In Ovid and related accounts Narcissus is the son of the river-god Cephissus and the nymph Liriope. Nonnus instead makes him the child of the lunar goddess Selene and her mortal lover Endymion. Local tradition places him at Thespiae in Boeotia.

Ovid frames the tale with Tiresias's prophecy to Liriope: the boy would live long only if he never "came to know himself." In his sixteenth year Narcissus, lost while hunting, was followed by the Oread Echo, whom Juno had punished so that she could only repeat the last words of others. Unable to declare her love freely, Echo was scorned; she wasted away until only her voice remained among the hills.

Nemesis heard the prayer of a rejected suitor and led Narcissus to a clear spring. Mistaking his reflection for another youth, he fell in love with the image and could not leave the pool. In Ovid he finally wastes away; the flower narcissus springs up in his place. Some versions have him beat his breast until it bruises purple, coloring the flower's center.

Earlier or alternate tellings omit Echo. A concise Greek version ascribed to Parthenius (rediscovered among the Oxyrhynchus papyri) has Narcissus conceive love for his own form in a spring and shed his blood into the flower. Conon names a rejected suitor Ameinias who kills himself and curses Narcissus. Pausanias records a rationalizing local story in which Narcissus mourns a deceased twin sister and finds consolation in his likeness in the water.

Ancient tellings stress illusion, self-recognition, cruelty punished, or grief. Modern psychology took the name for narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder; later psychoanalytic readers have also questioned a simple equation of the myth with clinical narcissism.

The myth has inspired visual art (Caravaggio, Poussin, Waterhouse, Dalí, and others), poetry from Keats to Wilde, and music including Britten's "Narcissus" among the Six Metamorphoses after Ovid.