of
self-love. His pursuit, too, of his own image, ever retiring from his
embrace, strongly resembles the little reality that exists in many of
those pleasures which mankind so eagerly pursue.

Pausanias, in his Boeotica, somewhat varies the story. He tells us
that Narcissus having lost his sister, whom he tenderly loved, and who
resembled him very much, and was his constant companion in the chase,
thought, on seeing himself one day in a fountain, that it was the
shade of his lost sister, and, thereupon, pined away and died of
grief. According to him, the fountain was near a village called
Donacon, in the country of the Thespians. Pausanias regards the
account of his change into the flower which bears his name as a mere
fiction, since Pamphus says that Proserpina, when carried away, long
before the time of Narcissus, gathered that flower in the fields of
Enna; and that the same flower was sacred to her. Persons sacrificing
to the Furies, or Eumenides, used to wear chaplets made of the
Narcissus, because that flower commonly grew about graves and
sepulchres.

Tiresias, who predicted the untoward fate of Narcissus, was, as we are
informed by Apollodorus, the son of Evenus and Chariclo, and was the
most renowned soothsayer of his time. He lost his life by drinking of
the fountain of Telphusa when he was overheated; or, as some suppose,
through the unwholesome quality of the water. As he lived to a great
age, and became blind towards the end of his life, the story, which
Ovid mentions, was invented respecting him. Another version of it was,
that he lost his sight, by reason of his having seen Minerva while
bathing. This story was very probably based either upon the fact that
he had composed a Treatise upon the Animal Functions of the Sexes, or
that he had promulgated the doctrine that the stars had not only souls
(a common opinion in those times), but also that they were of
different sexes. He is supposed to have lived about 1200 years before
the Christian era.

FABLE VIII. [III.511-733]

Pentheus ridicules the predictions of Tiresias; and not only forbids
his people to worship Bacchus, who had just entered Greece in triumph,
but even commands them to capture him, and to bring him into his
presence. Under the form of Acoetes, one of his companions, Bacchus
suffers that indignity, and relates to Pentheus the wonders which the
God had wrought. The