Gentle Titaness of motherhood, daughter of the Titans Coeus and Phoebe, who was joined in love with Zeus and bore him the divine twins Apollo and Artemis.1
Phoebe came to the desired embrace of Coeus, and of that union the Titaness bore dark-gowned Leto, mild from the very beginning, kind alike to mortals and to the deathless gods, gentlest in all Olympus, together with her sister Asteria. When Zeus had come into his kingship, Leto was joined in love with the lord of the aegis and bore him Apollo and arrow-pouring Artemis, children lovely beyond all the offspring of Heaven.2
Her motherhood was won through torment. Jealous Hera hunted the pregnant goddess over the whole earth until she came at last to Delos, where she brought forth Artemis first — and the newborn goddess turned midwife to deliver her own twin, Apollo. Hyginus tells a darker pursuit: the serpent Python, foreknowing its death at the hands of Leto's child, chased her while Juno decreed she give birth only where the sun never shone. At Jove's command the north wind Aquilo carried her to Neptune, who hid the island Ortygia beneath the waves until the serpent gave up the hunt and returned to Parnassus; the island was raised again into the daylight and thereafter called Delos, and there, clinging to an olive tree, Leto bore her twins. Four days after his birth, Apollo avenged his mother, killing Python with his arrows.3
Those who laid hands on the quiet goddess answered to her children. As she travelled toward Pytho through Panopeus with its lovely lawns, the giant Tityos, overpowered by lust, seized and dragged her; she cried out to her twins, and they shot him down with their arrows. In the house of Hades Odysseus saw him still paying the price, stretched over nine roods of ground while two vultures, one on either side, tore at his liver.4
Niobe of the lovely hair boasted that she outranked fair-cheeked Leto, for the goddess had borne but two children while she herself was mother to many — six sons and six daughters in Homer's telling. The two were enough. Apollo slew the sons with his silver bow and Artemis the daughters with her arrows, and Niobe, wasted with weeping, was turned to stone and set among the crags of Sipylus, where the rock broods over her sorrows still.5
Even peasants learned not to slight her. Wandering parched under the Lycian sun with her newborn twins at her breast, Latona knelt to drink from a small clear pool, but the rustics gathering osiers there forbade her, jeering, and churned the soft mud up from the bottom with their hands and feet for spite. The use of water, she pleaded, is the common right of all — and when they persisted she cursed them to live in that pool forever. Their necks swelled, their mouths stretched wide, their backs turned slick and green, and as frogs they croak and muddy their own waters to this day.6
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
