Lycian peasants

The impious Lycians refuse to exercise hospitality, the ritualized guest-friendship termed xenia by the ancient Greeks, or else theoxenia, which refers specifically to the instances when a god, such as Leto, is involved.

The story of the Lycian peasants is a short one; legend says that after a very troubling labour on Delos, the goddess Leto took her newborn infants, Artemis and Apollo, and crossed over to Lycia (a region in southwestern Asia Minor) where she attempted to bathe her children in and drink from a spring she found there.

[9][10] Traditionally, the etymology offered for Leto's (Ancient Greek: Λητώ, romanized: Lētṓ) name has even been the Lycian word lada, meaning 'wife', although other scholars like Paul Kretschmer and Robert S. P. Beekes have suggested a pre-Greek origin instead.

[14][15] Thanks to Antoninus Liberalis citing the earlier writers Menecrates of Ephesus and Nicander as the sources for his tale, Leto's arrival in Lycia can be dated to around the early fourth century BC, a period during which the city of Xanthos would have been a mixed settlement of Greeks and local Lycians.

[19] The Lycian peasants, who callously attempted to stop a fatigued mother and her young children from using the water of the pond thus broke a very sacred rule and concept of ancient Greek culture, and thus paid by being transformed into creatures that were regarded as hideous and disgusting.

[23] In the Gardens of Versailles, France, lies the Latona Fountain, built in 1670, which depicts the myth; on the top tier stands a statue of Leto with her children Artemis and Apollo surrounded by six lead half-human, half-frog sculptures placed around the perimeter of the basin.