Ni'obe

Ni'obe, in Greek Mythology, the daughter of Tantalus and wife of Amphion, king of Thebes, to whom she bore six sons and six daughters. Proud of her children, she despised Leto or Latona, who had only two children, Apollo and Artemis; whereupon Latona, enraged at her presumption, moved her children to destroy all the children of Niobe with their arrows. They lay nine days in their blood unburied, when Zeus changed them into stone, and on the tenth day they were buried by the gods themselves. Niobe was changed into stone on Mount Sipylus, in Lydia, from which tears flowed every summer. Such is the Homeric legend, which, however, was afterwards much varied and enlarged. Only fragments exist of the tragedies of Æschylus and Sophocles on this theme, which was a favourite subject of ancient art. A noble group representing Niobe and her children was discovered at Rome in 1583, and is now in the Uffizi Palace at Florence. Even the ancient Romans were in doubts whether the work proceeded from Scopas or Praxiteles. See Heydemann, Analekten zu den Kunstdarstellungen der Niobe (Leip. 1883).