Niobe

The city was located at the foot of Mount Sipylus and its ruins were reported to be still visible at the beginning of the 1st century AD,[6] although few traces remain today.

[7] Pliny reports that Tantalis was destroyed by an earthquake and the city of Sipylus (Magnesia ad Sipylum) was built in its place.

Amphion became a great singer and musician after his lover Hermes taught him to play music and gave him a golden lyre.

Aëdon instructed her son to sleep in the back of the room, or in the innermost position of the bed that night, but Itylus forgot about his mother's words.

[12] Her speech which caused the indignation of the goddess was rendered in the following manner: It was on occasion of the annual celebration in honor of Latona [i.e, Leto] and her offspring, Apollo and Diana [i.e, Artemis] when the people of Thebes were assembled, their brows crowned with laurel, bearing frankincense to the altars and paying their vows, that Niobe appeared among the crowd.

Devastated, Niobe fled back to Mount Sipylus[13] and was turned into stone, and, as she wept unceasingly, waters started to pour from her petrified complexion.

Mount Sipylus indeed has a natural rock formation which resembles a female face, and it has been associated with Niobe since ancient times and described by Pausanias.

[15] This is related to the myth of the seven youths and seven maidens who were sent every year to the king Minos of Crete as an offering sacrifice to the Minotaur.

Niobe was transformed into a stone on Mount Sipylus in her homeland of Phrygia, where she brooded over the sorrows sent by the gods.

The Niobe of Aeschylus, set in Thebes, survives in fragmentary quotes that were supplemented by a papyrus sheet containing twenty-one lines of text.

[21] In Latin language sources, Niobe's account is first told by Hyginus in his collection of stories in brief and plain Fabulae.

Parthenius of Nicaea records a rare version of the story of Niobe, in which her father is called Assaon and her husband Philottus.

[24] The subject of Niobe and the destruction of the Niobids was part of the repertory of Attic vase-painters and inspired sculpture groups and wall frescoes as well as relief carvings on Roman sarcophagi.

The subject of the Attic calyx-krater from Orvieto conserved in the Musée du Louvre has provided the name for the Niobid Painter.

[25] A lifesize group of marble Niobids, including one of Niobe sheltering one of her daughters, found in Rome in 1583 at the same time as the Wrestlers, were taken in 1775 to the Uffizi in Florence where, in a gallery devoted to them, they remain some of the most prominent surviving sculptures of Classical antiquity (see below).

An early appearance, The Death of Niobe's Children by Abraham Bloemaert, was painted in 1591 towards the start of the Dutch Golden Age.

The English artist Richard Wilson gained great acclaim for his The Destruction of the Children of Niobe, painted in 1760.

In the play she is bought to life by a quaint electrical storm and brings the Edwardian values and relationships in the household to disarray.