In Greek mythology, Niobe (Ancient Greek Νιόβη) is the daughter of Tantalus and wife of Amphion of Thebes. Her boast that her many children surpassed Leto's two twins brought Apollo and Artemis to slaughter the Niobids; grief turned Niobe to stone on Mount Sipylus, where the "Weeping Rock" was said still to shed her tears. Homer already treats her as the archetype of mourning.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Niobe" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Family
Niobe's father was Tantalus, ruler of a city at the foot of Mount Sipylus in western Anatolia (later associated with Lydia rather than inland Phrygia). Ancient authors name her mother variously as Dione (a daughter of Atlas, sister of the Pleiades in Ovid's implication), Eurythemista, or Euryanassa. Her brothers include Pelops and Broteas.
She married Amphion, son of Zeus and Antiope and twin of Zethus, co-founders of Thebes. Amphion's music raised the city's walls; Zethus's wife Aëdon, jealous of Niobe's many children, accidentally killed her own son Itylus and was transformed into a nightingale — a parallel mourning myth already known to Homer.
II.Blasphemous boast and metamorphosis
Niobe boasted that her children outnumbered Leto's twin offspring, Apollo and Artemis. The gods answered with arrows: Apollo slew the sons, Artemis the daughters. Homer remembers six of each; Apollodorus and Ovid usually give seven; Hesiod and others preserve rival totals. Some versions spare Meliboea (thereafter called Chloris, "the pale") and Amyclas; Amphion dies by suicide, by the twins' arrows, or — in Hyginus — while attacking Apollo's temple.
Devastated, Niobe fled to her native Sipylus and was turned to stone, still weeping so that water poured from the rock. Pausanias and local tradition identify a limestone face on Mount Sipylus (Turkish Ağlayan Kaya, the Weeping Rock) with her petrified form. In the Iliad Achilles cites her to Priam as a pattern of grief that must yet yield to food after nine days of unburied dead.
III.Literature and reception
Aeschylus and Sophocles each wrote a Niobe (lost or fragmentary); in Antigone the heroine compares her own fate to Niobe's loneliness on Sipylus. Sappho recalls Leto and Niobe as once-devoted friends. Latin retellings appear in Hyginus's Fabulae and Ovid's Metamorphoses 6. Parthenius preserves a rare variant with different parents and husband.
Shakespeare's Hamlet remembers Gertrude "like Niobe, all tears"; Byron called Rome "the Niobe of nations." Visual cycles range from Attic vase-painting (the Niobid Painter) and the Uffizi marble group to Pompeian frescoes and later canvases by Bloemaert, Wilson, and David. Britten's Six Metamorphoses after Ovid includes a Niobe movement; the chemical element niobium was named as Tantalus's daughter beside tantalum.