Echo and Narcissus Echo and Narcissus Echo and Narcissus is a myth from Ovid's "Metamorphoses", a Latin mythological epic from the Augustan Age. The introduction of the myth of the mountain nymph Echo into the story of Narcissus, the beautiful youth who rejected sexuality and falls in love with his own reflection, appears to have been Ovid's invention. Ovid's version influenced the presentation of the myth in later Western art and literature. The myth of the goddess is told in Book III of the "Metamorphoses", and tells the story of a "talkative nymph" whom the goddess Venus admires for her magnificent voice and
Greek love the male form, most notably the "David", but his great-nephew edited his poems to diminish references to his love for Tommaso Cavalieri. By contrast, the French Renaissance essayist Montaigne, whose view of love and friendship was humanist and rationalist, rejected "Greek love" as a model in his essay "De l'amitié" ("On Friendship"); it did not accord with the social needs of his own time, he wrote, because it involved "a necessary disparity in age and such a difference in the lovers' functions". Because Montaigne saw friendship as a relationship between equals in the context of political liberty, this inequality diminished