ECHO. A sound reflected from an obstacle. Personified in later Greek mythology, as a mountain nymph or Oread (not before Euripides). In Ovid (Metam. III., 356 ff.) she of fended Hera by keeping her talking and thus preventing her spying on an amour of Zeus; in punishment, she was deprived of speech, save the power to repeat the last words of another. A hopeless love for Narcissus (q.v.) made her fade away to a voice only. In Longus (III., 23), she rejected Pan's advances; he thereupon drove the shepherds mad, and they tore her in pieces; Earth buried her limbs and allowed them still her power of song.
See Roscher's Lexikon, art. ECHO.