Narcissus Beyond Vanity: Echo, Ameinias, and Desire

I recently found myself rereading the story of Narcissus as told in Book Three of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Completed around 8 CE, this Latin epic gathers and reshapes stories of transformation from the Greco-Roman world. The myth of Narcissus has itself been reimagined countless times, becoming one of the most recognizable stories inherited from classical antiquity.

The familiar version is often reduced to a simple warning: Narcissus is so self-absorbed that he falls in love with his own reflection. Ovid’s account, however, is more precise—and more unsettling. Narcissus is a beautiful young hunter who scorns everyone who desires him. After one rejected admirer prays that Narcissus might experience love without ever possessing the beloved, Nemesis answers the prayer.

Narcissus finds his image a pool of water.
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. "Narcissus at the Spring ; after Parmigianino" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1525.

At an untouched spring, Narcissus encounters his reflection and becomes transfixed by it. At first, he mistakes the image for another person. Even after recognizing himself, he cannot free himself from his desire. He remains beside the water, gradually wastes away, and dies. When the nymphs come to prepare his body for burial, they discover in its place the flower that bears his name.

This is why the myth cannot be explained entirely as a warning against excessive self-love. Narcissus does not demonstrate healthy love for himself; he desires an image that can neither answer nor exist apart from him. He is made to experience the same unrequited longing that he inflicted upon others. The story is therefore not only about vanity. It is also about failed reciprocity, the difference between an image and a person, and the destructive loop created when desire cannot recognize another human being.

One of the most intriguing discoveries to emerge from my latest reading was the story of Ameinias, a young man who persistently pursued Narcissus. An important distinction must be made, however: Ameinias does not appear in Ovid’s version of the myth. His story belongs to an alternate Greek account preserved in Conon’s Narrations, a collection composed around the same period as Ovid’s poem.

In Conon’s version, many young men desire Narcissus, but Ameinias remains especially devoted to him. Narcissus rejects Ameinias and cruelly sends him a sword. In despair, Ameinias uses the weapon to take his own life at Narcissus’s doorway, calling upon a god to avenge him. Narcissus later sees his reflection in a spring and recognizes his suffering as a just punishment for the pain he caused Ameinias. Unable to endure his impossible desire, Narcissus kills himself, and the narcissus flower springs from the earth where his blood was spilled.

Placing Ovid’s and Conon’s accounts beside one another changes our understanding of the myth. In Ovid, Echo can only return another person’s words, while Narcissus can respond only to his own image. They are two figures trapped in failed forms of communication. In Conon, the tragedy is sharpened by Ameinias’s rejection and plea for retribution. Both versions turn rejection into a structure of return: the suffering Narcissus dismisses in others eventually comes back to him as an unbearable desire of his own.

This is one reason rereading ancient myths can be so rewarding. Familiarity sometimes flattens them into a single moral or supposedly definitive version. Greek and Roman myths, however, developed organically through competing traditions, local stories, poetry, art, and retellings. Their variations are not mistakes to be eliminated; they are part of what gives mythology its richness.

For teachers interested in exploring these variations with students, I created a Narcissus and Echo teaching resource for middle and high school ELA and Humanities classrooms. The myth can also be paired with this critical-thinking and movement activity, which asks students to take a position on questions such as whether Narcissus was justified in rejecting Echo and what the myth suggests about romantic relationships and unrequited love.

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A Small Act of Care: Making Eggs for Someone You Love

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An Egg for you
(image credit: Greig Roselli)

Today I made eggs for a friend, and something about it made me feel good. Not simply because I know how to boil an egg, but because I took my time with it. I put the eggs in the water and cooked them just enough so that the yolks stayed soft and tender, not chalky, and the whites were silky and smooth.

Then I sat there and peeled them—three eggs, one by one.

I gave one to my sister and the other two to my two children.

And somehow, that was enough. There was something comforting about making something simple and giving it away.

But I realized afterward that I hadn’t kept an egg for myself.

So next time I make eggs with you, I’ll make enough for both of us.

And we’ll sit down and eat them together.

Poem in Free Verse: I Stood by a River Tree

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Review: Odysseus Comes Home, But He’s Still Lost

Review: Odysseus Comes Home, But He’s Still Lost

By Greig Roselli | Stones of Erasmus

Spoilers ahead for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and, I suppose, for a story that has been circulating for nearly three thousand years.

“Odysseus makes it back to Ithaca. I’m just not convinced Christopher Nolan lets him come home.”

I saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey last night with a friend and his son.

Beforehand, I even said something reassuring: “That’s cool. Y’all will like the story. It has these deep, familiar themes.”

Maybe I should have done my homework.

Nolan’s take on Homer is legitimate Odyssey—the bones of the ancient poem are certainly there—but this is far from the comforting version of the story I had carried into the theater. I expected Athena mentoring young Telemachus. I expected the clever “man of many wiles,” fighting monsters and gods as he struggles toward Ithaca.

What I got instead was something considerably more unsettling: an Odyssey about cognitive distortion, psychological damage, war, memory, and the frightening possibility that a person can return home without ever really coming home.

And Nolan tells us almost immediately what kind of movie this will be.

The Trojan Horse in the Sand

The film does not begin with Odysseus wandering the sea.

It begins with the Trojan Horse.

We see that iconic instrument of Troy’s destruction lodged in the landscape like some enormous effigy—a monument to the violence that has already happened and to everything that will follow.

I wasn’t expecting it.

In fact, strangely enough, I wasn’t expecting to see the Trojan Horse at all.

But its presence makes sense because Nolan is interested not merely in Odysseus’s adventures after Troy but in what Troy has done to him. The war isn’t prologue. The war follows him.

That distinction matters.

This is where Nolan’s adaptation departs most dramatically from the Odyssey I thought I was going to see.

I still have enormous affection for the 1997 television miniseries starring Armand Assante. As a straightforward screen adaptation of Homer’s adventures, I may even prefer it. Nolan is after something else.

His Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, is not simply a wanderer desperately trying to find his way home.

He is a man who may no longer know what “home” means.

Odysseus Comes Home. Does It Matter?

That is the film’s most disturbing idea.

Of course Odysseus eventually returns to Ithaca. That’s the story. Homer told us that part a few millennia ago.

But watch Damon’s face when Odysseus finally looks into Penelope’s eyes.

Has this man actually returned?

I don’t think so.

He seems almost as lost standing before Penelope as he was when he first left his family and sailed toward Troy.

That changes the meaning of the entire journey.

Homer’s Odyssey is obsessed with nostos—homecoming. Nolan seems more interested in asking whether nostos is psychologically possible after a person has been transformed by violence.

And that is where this ancient Greek story begins to feel startlingly American.

Nolan’s Odysseus looks to me less like an ancient king than a modern man disenchanted with the promises that were supposed to organize his life: war, masculinity, marriage, heroism, status, home.

He gets Ithaca back.

He gets Penelope back.

He gets the palace back.

But does he get Odysseus back?

I’m not convinced.

Circe Without the Comfort of Hermes

The same psychological unease runs through Samantha Morton’s remarkable Circe.

In Homer, Circe transforms Odysseus’s men into pigs, but the episode also gives us divine intervention: Hermes provides Odysseus with moly, the magical herb that protects him from Circe’s enchantment.

Nolan strips away much of that reassuring mythological machinery.

Morton’s Circe is terrifying precisely because she doesn’t feel comfortably mythological. She feels damaged, dangerous, unpredictable—someone whose capacity to hurt others seems bound up with her own distorted relationship to the world.

Morton plays her with gasping accuracy.

It is one of several moments when Nolan makes the supernatural feel less like fantasy than psychological horror.

The gods and monsters haven’t exactly disappeared.

But somehow the humans have become more frightening.

And Then There Is Penelope

Anne Hathaway’s Penelope may be the character that most startled me.

Homer’s Penelope is one of Western literature’s great figures of fidelity and cunning. She delays the suitors by weaving Laertes’ burial shroud during the day and secretly unraveling it at night. She survives through patience, intelligence, and an extraordinary ability to control what others know.

Nolan gives us something colder.

Hathaway retains Penelope’s intelligence and regal authority, but this Penelope seems deeply resentful—of her circumstances, of the men surrounding her, perhaps even of the husband whose absence has defined her life.

There is a monarchical aloofness to her.

At moments she seems less concerned with the sentimental preservation of marriage than with power, status, survival, and maintaining control over Ithaca.

Even her relationship with Telemachus carries an edge I wasn’t prepared for.

And then there is Tom Holland’s Telemachus.

I’ve rarely seen the boy portrayed as quite this feckless.

That may sound like criticism, but I think it’s intentional.

Homer’s Telemachus begins the poem immature and uncertain, but Athena pushes him toward adulthood. Nolan gives us a young man who seems almost painfully ill-equipped to inherit the damaged world his parents have made for him.

The old generation went to Troy.

The next generation gets the consequences.

That’s a pretty bleak inheritance.

Homer Without Homework

Here’s the good news: you do not need to know Homer to see this movie.

In some ways, knowing Homer may make the experience stranger.

I walked into the theater carrying Athena, Hermes, nostos, Penelope’s loom, Telemachus’s coming-of-age story, and decades of other adaptations in my head.

Nolan kept knocking those expectations sideways.

Someone encountering the story fresh may simply experience an enormous, brutal, strange adventure about a soldier trying to return to his family.

Someone who knows the poem may find themselves constantly negotiating the distance between Homer and Nolan.

Both experiences are worthwhile.

And My God, Look at It

Whatever reservations I have about Nolan’s interpretation, visually The Odyssey is extraordinary.

This is a movie made for enormous screens.

The landscapes don’t merely illustrate Homer. They make you understand how landscapes might have generated Homeric storytelling in the first place.

Sea.

Rock.

Dust.

Islands.

Palaces.

Bodies against enormous horizons.

There are moments when you can almost imagine Homer—or generations of singers whose stories eventually became Homer—looking upon something like these same Mediterranean landscapes and turning geography into myth.

Even the costumes have an unnerving physicality. Telemachus’s almost boyish armor seems particularly appropriate: a young man dressed for a heroic tradition he hasn’t grown into yet.

Nothing feels clean.

Nothing feels particularly safe.

And very little feels like the sanitized Greece of a museum gift shop.

Nolan’s Mediterranean is gorgeous because it is indifferent to the people struggling across it.

So, Should You See

The Odyssey?

Yes.

But not because Christopher Nolan has finally given us the definitive screen version of Homer.

I don’t think he has.

See it because Nolan has taken one of Western literature’s foundational stories about coming home and turned it into a movie about people who no longer know whether home can save them.

That makes The Odyssey feel less like a revival of an ancient epic than a snapshot of the world in 2026.

War doesn’t end when somebody announces that the war is over.

Families don’t simply resume where they left off.

Children inherit consequences they didn’t create.

People hurt one another and call it survival.

And sometimes the person who finally reaches home discovers that the most difficult distance remaining is the one between himself and the people waiting for him.

Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut once held an uncomfortable mirror up to marriage, desire, privilege, and the anxieties lurking beneath an apparently stable world.

Nolan is doing something similarly unsettling here, only with Homer.

The result isn’t always the Odyssey I wanted.

Maybe that’s the point.

Odysseus makes it back to Ithaca.

I’m just not convinced Christopher Nolan lets him come home.

Rating: ★★★★☆

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is now playing in theaters. See it on the largest, highest-fidelity screen you reasonably can. This is one movie where the scale really does matter.

How to Write a Goodbye Letter to Depression: A Recovery Writing Exercise

Saying Goodbye to the Voice That Told You to Disappear

Depression often speaks in commands: withdraw, stay quiet, numb yourself, trust no one, and disappear before anyone has the chance to hurt you.

At first, isolation may feel protective. It can create distance from conflict, anger, rejection, and painful memories. Yet the same walls that appear to keep danger out can also separate us from the people, routines, and sources of support that help recovery take root.

Writing a goodbye letter to depression is one way to make that hidden conversation visible. The purpose is not to pretend that depression can be dismissed through willpower or a few forceful sentences. Rather, the exercise allows a person to identify depression’s language, confront the coping patterns it encouraged, and reclaim authority over the story.

A goodbye letter may include grief, anger, humor, accusation, insight, and hope. It can name unhealthy attempts to numb pain without turning those choices into moral failures. It can also acknowledge what has helped: therapy, trusted friends, family members, recovery communities, creative work, and the decision to ask for help.

In the following letter, Milo addresses depression as an unwanted tenant who has occupied too much space for too long. Drawing upon the language and mythology of The Wizard of Oz and Wicked, Milo transforms a private struggle into an eviction notice. Depression is placed on notice: it may have influenced the past, but it will no longer be permitted to speak with unquestioned authority.

Goodbye Letter

Dear Depression:

I withdraw to feel better. To numb.

I isolate to protect myself from those who can—or could—hurt me. To prevent myself from experiencing triggers. To prevent myself from feeling anger.

But anger is on the opposite end of the emotional spectrum from depression. That is something you never told me. It is something I had to discover for myself.

To feel better, I had to seek help from other people: my friends, family members, confidants, and therapist.

Had you told me the true source of my sadness, perhaps I could have begun healing sooner. But you did not. Instead, I sank further and further into depression without recognizing the damage it was causing to my body and mind.

I searched for unhealthy ways to cope. At different points, I tried to numb myself rather than confront what I was feeling.

Those choices were hurting me. They were slowly eating away at my body and soul.

But I have learned that depression has a language. It has its own vocabulary.

I have been in therapy for fifteen years, and I am only now becoming aware of how much damage you have done to my body and mind. I hate that about you.

I am expressly asking you to vacate these premises.

Be gone.

You have no power here—just as Glinda tells the Wicked Witch.

But even Elphaba is a victim of isolation. We share that in common. Elphaba, however, uses her rage to advocate for the Animals of Oz.

I have been obsessed with the lore of Oz all my life.

Now I understand why.

So I ask you to depart. I am choosing peace, recovery, connection, and the tools that help me remain well. You are no longer permitted to convince me that isolation and numbness are the only ways to survive.

Consider this document your official eviction notice.

—Milo

A Note on Recovery: Reflective writing can support healing, but it is not a replacement for therapy, medical care, or a relapse-prevention plan. A goodbye letter may be most useful when shared with a trusted therapist, counselor, recovery professional, or support person.

If you are in crisis call or text 988.