all my plated side-dishes and ice
machine the first time she has a dinner, but that is not often, thank
goodness.”
In the meanwhile Honor had been leaning over a rustic railing
watching a tennis match in which her uncle was playing. He was an
enthusiast, played well, and looked amazingly young and active.
“So you have been making friends, I see,” observed Jervis.
“I don’t know about friends,” she repeated doubtfully, thinking of
Lalla. “But I’ve been introduced to several people.”
“That verandah is an awful place. Waring has extraordinary nerve
to sit there among all those strangers. I am much too shy to venture
within a mile of it.”
 “I believe he is quite at home, and has met no end of
acquaintances. Have you paid any visits yet?”
“No; only one or two that he dragged me out to. I’m not a society
man.”
“And how will you put in your time?”
“I’m fond of rackets and tennis. Your uncle has given me a general
invitation to his courts. Do you think we could get up a game to-
morrow—your uncle and I, and you and Miss Paske—or Mrs.
Sladen?”
“Yes; if we could get Mrs. Sladen.”
“Not Miss Paske? Don’t you like her?” with a twinkle in his eye.
“It is too soon to say whether I like her or not; but she did not think
it too soon to ridicule my aunt to me.”
“Well, Miss Gordon, I’ll tell you something. I don’t care about Miss
Paske.”
“Why?” she asked quickly.
“Because she snubs me so ferociously. It was the same in
Calcutta. By the way, how delighted she was just now, when you,
with an air most childlike and bland, informed her aunt and most of
Shirani of her pleasant little expeditions with young Joy.”
“Ought I not to have said anything?” inquired Honor, turning a pair
of tragic eyes upon him. “Oh, that is so like me, always blundering
into mistakes. But I never dreamt that I was—was——”
“Letting cats out of bags, eh?” he supplemented quietly.
“No, indeed; and it seemed so odd that she did not remember
meeting me only three days ago.”
“You were thoroughly determined that she should not forget it, and
we will see if she ever forgives you. Here comes old Sladen,” as a
heavy figure loomed in view, crunching down the gravel, and leaning
on the railings in a manner that tested them severely, he looked
down upon the gay groups, and six tennis courts, in full swing.
Colonel Sladen had an idea that blunt rudeness, administered in a
fatherly manner, was pleasing to young women of Miss Gordon’s
age, and he said—
“So I hear you came up with the great catch of the season. Ha, ha,
ha! And got the start of all the girls in the place, eh?”
“Great catch?” she repeated, with her delicate nose high in the air.
“Well, don’t look as if you were going to shoot me! I mean the
millionaire—that fellow Waring. He seems to be rolling in coin now,
but I used to know him long ago when he had not a stiver. He used
to gamble——”
“This is his cousin, Mr. Jervis,” broke in Honor, precipitately.
“Oh, indeed,” casting an indifferent glance at Jervis. “Well, it’s not
a bad thing to be cousin to a millionaire.”
“How do you know that he is a millionaire?” inquired the young
man coolly.
“Oh, I put it to him, and he did not deny the soft impeachment. He
has just paid a top price for a couple of weight-carrying polo ponies
—I expect old Byng stuck it on.”
“The fact of buying polo ponies goes for nothing. If that were a
test, you might call nearly every subaltern in India a millionaire,”
rejoined Jervis with a smile.
Colonel Sladen merely stared at the speaker with an air of solemn
contempt, threw the stump of his cheroot into a bush of heliotrope,
and, turning once more to Honor, said—
“You see all our smartest young men down there, Miss Gordon—at
your feet in one sense, and they will be there in another, before long.
I can tell you all about them—it’s a good thing for a strange young
lady to know how the land lies, and get the straight tip, and know
what are trumps.”
“What do you mean?” asked Honor, frigidly.
“Oh, come now,” with an odious chuckle, “you know what I mean. I
want to point you out some of the people, and, as I am the oldest
resident, you could not be in better hands. There’s Captain Billings of
the Bays, the fellow with the yellow cap, playing with Miss Clover, the
prettiest girl here——”
He paused, to see if the shot told, or if the statement would be
challenged; but no.
“That is Toby Joy, who acts and dances and ought to be in a
music-hall, instead of in the service. There is Jenkins of the
Crashers, the thin man with a red belt; very rich. His father made the
money in pigs or pills—not what you’d call aristocratic, but he is well
gilded. Then there is Alston of the Gray Rifles—good-looking chap,
eldest son; and Howard of the Queen’s Palfreys—old family, heaps
of tin; but he drinks. Now, which of these young men are you going
to set your cap at?”
“None of them,” she answered with pale dignity.
“Oh, come! I’ll lay you five to one you are married by this time next
year.”
“No—not by this time five years.”
“Nonsense! Then what did you come out for, my dear young lady?
You won’t throw dust in the eyes of an old ‘Qui hye’ like me, who has
seen hundreds of new spins in his day? I suppose you think you
have come out to be a comfort to your aunt and uncle? Not a bit of it!
You have come out to be a comfort to some young man. Take a
friend’s advice,” lowering his voice to a more confidential key, “and
keep your eye steadily on the millionaire.”
“Colonel Sladen,” her lips trembling with passion, her eyes blazing
with wrath, “I suppose you are joking, and think all this very funny. It
does not amuse me in the least; on the contrary, I—I think it is a
pitiable thing to find a man of your age so wanting in good taste, and
talking such vulgar nonsense!”
“Do you really?” in a bantering tone, and not a wit abashed—in
fact, rather pleased than otherwise. “No sense of respect for your
elders! Ho, ho, ho! No sense of humour, eh? Why, I believe you are
a regular young fire-ship! We shall be having the whole place in a
blaze—a fire-Brande, that’s a joke, eh?—not bad. I see Tombs
beckoning; he has got up a rubber at last, thank goodness! Sorry to
tear myself away. Think over my advice. Au revoir,” and he departed,
chuckling.
“Did you ever know such a detestable man?” she exclaimed,
turning to Jervis with tears of anger glittering in her eyes.
“Well, once or twice it did occur to me to heave him over the
palings—if I was able.”
Honor burst into an involuntary laugh, as she thought of their
comparative weight.
“He did it on purpose to draw you, and he has riled you properly.”
“To think of his being the husband of such a woman as Mrs.
Sladen! Oh, I detest him! Imagine his having the insolence to make
out that every girl who comes to India is nothing but a scheming,
mercenary, fortune-hunter! I am glad he pointed out all the rich men!”
“May I ask why?” inquired her somewhat startled companion.
“Because, of course, I shall take the greatest possible care never
to know one of them.”
“So poverty, for once, will have its innings? You will not taboo the
younger sons?”
“No; only good matches and great catches,” with vicious
emphasis. “Hateful expressions! Mr. Jervis, I give you fair warning
that, if you were rich, I would never speak to you again. You are
laughing!”
He certainly was laughing. As he leant his head down on his arms,
his shoulders shook unmistakably.
“Perhaps,” in an icy tone, “when your amusement has subsided,
you will be good enough to take me back to my aunt!”
“Oh, Miss Gordon!” suddenly straightening himself, and
confronting her with a pair of suspiciously moist eyes, “I must have
seemed extremely rude, and I humbly beg your pardon. I was
laughing at—at my own thoughts, and your wrathful indignation was
such that—that——”