Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Niobe, daughter of Tantalus and wife of Amphion of Thebes, bore many children—Apollodorus counts seven sons and seven daughters (numbers vary in the poets: six of each in Homer’s implication of “twelve,” or other tallies). Proud of her fertility and her Tantalid blood, she boasted that she was superior to Leto, mother of only two children, Apollo and Artemis, and she forbade Theban women to worship Leto—or otherwise insulted the Titaness’s meager offspring. Leto called on her twins. Apollo took his bow against Niobe’s sons; Artemis against the daughters. They shot the children down—sons in the countryside or on the exercise-ground, daughters in the house—until all (or all but one or two spared in some local variants) lay dead. Amphion killed himself (or was also destroyed). Niobe fled to her father Tantalus’s land on Mount Sipylus in Lydia/Phrygia; there she turned to stone, and the rock was said still to weep. Homer has Achilles remind Priam that even Niobe, exhausted with weeping for her slain children, took food at last—so Priam too should eat—while her stone form still sheds tears on Sipylus among the lonely mountains, where the nymphs dance about Achelous’s streams. The myth is a paradigm of hybris against a goddess and of parental grief; it links the Theban house of Amphion to the cursed Tantalid line and to Anatolian Sipylus.