Echo

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A call goes out across a gorge and a moment later comes back, thinned, missing its beginning, carrying only the tail of itself. The Greeks gave that returning sound a name before they gave it a story: ēchō, the answer the rock makes. The nymph is what stands behind the word — a being who is at once a person with a history and the bare acoustic fact of a valley that talks back. Echo lives on that seam. Everything told about her is an attempt to say how a voice came to be loose in the world without a body to own it.

Echo, oil on canvas by Alexandre Cabanel, 1874, Metropolitan Museum of Art — Alexandre Cabanel, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

She is an Oread, a nymph of the mountains and their hollow places, and her defining condition is a deprivation: she can no longer speak first, cannot stay quiet while another speaks, and can only give back the close of what is said to her. The name and the affliction are the same thing seen from two sides. To explain the sound, a story has to take a speaking creature and strip her of everything in speech except repetition — and once that is done, the creature is the echo, and the line between myth and physics dissolves.

The Ovidian portrait

Her fullest and most influential portrait comes late, in the third book of the Metamorphoses of the Roman poet Ovid, written around the turn of the Common Era. There she is fully a nymph before she is a sound. Echo had a tongue, and a dangerous use for it: when Jupiter lay with the mountain nymphs, she would keep his wife Juno busy with long, knowing talk so that the others could scatter and escape down the slopes before the queen of heaven arrived. When Juno understood that the chatter was a screen, she struck at exactly the instrument of the offense. She left Echo the power of speech — but only the smallest part of it, and the most servile: never to open her mouth first, never to hold her peace when spoken to, and only ever to return the last of what she hears. The punishment fits the crime with cruel neatness. The tongue that had filled time with cover-talk is reduced to an appendage of other people’s sentences.

Roman fresco of Narcissus and Echo from Pompeii, first century CE, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

What follows turns the curse into a tragedy of love. Echo sees the beautiful youth Narcissus, hunting alone, and is seized with desire — but she cannot declare it. She can only wait for him to speak and hand his own words back, hoping they will mean, in her mouth, what they did not mean in his. When he calls out, separated from his companions, Is anyone here?, she answers here. Come! he cries, and come! she cries, stepping from the trees with her arms open. He recoils. In Ovid’s wording he would sooner die than give her power over him; she is left to fold his final refusal back at him as a last, useless tenderness. Spurned, she withdraws into caves and lonely glens, and shame and longing waste her. Her body thins; her flesh dries away; her bones, the poem says, harden into the shape of stone; and at last nothing is left of her but the voice and, by some accounts, a scatter of rock among the hills. She is heard by all and seen by none. The metamorphosis is the point: the punishment that took her speech down to repetition finishes by taking her body away entirely, leaving the repetition pure.

Echo and Narcissus, oil on canvas by John William Waterhouse, 1903, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool — John William Waterhouse, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Ovid sets her, deliberately, beside the youth she could not reach. In the same stretch of Book 3, Narcissus bends to a spring and falls in love with the face that looks back at him, and wastes in turn for a reflection that can only ever return his own gaze. The two are built as answering images — a sound that can only repeat and a face that can only mirror; a love that gives back words and a love that gives back a likeness. Each is trapped in a self that comes back to it without ever becoming other. The pairing is so exact that later readers have found it hard to think of either figure alone, though the soul-lost-in-its-own- reflection reading belongs properly to Narcissus and his pool, not to her. Echo’s register is the spoken and the heard: the returned word, not the mirrored shape.

Echo and Narcissus, oil on canvas by Nicolas Poussin, c. 1630, Musée du Louvre, Paris — Nicolas Poussin, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The older, grimmer strand

The Ovidian version is the one most readers carry, but it is not the only one, and almost certainly not the oldest. A separate tradition keeps Echo with no Narcissus in it at all. Its fullest surviving form is in the Greek pastoral romance Daphnis and Chloe of Longus, probably composed in the second century of the Common Era, where the tale is told as one of three inset myths, each about a musical girl, an act of violence, and a transformation that saves the music. In Longus (the episode falls at 3.23), Echo is a girl reared by the nymphs and taught by the Muses to play and sing on every instrument, who keeps her maidenhood and refuses every suitor, human and divine alike. The goat-god Pan wants her and cannot have her, and is galled as much by her music as by her beauty. In revenge he drives the shepherds and goatherds of the country into madness, and they fall on her and tear her apart like dogs, scattering her limbs — still singing — across the earth. The Earth, in favor to the nymphs, hides the fragments and keeps their music intact, so that the scattered remains go on imitating every sound, as the living girl once imitated the Muses. It is a savage aetiology, with none of the comedy of unrequited love that Ovid gives the figure: here the echo is what is left after a dismemberment, the indestructible song of a body that was destroyed for refusing a god.

In this strand Echo is the object of Pan’s pursuit, and the violence is his: the dismemberment is ordered by the god whose love she refused, carried out by mortals he has maddened. The pattern recurs in the inset tales around it in Longus — a girl gifted in music, a god rebuffed, a metamorphosis that destroys the body but rescues the song — and it places Echo among the unwilling beloveds of the wild rather than among the comic victims of Ovidian desire. There is no flower here, no spring, no answering youth; there is a singer silenced into pure singing, a voice that survives precisely what was done to end it.

That two such different stories — a curse and a courtship in one, a pursuit and a murder in the other — could both end in the same disembodied voice tells something about how the figure works. The voice answering from the rocks is the fixed point; the narrative is variable, attached and reattached to explain it. The strand with Pan circulated in Greek before Ovid built the pairing with Narcissus in Latin, and the mythographers preserved more than one shape for her besides. The figure is older and more various than the single famous episode that fixed her in the European imagination.

The name that became a noun

What is unusual about Echo among the figures of myth is that her name passed out of story and into the ordinary vocabulary of the language. The Greek ēchō is the common word for the returned sound, and in this case the noun is the nymph: the word that any speaker of Greek used for the answer a cliff makes was also the name of a person whose fate had been to become exactly that. The relation runs deeper than the chance that a god or a flower lends a name to a plant or a place. Here the abstraction and the character are not two things loosely joined; the story is a narrative unfolding of the word, and the word is the story compressed to a single sound. When the term descended through Latin into the modern languages — and into the later, wholly physical science of reflected sound and, in the twentieth century, of sonar and radar ranging — the nymph went silently along inside it, so that the most technical use of the word still carries, etymologically, a girl who could only answer.

Echo as an image of language

Ancient and later writers were drawn to her as something more than a tale, because the condition the story gives her is also a description of how speech behaves. She is the limiting case of language: utterance with the originating power removed, sound that can only give back what it has already received. As an allegory she stood readily for repetition itself, for imitation, for memory — which returns the past in a thinner form — and for the diminished trace any thing leaves as it recedes. Poets found in her a figure for their own art when that art consists of answering, repeating, and quoting: a voice that lives by giving back the words of others, and that can, in the giving back, change their sense. The mechanism the curse imposes — return only the close of what is heard — is also the engine of irony, for the fragment given back, severed from its opening, can mean the opposite of the whole. Ovid had already exploited this: when Echo answers Narcissus, she means the words tenderly that he meant only as a call into the empty wood. The figure thus carries within it a small theory of how meaning shifts when words are detached from the one who first spoke them.

Echo, oil on canvas by Talbot Hughes, 1900 — Talbot Hughes, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

This made Echo a favored device of later verse. Renaissance and Baroque poets developed the echo-poem, a form in which a speaker’s questions are answered by a hidden respondent who returns only the syllables at the line’s end, turning those returned fragments into oracular or witty replies — the technique surfaces in pastoral, in masque, and in religious lyric, where the answering voice can be made to speak as conscience or as God. The figure became, in short, a working piece of poetic machinery, not merely an image to be alluded to.

All of this is a way of taking the myth, and a productive one, but it is not a claim the myth itself makes. The texts report only a punishment, a love, a refusal, and a wasting; the readings lay over them interests the stories never state. The modern coinage of “echoism” — proposed as the self-effacing counterpart to narcissism, the disposition to live only by answering others — belongs entirely to twentieth- and twenty-first-century psychology, and is best held apart from the ancient figure even as it draws its name from her.

She is kindred, in her thin partition between a person and a thing, to the other nymphs whose names mark a single function of the world — Maia among the mountain Pleiades, Callisto turned to the bear of the night sky, Lethe whose waters are forgetting itself. Each is a being and the thing the being became, and in each the boundary is thin to the point of vanishing. Echo’s distinction among them is that her phenomenon is answering: she is the only one whose whole nature is to respond, never to begin.

Texts and scholarship

The standard critical text of the Metamorphoses is R. J. Tarrant’s Oxford Classical Text (2004), which freshly collated the manuscripts and drew on the twelfth-century witnesses more fully than its predecessor, W. S. Anderson’s Teubner. The Loeb Classical Library edition, originally translated by Frank Justus Miller and revised by G. P. Goold (Harvard University Press, 1977–84), gives the most widely used English facing text. The Echo and Narcissus episode occupies Book 3, roughly lines 339–510; A. S. Kline’s freely available translation is hosted at Poetry in Translation. The non-Ovidian strand survives in Longus, conveniently read in the Loeb Daphnis and Chloe, where the Echo aetiology stands at 3.23, and in scattered later mythographers; the standard modern reference handbook is Robin Hard’s Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology (2004), a rewriting of H. J. Rose, which gathers the variants.

The figure has also drawn a literature of its own. John Hollander’s The Figure of Echo (University of California Press, 1981) made Echo the governing image for a whole theory of poetic allusion, treating quotation and intertextual response as species of the returned voice. Joseph Loewenstein’s Responsive Readings: Versions of Echo in Pastoral, Epic, and the Jonsonian Masque (Yale University Press, 1984) traced the figure’s long career in Renaissance and later poetry, where the literal echo-poem became a recognized form. In a different key, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay “Echo” (New Literary History 24.1, 1993, pp. 17–43) reread the myth through and against psychoanalysis, recovering Echo from her subordination to Narcissus and asking what it means to be the one who can only answer. Across these readings the nymph keeps her ancient role: she is the part of speech that gives back, made into a person and then unmade into a voice.

A voice without a body, answering from the rocks, is older than any of the stories told to account for it.

→ Related: Callisto · Maia · Lethe · Narcissus · Pan · Juno · Jupiter