Niobe

Greek · mortal · heroic age · mortal

Mortal-tier daughter of Tantalus, queen of Thebes through marriage to Amphion. Mother of twelve (Homer) or fourteen (Hesiod, Hellenistic) children, all but two killed by Apollo and Artemis after her boast against Leto. Transformed into a weeping stone on Mt. Sipylus per the canonical Greek-tradition aetiology — Pausanias 1.21.3 visited the rock-formation in the 2nd c. CE. The Iliadic-Homeric Niobe is one of the most-staged tragic figures of classical Greek tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles, both lost) and the most-iconographically-treated through the Niobid-Group sculptural cluster (c.440 BCE).

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