Andrew Zissos

Ovid's Narcissus ( Met. 3.339-510): Echoes of Oedipus

OVID’S TALES OF Echo and Narcissus, while mutually enhancing in their magnificently suggestive symmetries,1 have long been considered an oddity in their larger narrative context.2 Otis, for instance, is not alone in feeling that they are quite “extraneous” to the Theban milieu which dominates this particular stretch of the Metamorphoses, since they seem only superficially linked to the tragic city through the figure of Tiresias.3 Some scholars have tried to solve the problem of their inclusion in Ovid’s “Thebaid” (3.1–4.603) by pointing to thematic correspondences that connect “Narcissus and Echo” to other episodes in the narrative vicinity, such as fatal love,4 the intervention of a vengeful divinity,5 or the problematization of sight.6 Such sequences of thematic patterns, though, are a rather ubiquitous “surface phenomenon” which can be traced in various ways throughout the entire poem, and which hardly ever explain Ovid’s poetry in and of themselves.7 Thus, such the-