Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Roman fresco: Apollo and Artemis shoot the sons of Niobe, who flee (partly on horseback) in an idyllic landscape, 1st c. BC - 1st c. AD Roman sarcophagus: Apollo and Artemis killing the 14 children of Niobe (front side). Artemis; 5 daughters with a nurse; younger son with a pedagogue; 3 other sons; Apollo. Top: dead Niobids. 160–170 Ad
Using arrows, Artemis killed Niobe's daughters and Apollo killed Niobe's sons. According to some versions, at least two of Niobe's children (usually Meliboea, along with her brother Amyclas in other renderings) was spared. Their father, Amphion, at the sight of his dead sons, either killed himself or was killed by Apollo for having sworn revenge.
He is named after a calyx krater which shows the god Apollo and his sister Artemis killing the children of Niobe, who were collectively called the Niobids. [1] The krater is known as the Niobid Krater and is now housed at the Louvre in Paris. In his other work he shows a preference for Amazonomachy scenes and three-quarter-view faces.
Meliboea was the only one (or one of two) spared when Artemis and Apollo killed the Niobids in retribution for Niobe's insult to their mother Leto, bragging that she had many children while Leto had only two. Meliboea was so frightened by the ordeal, she turned permanently pale, changing her name to Chloris ("pale one").
Apollo, enraged, drove the donkeys mad which then began to devour the entire family. Leto and Artemis felt sorry for Clinis, his third son and his daughter, who had done nothing to deserve such fate. Apollo allowed his mother and sister to save those three, and the goddesses changed them into birds before they could be killed by the donkeys. [77]
It was said that the boys, whom Apollo slew, were killed while they were hunting in the woods. Their father, Amphion, committed suicide at the sight of the lifeless bodies of his sons, or was slain by Apollo while storming his temple in protest. Niobe herself would be transformed into rock following the slaying of the daughters.
Amphion married Niobe, and killed himself after the loss of his wife and children (the Niobids) at the hands of Apollo and Artemis. Diodorus Siculus calls Chloris his daughter, [ 4 ] but the other accounts of her parentage identify her father as another Amphion, the ruler of Minyan Orchomenus (see below).
On the temple's doors, a scene depicting the killing of the children of Niobe by Apollo and Diana was rendered in ivory, [98] while the other door depicted the defeat of the Celtic attack on the Oracle of Delphi, of which Apollo was the patron god, in 281 BCE. [7]