A talkative mountain nymph whom Juno stripped of independent speech so that she could repeat only the last words of others — who loved Narcissus, was scorned, and wasted away until nothing remained but her voice among the hills.1
Echo once possessed a form and spoke as freely as she listened — until Juno, tired of being delayed on the mountains while Echo chatted with Jove's mistresses and let many a nymph escape the goddess' wrath, condemned her to babble and repeat the words once spoken, over and over. From that hour she could answer but not begin speech.2
She saw Narcissus hunting and loved him. When he called Who is here? she answered Here! and ran to embrace him — but he fled, crying that he would rather die than be caressed by her. Echo wasted to voice and bone among the hills, hiding in caves; yet when Narcissus at last pined for his own reflection and cried that he had destroyed himself, she still answered in grief.3
The story lives on the Metamorphoses shelf as `narcissus-echo`, where Tiresias' prophecy and Nemesis' answer frame the boy's fate; Echo's own metamorphosis is the reduction to repeating sound rather than a change of species. Pausanias knew the spring at Thespiae where Narcissus looked into the water, but the nymph's punishment belongs to Ovid's Juno on the highlands.4
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
