When the beautiful Niobe boasted that she had more children than the goddess Leto, Apollo and Artemis decided to take revenge for the insult she inflicted on their mother: Apollo shot six of Niobe's sons with a silver bow, and Artemis killed her six daughters. For nine days and nine nights, Niobe's children lay unburied in the blood, because Zeus petrified all the inhabitants of Thebes. On the tenth day, the Olympians themselves buried the dead, and Nioba, tired of crying, asked for food. Zeus then, pitying her pain, turned her into a stone on the lonely hill of Sipilus, in Lydia, an area in Asia Minor.
The unfortunate mother was later told that she was the daughter of Tantalus and the Pleiades of Dione, that she came to Thebes from her homeland of Phrygia, that she married King Amphion there and that she gave birth to fourteen children - seven sons and seven daughters. When the prophetess Manto, the daughter of Tiresias, called on the Theban women to pay homage to the goddess Letta, Nioba began to dissuade them from doing so, emphasizing that because of her origin and her beautiful children, she deserves divine honors. Those words angered Leto; she complained to Apollo and Artemis that Niobe humiliated her, that he also put them behind his children, that he denied her victims and called her childless. The brother and sister immediately set out to punish the haughty Niobu. In the field in front of the Theban ramparts, Apollo, one by one, shot all the sons of Nioba; the youngest of them sent a request to the gods to spare his life, but the arrow was already flying towards his heart and Apollo did not manage to stop it. On the news of the death of her sons, Nioba went out with her daughters in front of the walls of Thebes; mad with pain, she exclaimed over the corpses of her children: "Cruel Summer, I have more left in misfortune than you in happiness, after so much loss, I still surpass you." At those words, the buzzing of fired arrows was heard again, and the annoyed Nioba saw her daughters falling one after the other. The youngest of them sought refuge in her mother's embrace; Nioba hugged her daughter and covered her with a dress, raised her eyes to the sky and cried out for the gods to spare her at least one child. Her request was not granted. As she stood alone among the corpses of her children, a terrible pain petrified the unhappy mother. A strong whirlwind gripped the petrified Niobe and carried her to her homeland, to Mount Sipil, where tears still flow from her stiff eyes.
The story is about the different number of Niobe's children. According to Homer, Niobe had twelve children, according to Hesiod twenty, according to Herodotus four, and according to Sapph eighteen, but in the notes of Euripides and Apollodorus, which are the most complete, it is said that she had seven sons and seven daughters. According to Apollodorus, their names are: Sipil, Eupinit, Ismen, Damasichton, Agenor, Faedim, Tantalus; Philomachus, Cleodox, Astiochus, Phthius, Pelopius, Astycrates, Ogygia. Some say that Apollo and Artemis spared one of Niobe's sons and one daughter, because they prayed fervently to their mother, the goddess Leta.
According to Lydian myth, Nioba is Asaon's daughter, the wife of the Assyrian Philot and the mother of twenty children. When Philot died in the hunt, Asaon began to persecute his love-born daughter. Horrified by this action, Nioba refused him, but Asaon, in order to take revenge on her, invited his grandchildren to the house and burned them during lunch. Nioba threw herself from a high rock in despair, and some say that the gods turned her into a stone. On Mount Sipil, one rock looks like a woman sitting immersed, in deep sorrow.
The myth of Niobium is a favorite subject of Greek art. The great tragedians, Aeschylus and Sophocles, took Niobe's fate as the theme of their tragedies, which have not been preserved. Nioba's evil destiny was also treated by the famous Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses). Beginning in the middle of the 6th century AD, painted vases show the death of Niobium's children. The most famous is the vase of the so-called painter Niobid, which is kept today in the Louvre (5th century AD). Niobida is also depicted on the throne of Zeus the Olympian, and Praxiteles or Skopas sculpted the group Niobida, which was later, in Hellenistic-Roman times, often copied.
According to some sources, Niobida was a true person. The narrators used that character, who in real life was a ruler's husband, and described him as a mythological being. Who knows what history is and what mythology is.