Characters
- Ajax — host and consoler; tells the Niobe tale
- Apollo and Artemis — slew Niobe’s children
- Artemis — mother Niobe insulted
- Dardanus — grieving father urged to take food
- Niobe — lost twelve children; yet ate; turned to stone on Sipylus
- Philotes — turned the people to stone so none could bury the dead
Places
- Lydia — where Niobe broods as stone
- Mysia — background of Niobe’s house (implied)
- Ships — ransom supper
Themes
Narrative
After Priam has ransomed Hector’s body, Achilles urges him to eat, citing Niobe. Niobe lost twelve children—six daughters and six sons—slain by Apollo and Artemis because she taunted Leto with bearing only two. The children lay nine days in their blood; there was no one to bury them, for Zeus had turned the people to stone; on the tenth the gods buried them. Yet even Niobe remembered food. Now somewhere among the rocks on Sipylus, though a stone, she still broods on her sorrows. So we too, Achilles says, should eat, then mourn.
The Iliadic Niobe is a consolation *paradeigma* inside the ransom scene, not the full Theban–Lydian narrative. Catalogue it apart from Apollodorus’s Niobe and from Pausanias’s weeping rock.