APOLLO slew all the sons, and Artemis had already slain all the daughters save one, the youngest and best beloved, whom Niobe clasped in her arms, when the agonized mother implored the enraged deities to leave her, at least, one out of all her beautiful children; but, even as she prayed, the deadly arrow reached the heart of this child also.* Meanwhile the unhappy father, unable to bear the loss of his children, had destroyed himself, and his dead body lay beside the lifeless corpse of his favourite son.
Widowed and childless, the heart-broken mother sat among her dead, and the gods, in pity for her unutterable woe, turned her into a stone, which they transferred to Sipylus, her native Phrygian mountain, where it still continues to shed tears.*
Some accounts allow at least one daughter to survive, for seeking pardon of Leto. Most often named is Meliboea, who turned so pale from fear that she was known ever after as Chloris, ‘the pale one’.
Niobe has thus become a symbol of uncontrollable grief, as we see from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when Hamlet looks back over his mother’s reaction to widowhood:
And yet, within a month —
Let me not think on’t — Frailty, thy name is woman! —
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow’d my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears: — why she, even she —
O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn’d longer — married with my uncle.