According to the best-known version of the story, by Ovid, Narcissus rejected all advances, eventually falling in love with a reflection in a pool of water, tragically not realizing its similarity, entranced by it.

In some versions, he beat his breast purple in agony at being kept apart from this reflected love, and in his place sprouted a flower bearing his name.

This quality in extreme contributes to the definition of narcissistic personality disorder, a psychiatric condition marked by grandiosity, excessive need for attention and admiration, and an inability to empathize.

Pliny the Elder wrote that the plant was named for its fragrance (ναρκάω narkao, "I grow numb"), not the mythological character.

In Ovid's narrative, the framing revolves around a test of the prophetic abilities of Tiresias, an individual who has experienced life as both a man and a woman.

In another similar version by Ovid, it Echo kept the goddess Juno occupied with stories while Zeus's lovers escaped Mount Olympus.

Meanwhile, Echo spied Narcissus, separated from his hunting friends, and she became immediately infatuated, following him, waiting for him to speak so her feelings might be heard.

Heartbroken, Echo wasted away, losing her body amidst lonely glens, until nothing of her but her chaste verbal ability remained.

[8][9] An earlier version ascribed to the poet Parthenius of Nicaea, composed around 50 BC, was discovered in 2004 by Dr Benjamin Henry among the Oxyrhynchus papyri at Oxford.

[12][8] A century later the travel writer Pausanias recorded a novel variant of the story, in which Narcissus falls in love with his twin sister rather than himself.

The myth of Narcissus has inspired artists for at least two thousand years, even before the Roman poet Ovid featured a version in book III of his Metamorphoses.

This was followed in more recent centuries by other poets (e.g. Keats and Alfred Edward Housman) and painters (Caravaggio, Poussin, Turner, Dalí (see Metamorphosis of Narcissus), and Waterhouse).

On Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen's A Fada Oriana, the eponymous protagonist is punished with mortality for abandoning her duties in order to stare at herself in the surface of a river.

Naomi Iizuka's play Polaroid Stories, a contemporary rewrite of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, features Narcissus as a character.

Sculptors such as Paul Dubois, John Gibson, Henri-Léon Gréber, Benvenuto Cellini and Hubert Netzer have sculpted Narcissus.