Bringing Bad News to Niobe

In classic Greek tragedy, violent acts always occur offstage, and actors or the chorus must relate to those on stage, and to the audience, what has happened out of sight. Meleager’s longest poem seems to be a demonstration of such a speech, in an imaginary drama about the fate of Queen Niobe and her family, all of whom are killed by Apollo and Artemis after she insults Leto (Latin, Latona), their mother. Boasting of her 14 children, Niobe calls the mother of Apollo and Artemis “nearly childless.” Ovid tells the gruesome story of all the sons and daughters felled by arrow shot from the sky in his Metamorphoses. Meleager would be engaged, it seems, in coming up with the worst news ever brought by a single messenger. He assumes that the Queen is in her palace, and that one poor soul has to narrate everything – and then, even in the midst of his speech, more horrors pile on. This tour de force, packed into the fewest possible lines, prompted me to expand the text, and to cast my version in blank verse so that it sounds like a speech from an English drama.

BRINGING BAD NEWS TO NIOBE

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Meleager, The Greek Anthology, xvi, 134

Daughter of Tantalus, O Queen of Thebes,
never was a messenger so charged with woe.
From your stern gaze, Niobe, I avert
my head; on bowed knees, trembling, I falter.
Can I say all that must be said to you
without a blinding dart or lightning bolt
reducing me to ash? O Queen, rend now
your robes to rags, hurl down the diadem
and howl as never a mother before!

Your sons are dead! What? All of them, yes all!
That glance! Would I were mad as you think me.
Come to the balcony and see it all,
what Thebes in horror witnessed in bright sun:
the arrows plunging down, one angry god
and his equally angry sister, hot
to avenge their mother’s honor, drew bows
from yon low-hanging cloud. What gods, you ask?
I cannot say it above a whisper —
Apollo and Artemis, none other.

Come quickly, then. Your daughters already
flood the field with cries. The horrified crowd
parts way for them. O lady, come not here —
hold back — oh, smiting gods — the girls as well!
They knelt in lakes of blood, and now they fall.

O Queen, where have you gone? Is it the King
you have gone to grieve with? I saved that bit
for later. Upon the sword he fell, seven sons
bereft. Now, what is that below? The Queen
amid the carnage, arms up imploring
the fatal heavens. One daughter leans hard
upon her bosom, another at her feet
expires. Some, praying to Leto, clasp hands
in fervent begging. No use! The feathered
shafts continue falling, seven sons dead
and seven daughters. O find me a sword
that I may fall upon it. O History,
will thy Muse permit the telling of this?
Must I live on to be the one who writes
on bloody parchment this dark tale of woe?

All witness on the red ground below, yet
who can compass both the effect and cause?
What plagues and sorrows will come after this?
And as for Niobe, still as a stone,
what will this hard retribution teach her?
Speak, Queen! Your mouth is open, but no cry
comes forth. Gods! What do my eyes behold now?

She is a stone. Crown gone, disheveled her
golden hair, hands out before her visage,
fingers spread fanlike as if to block out
the gaping wounds, the heart-blood spurting still
from where the unerring arrows chest-plates
pierced, skulls riven in two, dead eyes agape,
as fourteen new souls sleet down to Hades.

Frozen she is, tongue, lips and teeth, wild eyes,
torrent of torn robes and unloos’d sandals,
all to marble transformed, except one tear,
that, seeping up from a mineral spring,
flows rivulets upon the mother’s face,
and in renewing itself, becomes a font.

Weep, Niobe! I shall repeat your tale
to any Muse who wishes to listen.
I shake. I wield no stylus and no lyre.
If Gods do this to us, what hope is there
that brutish men will rise above the beasts?