Oread
Spirit KingMountain Nymph of Greek Mythology
The Oread (Greek Oreias, plural Oreiades, English Oread) is the mountain nymph (Greek nymphe) of Greek mythology, who dwells in mountains and caves, frequently depicted as a companion of the hunting goddess Artemis — the decisive canonical iconographic figure of the Greek-mythological mountain spirit. The etymology derives from the Greek oros ('mountain'), and within the classification of nymphs — Naiad (freshwater), Oceanid (ocean), Nereid (salt sea), Dryad (tree), Oread (mountain) — the Oread is the decisive canon of the mountain. The decisive textual canon is the origin in line 420 of Book 6 of the Iliad of the eighth-century BCE Homer (Homeros) — that the mountain nymphs planted elm trees by the grave of Eetion, father of Andromache — and in lines 615-617 of Book 24 — that the mountain nymphs danced on Mount Sipylos after the death of the children of Niobe — the origin of the mountain-nymph iconography, and the decisive canon is the Echo and Narcissus canon in lines 339-510 of Book 3 of the Metamorphoses (Metamorphoses) of the Roman poet Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 BCE - 17 CE) of c. 8 CE — in which the Oread mountain nymph Echo loved the beautiful youth Narcissus unrequitedly but, by the curse of Hera, could only repeat the last words of others, and ultimately became the mountain echo (meta-echo) — the decisive culminating canon of the Latin-literary Oread. The 1903 painting Echo and Narcissus by the British Pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse (1849-1917), held by the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, Britain, established the visual canon of the Oread in the nineteenth-century Victorian era.
