Niobe in art and literature

Aeschylus (525-456 BCE) and Sophocles (c. 496-406 BCE), two of the most famous Athenian dramatists, wrote tragedies based on the myth of Niobe. However, only a few fragments of these plays survive. One of the most famous retellings of Niobe’s story is found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid’s Niobe is not merely proud of her many children, but openly contemptuous of the goddess Leto. She actively dissuades other women from worshiping at her festival. Not only is Niobe turned to stone because of her incessant mourning, but the stone weeps. Finally she is whisked away to her native country of Lycia, where the poet tells us that the mountain continues to weep still. The scene of the death of the Niobids is depicted on a famous vase by

The Niobid Painter, who takes his name from this piece, while a famous sculpture of Niobe and her children existed in ancient Greece. A Roman imitation of this work is now housed in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.

While the myth of Niobe is well known, it has produced more allusions than full-scale responses by literary artists. Shakespeare’s Hamlet describes his mother at his father’s funeral as “Like Niobe, all tears.” Phillis Wheatley, an 18th-century African-American poet, wrote a poem inspired by both Ovid’s account and a painting by Richard Wilson. Musical compositions drawing on the myth include Giovanni Pacini’s opera Niobe (1826), and Benjamin Britten’s six-part piece for oboe, “Metamorphoses after Ovid” (1951), one part of which is called “Niobe.”A recent piece by American composer Stephen Scott, “The Tears of Niobe” (1990), is composed for a grand piano plucked and bowed by 10 musicians. American poet Kate Daniels’s 1988 volume The Niobe Poems draws on the myth to deal with the theme of a contemporary mother’s loss of a child.

Deborah Lyons

Bibliography

Homer, and Robert Fagles, trans. The Iliad. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Ovid, and A. D. Melville, trans. Metamorphoses. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

See also: Achilles; Minos; Priam.