Niobe
mythological figure · 9 works · 9 mentions · 9 anchored passages
Sorrows of Niobe · all-suffering Niobe · lovely Niobe
in the texts
Nicomachean Ethics
Mythological figure whose excessive pride in her children led her to rival the gods.
and inasmuch as in relation to all these naturally desirable things, as well as to the neutral ones, men are not blamed merely for regarding or desiring or liking them, but for doing so in a certain way, namely to excess (hence those who yield to or pursue, contrary to principle, anything naturally noble and good, for example those who care too much for honor, or for their children and their paren …
Tusculan Disputations
Mythological figure turned to stone from grief, cited as symbol of silent mourning.
and Niobe is feigned to be of stone on account of her eternal silence, I suppose, in mourning;
Protrepticus
Mythological figure turned to stone, used as a comparison for hard-hearted men.
Are you not, in a manner like Niobe — or rather, to speak more mystically to you, like that Hebrew woman (the men of old called her Lot's wife) — turning to insensibility?
Orations
Mythological figure whose sufferings were a subject of tragic performance, excluded from the sacred choruses endorsed by the speaker
And accordingly neither tragic nor comic actors, nor producers of unmixed laughter through mimes, nor dancers nor chorus-men — save those of the sacred choruses, but not those singing or dancing the sufferings of Niobe or Thyestes — nor lyre-singers nor flute-players contending for victory in theatres, even if certain of the famous cities will on these accounts be ill-disposed toward us, Smyrna an …
Phoenissae
Legendary Theban queen whose daughters' tomb is used as a landmark near Adrastus's position.
He is standing by Adrastus, near the tomb of Niobe’s seven unwed daughters.
Iliad
Mythic queen whose twelve children were slain by Apollo and Artemis after she boasted against Leto; invoked by Achilles as a parallel for Priam's grief.
Even lovely Niobe had to think about eating, though her twelve children - six daughters and six lusty sons - had been all slain in her house.
Republic
Mythological figure whose sorrows are the subject of tragic poetry cited as a test case for how poets must depict divinely caused suffering.
nor again must we permit our youth to hear what Aeschylus says— A god implants the guilty cause in men When he would utterly destroy a house, but if any poets compose a Sorrows of Niobe, the poem that contains these iambics, or a tale of the Pelopidae or of Troy, or anything else of the kind, we must either forbid them to say that these woes are the work of God, or they must devise some such inter …
Letters to Lucilius
Mythological figure whose grief for her children is invoked by Homer as an example of mourning's natural limit.
Do I seem to lay down a hard law for you, when the greatest of the Greek poets gave the right of weeping for one single day, when he said that even Niobe thought of food?