Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Phoebe.
The gallery
Phoebe in the Gigantomachy (Pergamon Altar, south frieze)
Unknown (Pergamon Altar sculptors), c. 180–160 BC
On the south frieze of the Great Altar of Pergamon in Berlin, the Titaness Phoebe — labeled Phoibe in the museum — lunges through swirling drapery with a torch, fighting beside her daughter Asteria in the Gigantomachy. For a figure who otherwise has almost no ancient iconography, this Hellenistic relief is the principal monumental witness to Phoebe as a martial power of the Titan generation, grandmother of Apollo and Artemis, rather than as a later lunar namesake.
To Phoebus at His Birth, From Aeschylus, Furies
John Flaxman, c. 1795
Flaxman's outline drawing for Aeschylus's Eumenides, now in the Yale Center for British Art, stages the Delphic succession speech of the Pythia: Phoebe, who received the oracle from Themis, presents the oracular tripod to the newborn Phoebus Apollo. The neoclassical sheet is the canonical modern image of the Titaness's one great mythic act — the birthday gift that gives Apollo his name from Phoebe.
Knucklebone Players (Giocatrici di astragali)
Alexander of Athens (signed), 1st century AD (from Herculaneum)
This painted marble pinax from Herculaneum, signed by Alexander of Athens and now in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples (inv. 9562), names its figures in Greek. Phoebe stands among Leto and Niobe while two Niobids play knucklebones below — a rare inscribed ancient image of the Titaness in a domestic mythic gathering, far from moon allegory, and one of the few classical works to label Phoebe herself.