In Book 3 of the Metamorphoses we have the story of Narcissus, enamoured aphrodisiacally by his own image reflected in a pool. The image of himself is so clearly defined, the lips move so appealingly in response to his own pleas, that he is ready to succumb amorously. Then he realizes the truth, that he and his reflection are one, his own self, his very identity. And he longs to free himself from himself, to escape the duplication. By this imaginative and symbolical mythological design, Ovid is unquestionably stressing the erotic passion itself, the frenzied ecstasy to detach oneself from one’s own being, the clamor of man against his fettered self and his erotic agonies.
A potion may appear in various guises. A vision of beauty can itself act like an enriched, stimulating philtre. The enraptured glance sends its erotic pronouncement to the enraptured heart, and the potion is virtually consummated. So, it seemed to Ovid, was the strange episode involving the sculptor Pygmalion:
Pygmalion loathing their lascivious life,
Abhorr’d all womanhood, but most a wife:
So single chose to live, and shunn’d to wed,
Well pleas’d to want a consort of his bed.
Yet fearing idleness, the nurse of ill,
In sculpture exercis’d his happy skill;
And carv’d in iv’ry such a maid, so fair,
As nature could not with his art compare,