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?

 

 

 

The Story of Niobe, Parts 4 to 6 (end)

A royal suicide. Seven daughters killed in twilight by all-but-invisible arrows. The weeping Queen Niobe turns to stone.

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Book VI of Ovid's

4

Nothing moves swifter than the knowledge of death.

King Amphion, Niobe’s consort, had spied the cloud

and shivered as he stood beneath it, powerless.

He could not make out in the tumult below,

just who was slaying whom and why, for his eyes

with age were failing him. The shouting and screams

roared into the palace, up stairs and into his rooms

where he was wont to linger with laws and testaments.

The one who told him could not get the words.

“How many dead?” King Amphion demanded.

“All seven, sire!” — “All seven what?” — “Your sons!

All dead in the span of minutes from vengeful arrows.”

“No man can bear such grief and live!” cried Amphion,

and taking the messenger’s own sword, he slew himself.

 

Enter Niobe, to the blood-stained chamber

where she hardly noticed her perish’d consort.

At the heavens she raged, inconsolable.

The women veiled themselves in pity

as the disheveled Queen removed herself

to the corpse-ridden playing field. None envied her

now, and all who had exalted her, averted their faces.

One by one, she threw herself upon the bodies

of her seven sons engored; with blood she smeared

her raiment, and it stained her face and hair.

Each pair of dead lips she kissed with her own,

last echo of a mother’s first infant blessing.

She lifted bruised arms, all bronzed with gore

to the never-moving storm-cloud, then turned

her face toward where Latona’s temple stood,

hurling her imprecation so loud the very walls

of Thebes were shocked, and trembled.

“Feast now upon my grief, Latona, cruel

beyond the imagination of Tartarus,

feast and glut your heart with my sorrow.

It is endless — it will feed you forever!

Seven sons now I must burn and bury,

sevenfold my suffering. Exult, victorious

only in hatred. Your named shall be cursed

as the by-word for cruelty. Feast then,

and fill your empty heart with my sorrow.

 

“But, ha! your victory is not a victory.

My misery is greater still than your contentment

off in that place where no one knows your name.

Who will come to your temple now? Doors boarded

up, its walls leaning every which way, in years

to come it will be a ruin, a chicken-coop.

“After so many deaths, I triumph still!

Seven sons gone, I still have seven daughters!”

 

5

The day advanced, and dusk drew near. Cut trees

and timbers carried forth from the city took shape

into seven hastily-made biers, and the seven sisters,

robed in black, their faces smeared with weeping,

gathered around the scene of horror. All heard

the sky-shaking throb of the bowstring on high,

and one, while drawing out the arrow from inside

her brother’s raven-torn innards, toppled dead

before any saw that a missile had stricken her.

Some thought she merely fainted, but others saw

the pulsing flow of blood beneath her.

Another as she stood next her grieving mother

was cut down just as suddenly. Dim light

and enfeebl’d sight made some assume

the daughters were passing out with grief.

 

Latona’s daughter died before her, lips clenched,

without a word of reproach or a farewell cry.

One tried to flee, hoping her robes of black

would vanish into twilight. So she fell too,

and her sister, hard upon her, tumbled down

and both, in a heap, were arrowed, expiring.

One hid, but from the overarching cloud

there was no shelter; she fell,

defiant, until the angry shaft toppled her.

 

Now six had suffered wounds, and bleeding,

died. Niobe raced to her last daughter’s side.

The girl crouched, and Niobe tried to drape

her blood-stained robe to cover her.

Niobe screamed to the heavens again. “Latona!

Or you who come to slaughter in Latona’s name!

Just leave me one, the smallest, she is nothing

to you, my last vestige on earth. The littlest

one I beg you to spare me! Just one!” Yet even

as she prayed for the mercy of the implacable,

another shaft fell, sure aimed, rending her robe

and killing the hidden, crouching girl beneath it.

 

6

Now sits Niobe, childless truly, amid the gore

of fourteen slaughtered children, the sons on biers,

the daughters scattered in bloody pools

as wolf and dog, crow and raven, red-eyed

begin their death caw, the taste for flesh

that attends every battlefield. None dare to move,

except to melt away to their darkened homes,

where, hearths extinguished, the Thebans sat

sleepless and transfixed with terror.

Niobe sees the bier she had not noticed:

the self-slain Amphion from whom no sons

or daughters more could issue, fate sealed

upon Niobe’s curse forever. Silence was all

amid the creeping night, the ominous wingbeats

of carrion seekers. What horror at dawn

when the night’s feasting would be revealed!

 

Sun rises on the unpeopled field of Mars.

The birds are at their business. A wary wolf

circles the motionless Niobe.

Her hair, a mass of blood clots, does not move.

There is no breeze to stir it. Her face grows pale

as though her own blood had gone to ground.

Her eyes are fixed on nothing, She does not stir.

Aside from her, the picture is void of human life. Eyes

frozen, tongue locked in roof of mouth, teeth

clenched on final horror, she weeps. She weeps.

She wills her neck to bend — it disobeys;

she orders her arms to move, but they will not.

Her legs and feet are frozen. Slowly her heart,

the proud heart and all her innards, petrify.

She is nothing but a rockpile in woman’s form,

but still she weeps, tears of their own accord

flow out and down the semblance of face.

 

During the night that followed, some gods

took pity and lifted the weeping Niobe on high

dropping her back to a hillside in Phrygia,

where she weeps still, and forever,

a perpetual spring in a wall of limestone,

 

Who learns not from the lessons of punished Pride

must pay the toll of sorrow and extinction!

 

 

 

The Story of Niobe, Parts 2 and 3

Seven archery murders in the unlucky city of Thebes ...

Adapted from Book VI of Ovid's Metamorphoses

2

At Cynthus, in her austere dwelling
high on the peak of a prodigious cliff,
Latona waits the waft of incense, and the bees’
murmur of far-off Theban prayers, too soon
ended and not enough to satisfy. Then up
to her ears by Echo carried comes Niobe’s speech.
Each laurel thrown to the temple floor, each
stooped retreat without the proper obeisance
is a slap in Latona’s face. How fair a face?
One need but look at Apollo and Artemis
formed in her guise in high relief. From her
the beauty that stuns to silence, from force
unknown beyond the universe, the arts divine
inspired by the sun-bright siblings.  “You two!”
her mother summons them, and fast they fly
as quick as thought and waves of energy.
They reach for her embrace; she shivers off
all contact in the ice of her anger. “You two,
my pride and joy, you know that I bow
to no one but Hera, knowing my place
that others many know and honor theirs,
hear how my divinity has been tarnished,
my temple insulted, my prayers snuffed out.
This Niobe, spawn of Tantalus, who crept
like a dog to sup on the gods’ apples, daughter
of a thief of table scraps, you she insults, too,
preferring her own grown sons and daughters
to the elder gods she should at least give nod to
and pass by in silence if she cannot praise.
No Apollo, no Artemis she honors: she calls me
childless, in bloat of pride just like a sow
who loses count of her many piglets and swells
to name and number them lords of the sty.
Just like her father, she is swollen with hubris.”

 More would Latonia have said, but Phoebus
Apollo with lifted hand stops her. “Enough!
Each moment spent in hearing more, delays
the moment of Latona’s punishment. Let’s go!”
So saying, he seizes his sister’s hand, and off
they fly. Sooner than a man could harness
two horses to a chariot, they came to Thebes,
concealed in cloud above the tower of Cadmus.

3
It was a field of Mars where they but played at war,
the exercising grounds of Latona’s athletic sons.
Crowds gathered daily to watch their chariots,
the shows of archery, the wrestling and races.
Truly, they seemed like gods at play. The earth
was flat and dry where horses’ hoofs and wheels
packed down the dust and clay. Only a few trees
and shrubs dotted the open plain, the city walls
in plain view behind it. King Amphion seldom came,
but many idled and watched as princes rode
horseback in Tryrian purple, turning and racing
with their tight gold-coated bridles. Ismenus,
first-born, his mother’s favorite son, rode wide
along the curved track, as if to race against
any or all of his brothers. Hard he pulled the bit,
the foam’d mouth of the young stallion resisted.
He squinted once at the single cloud, the only one
marring the sky’s perfection of azure, then sat
upright and cried as the first arrow struck him,
red on purple and straight through the heart.

 What can one say of the arrows of Apollo,
and those of his sister, no less in power?

Unleashed, they always strike their target.
Not even a zephyr would dare to deflect
the path from archer’s eye to the target.
Only another god, invisible, could nudge
the victim to safety in the eye-blink between
the harp twang of string and the heart-pierce
of flesh-rending bronze. And so, “Ah, me!”

was all Ismenus said, as he sank sideways downward
over the shoulder of his astonished horse.

 His brother, Sipylus made out the fatal sound
of the arrow-laden quiver within the cloud,
and giving rein, fled for the city walls,
just as a captain turns sail away and flees
from a sudden storm. How many hoof-beats
and how fast would take him to safety? Too slow,
too late, as the unavoidable arrow took him.
The arrow shaft sang as it sliced his neck.
Only a gurgling noise escaped him as the point
thrust out through his Adam’s apple. Forward
he pitched and his own horse trampled him.
His warm blood gushed in the dry ground’s gullies. 

Elsewhere upon the playing field, two brothers fond
who loved nothing more than trading triumphs
and sweet defeats as well-oiled wrestlers
were at a sweaty match, each goaded on by friends
and adherents. “Go Phaedmus!” some called.
“Tantalus! Be like your grandsire! Invent some trick
to tumble your brother under foot! On, Tantalus!”
The brothers strained together, breast to breast,
their breathing as heavy as lovers’, their eyes intent
for one another’s stumbling weakness. There was not
the track of an ant between them when both inhaled,
swelling their huge frames, as just one arrow,
one perfect, impossible arrow, sped from the bow
of Artemis intent to outshine her brother. One arrow
impaled them both. They groaned in unison, eyes locked
upon one another in disbelief. Naked they fell.
Their last breath was a mutual exhalation.

 Helpless Alphenor watched them die, and from the crowd
rushed forth, He beat his breast and crying, “My brothers!
My brothers!” he marked himself for ready death. He leaned
to lift the stone-dead bodies of Phaedmus and Tantalus,
and just as if he had carried them to their grave
the spot he stood on became his own death. One arrow
from Apollo plowed through his midriff at perfect center,
a bull’s eye hit that sent him groaning to slow
and painful death-agonies,. Someone ran bravely
and pulled out the Olympian arrow. Out came his lungs
and a cascade of blood. All stared in horror
at the hooded forms in the hovering cloudbank.

One brother hardly passed from boy to man, pretty
Damasichton, was almost, one would think, too fair
to kill. That may be why the god’s arrow deflected,
piercing below the knee. The boy reached down
to tend the fast-bleeding wound, and lo!
the second arrow pierced through his head so far
that from his astonished mouth the feathers showed.
So fierce the heart-blood pulsed in the prince’s neck
that the arrow went out and up on a geyser of blood.

 One son alone remained. Ilioneus he was called.
He knelt and stretched his arms in prayer.
“Unknown gods, whom we have offended, spare me!
All ye gods, but name yourselves and I will make amends!”
The god of arrows was stirred to pity, inhuman
he was not as patron to all human arts. But while he thought,
Apollo’s hand, so used to the automatic flow
of arrow from quiver, of bowstring draw and release,
alas and eheu! he had let the arrow go! The youth fell,
but the arrow, perhaps alive itself, withheld its force.
But as though the death of all had been foredoomed,
the boy’s heart broke anyway, and he perished.

The Story of Niobe, Part 1

This gruesome tale from Ovid encompasses the narcissist pride of a haughty ruler, fourteen murders, one suicide, and a petrifaction. Here is Part 1. The opening stanza about Arachne is the "hook" that Ovid used to connect a story to its successor.

by Brett Rutherford

adapted from Book VI of Ovid's

Part 1

A woman turned to a spider! Whoever heard of such a thing?

All the towns in Lydia trembled at the horror of it. It spreads

through Phrygia, the shattered pride of Arachne, daring to spin

and embroider in contest with Pallas Athena. Self-hanged

in spite, she is doomed to six-leggedness, to sit hungry always

at the heart of a dread weaving all know to be a place of poison.

 

You would think her friend and playmate Niobe, might weep

to recall how they ran the fields of Maeonia together,

and drank the bees’ nectar in the shadow of Mount Sipylus.

Yet the girl learned nothing from the sad example of how

the wise, concerning gods, should speak little and praise much.

Niobe had what some call pride of place, beside an artful spouse,

queen in her realm, high born and married to Thebes, but these

were motes of arrogance beside her pride of motherhood.

None need call out she was the most blessed of mothers,

since she so frequently uttered it herself. Fourteen times

blessed was her matronly belly, once even twinned!

 

Blameless old Manto, who could not help herself,

daughter as she was to Tiresias, got up with an impulse

divine and, taking a torch and banner, raised a throng,

saying to all in the marketplace, “Come, Theban women!

Go to the temple of Latona the Titaness. Without delay,

give up to her and to Apollo and Artemis, her offspring,

prayers and costly incense. Make laurel wreaths

and don them,  and follow me in loud procession!

Latona exults to speak through me!” The women obey,

and ripping from the laurels every reachable branch

they wound their brows with the sacred leaves and marched.

Up to the very moon and stars the incense rose, smoke, too

from everything else they heaped into the altar fires.

 

But last, and wrathful, comes Queen Niobe, her cohorts

of the palace unasked and unconsulted, no wreath

upon her brow, gold-and-white Phrygian robes aglow

as she steps into the shadowed temple. Crowds bow

and part; some kneel at the royal presence among them.

Manto freezes in her supplicatory pose, back turned

to the Queen and facing Latona’s time-blackened

visage. Niobe halts, compels with wrath’s eye-darts

that the priestess turn to face her. Neck, head, and crown

make her seem a giant among them. “What is this?”

she demands of them. “You would rather worship a stone,

a thing behind a curtain, an “Old One” you only know

by reputation? No incense for me? No laurels for me?

Must I be dead before the people worship me?

Do you know who my father was? Tantalus! Tantalus!

The only man ever to take food from the gods’ table.

Sister to the glimmering Pleiades my mother is.

The one who holds the vault of the Heavens

upon his shoulder, yes, Atlas himself, I call

my grandfather. I am descended from Titans

and as such I can call Zeus my grandfather, should

I ever have need to trouble him. In Phrygia,

where they know who is who, they revere and fear me.”

 

The women tremble. None say a word. Manto is like

a woman who has seen a Gorgon, no sound from her

defends the interrupted prayer to Latona, whose ears

hear all through the rude unpolished stone of her likeness.

 

Niobe cannot stop herself. “Queen of the Royal House

of Cadmus am I. The stones you walked to come here,

the walls of the palace and city of Thebes, rose up

at the magic sound of my husband’s lyre,

and the labor of the men of Thebes, those very rocks,

if they could speak, would acknowledge me.

 

“There is nothing here but a shack and a face of stone.

You all know how in the palace, the eye cannot see

the end of its wealth and splendor. Why this? Why here?

Do I not have the eye and brow and shoulders of Zeus,

the grace of a Hera if not an Aphrodite? All say it is so.

And add to this my proof of glory: my seven sons, our

seven sons, the glory of Thebes, and my seven daughters,

our seven daughters, and for them each a warrior king

to be my seven sons-in-law.  Dare you to call me proud

without warrant? Dare any of you?” All are silent.

The incense hangs beneath the temple roof.

 

Her fury at their silence rises. “So you prefer to me,

decked as you are with stolen laurels from my trees,

that Titaness Latona, daughter of somebody named Coeus,

whom no one has ever heard of — Latona, whose

pregnancy the Earth spat out, denied a spot of land

to give birth to her progeny, until the spirit of Delos

took pity and said, ‘Vagrant Titan, light down

on this vagrant island.’ Born they were, with Pity

as their stepfather and a bare rock as home,

a rock that floated hither and yon for centuries.

The land did not want her. The sea denied her.

The starry universe spat at the sound of her name.

 

“And what did Latona do? She bore two children. Two.

I have done seven times that, and might do more.

Happy am I, and blessed, and happy shall I be.

Why ask anything of all-but-forgotten gods

when you are safe with me, too great

and too well-descended to fear bad luck?

If drought comes, the stores are full. It passes.

If sickness comes, we heal the sick. Bright day

erases the drear fog of the night of the dead.

 

“Suppose some part of my tribe of children

might be taken from me? Take two, take four.

I still have five times as many as she! Latona,

as such things go, is practically childless!

 

“Go back to your looms, and to the market,

go back to your homes and gardens,” Niobe demands.

“Cast off the laurels as you pass the door.

I will hear no more of Latona.”

 

The women obey, and yet they mumble the name

of the slighted Titaness instead of that

of the proud and angry Queen of Thebes.

Manto, alone, falls to her knees and weeps.