Niobe- Greek FigureMortal"Queen of Thebes"

Daughter of Tantalus

Niobe was born to Tantalus, king of Sipylus in Lydia, a man who had dined with the gods and stolen their nectar, who had killed his own son Pelops and served the flesh at a divine banquet. For these crimes he was condemned to stand in a pool in Tartarus, water receding whenever he bent to drink, fruit retreating whenever he reached for it. Niobe inherited his blood and his pride but not, she thought, his fate.

She married Amphion, king of Thebes, a musician so gifted that the stones moved to the sound of his lyre and arranged themselves into the city's seven-gated walls. Between them they had fourteen children: seven sons and seven daughters. Homer gives the count as twelve, but Ovid and Apollodorus settled on fourteen, and it is their number that stuck.

The Boast

When the women of Thebes gathered to honor Leto, the goddess who had borne Apollo and Artemis, Niobe appeared at the ceremony in gold-embroidered Phrygian robes, her hair flowing loose. Ovid describes her as beautiful even in anger.

Why should they worship Leto, she demanded. What was Leto? A wandering exile whom Earth itself had nearly refused to shelter, who had given birth on a barren floating island because no land would receive her. And she had borne two children. Niobe had fourteen. She had the blood of Zeus in her veins and a husband whose music had built a city around her. Even if some misfortune struck, she would still outnumber Leto. Let the Thebans abandon Leto's altars and worship her instead.

The women removed their laurel wreaths and abandoned the ceremony, frightened. Niobe's words had already reached Olympus.

The Arrows

Apollo found the seven sons outside the city walls, riding horses and wrestling on the open ground. His silver arrows struck them one by one. Ovid names each death: Ismenus fell first, an arrow through his throat while reining in his horse. Phaedimus and Tantalus died wrestling, pierced by a single shaft that passed through both their bodies. Alphenor ran to his fallen brothers and tried to warm them with his hands. Apollo shot him through the chest. The youngest, Ilioneus, raised his hands and prayed to all the gods at once to be spared. "All the gods," says Ovid, "not knowing he need not have prayed to all." The arrow was already loosed. It struck the boy through the heart.

Amphion saw the carnage and fell on his own sword.

Niobe rushed to find her daughters, hoping the gods' anger was spent. She found them in black, some kneeling over their brothers' corpses, others pulling arrows from the wounds. Artemis's arrows found them one by one as they mourned or tried to flee. Niobe clutched the youngest to her breast. "Leave me one!" she cried. "Of so many, I ask only the littlest!" The arrow struck, and the last daughter died in her arms.

Pausanias records that one daughter, Chloris, survived. She married Neleus of Pylos and became the mother of Nestor.

The Weeping Rock

For nine days the dead lay unburied. Zeus had turned all the Thebans to stone so that none could tend the bodies. On the tenth day the gods themselves buried the Niobids.

Niobe wept without ceasing. She neither ate nor slept, only wept. The gods transformed her into stone and a whirlwind carried her to Mount Sipylus in her ancestral Lydia. There she became a rock formation on the mountainside, but even as stone she weeps. Water flows from the rock without end. Pausanias traveled to the site and described what he saw: from a distance the rock resembled a woman bowing her head in mourning, but close up it was a cliff face with a stream running through it. Pliny the Elder counted it among the wonders of the natural world.

Niobe in Story

Sophocles gave the image to Antigone. Led to her death for burying her brother, Antigone compares herself to Niobe: both turned to stone by grief, both punished for honoring the dead. Aeschylus wrote an entire Niobe play, now lost, in which the bereaved queen sat veiled and silent on her children's tomb through the first half of the drama.

But the story appears at the climax of the Iliad. Achilles has killed Hector and dragged his body around the walls of Troy. Priam comes alone through the Greek camp to beg for his son's remains. Achilles relents. Before he returns the body, he urges the old king to eat. Even Niobe, he says, who lost all her children to the arrows of Apollo and Artemis, eventually sat down to a meal. And so they eat together: the man who killed Hector and the father who came to beg for the body.