Niobe’s Weeping Rock on Sipylus (Pausanias)

Catalogue ID: 05-local-and-lesser/095-niobe-weeping-rock-sipylus-pausanias

Cycle: Local and lesser — Lydian / Anatolian aetiology

Version line: Pausanian local — rock on Mount Sipylus still weeping

Sources: Pausanias 1.21.3, 8.2.5–7; cf. Homer, *Iliad* 24.614–617 (Niobe turned to stone on Sipylus)

Source file: /workspace/greek-myth-catalogue/05-local-and-lesser/095-niobe-weeping-rock-sipylus-pausanias.md

Characters

Artemis — agents of the prior slaughter (background)
Niobe — petrified mourner; weeping rock
Pausanias — traveler who reports the rock’s appearance
Sisyphus — father; Sipylus his country

Places

Pytho — prior scene of the children’s death (background)
Sardis — weeping rock

Themes

Petrification

Narrative

After Apollo and Artemis kill her children, Niobe returns to her father Tantalus’s land and on Mount Sipylus becomes a stone that weeps in summer. Homer already places her there among the rocks, nursing grief though turned to stone. Pausanias, describing Sipylus, says he himself saw the cliff-face: from nearby it is only bare rock, but from the road it resembles a woman bowed and weeping—seasonal water on the face of the cliff supplying the tears. The entry catalogues the Anatolian landscape claim and autopsy tradition as a local aetiology distinct from the slaughter narrative proper.