Niobe (Sophocles play)

Niobe (Ancient Greek: Νιόβη, romanized: Nióbē) is a lost play by Sophocles, an ancient Athenian tragedian of the fifth century BC. It was performed during the City Dionysia, though very few fragments remain of it. The exact year of production cannot be determined, other than it was produced after Aeschylus' own play of the same name. The play was centered around the myth of the arrogant queen Niobe and how her blasphemous boast cost the lives of her children, the Niobids.

The story of Niobe is very old, recounted first in the Iliad, where Achilles says that Niobe boasted of being a more accomplished mother than the goddess Leto for having borne twelve children, while Leto only had two (Artemis and Apollo). And yet those two brought down Niobe’s twelve own with their arrows, leaving their mother in deep grief.^[1] Later writers add Amphion, king of Thebes, as Niobe's husband and father of the Niobids, and Tantalus as her father, though no author disputes those additions.^[2] Eventually, as all sources agree, Niobe was turned into a weeping rock in Mount Sipylus, near her homeland.

The evidence based on which fragments are traditionally assigned to Sophocles' play can be dubious, though Sophocles' version can be distinguished from others as Aeschylus' Niobe was set entirely after the deaths of the children (whereas Sophocles' dealt directly with their demise^[3]), Euripides is not known to have written a play about Niobe, and it is very unlikely that fragments from a lesser tragedian have survived.^[4][5]

Unlike Homer, Sophocles gave the number of the children as fourteen (seven sons and seven daughters).^[6] The characters in the play were Niobe, the Niobids, Amphion, Artemis, Apollo, a messenger, and Amphion's twin brother Zethus, though not enough fragments remain to determine what his role was.^[7] The chorus was likely made up of local Thebans; typically for Sophocles, the chorus is sympathetic to the protagonist's plight, but can offer no true help, and stay neutral.

The play opened with Niobe boasting that she had the prettiest children the sun had ever seen, better even than Leto's, and then boasted again before sending the boys off to hunt with some other men, apparently their male erastai;^[8] within an ancient Greek context, it is logical that Sophocles presented the male Niobids as the young eromenoi of their older tutors.^[9]

What happens next is unclear, but we can conjecture that Apollo killed the boys as they hunted in the woods of Cithaeron, perhaps along with their erastai as well; the boys looked to their mature companions for protection, only to be killed in cold blood, a feature added to increase the pathos of their deaths.^[10] The boys' father, Amphion, seeing his sons dead challenged Apollo to a fight, and the god finished him off quickly.^[8][11] The deaths of the sons and Amphion would have been announced to Niobe by a messenger.

The next fragments seems to deal with the murder of the girls; a speaker, who has to be Apollo, eggs on Artemis to kill the frightened girl who has sought shelter inside the cellar of the palace.^[3][12] The two actors portraying the gods would be standing on top of the stage (the roof of the palace in this case), but their victims would be out of the audience's sight, with only cries of pain indicating their fate, in line with ancient Greek theater not allowing on-stage depictions of violence;^[13] neverthless the impact of such a scene would have been considerable.^[10] Artemis then entered the palace, supposedly to finish off the rest of the girls, while dragging Niobe out of it, who asks the goddess to kill her instead.^[14] The chorus and Niobe then hear the last female child begging Artemis for mercy, unable to do anything as Niobe weeps.^[15]

As Niobe mourns her murdered progeny, the last of the daughters emerges from the palace, frightened but alive, as the chorus rejoices and then tries to calm her down and assure her that their woes are over.^[16] The variation that a daughter (and sometimes a son as well) was spared was already attested in Telesilla,^[17] and Sophocles perhaps chose to portray that version in order to differentiate his version from those of his predecessors, including Aeschylus (in whose play no child survives).^[18] The surviving girl in later authors is identified as Meliboea, whose name was then changed to Chloris (“pale”) due to her fright.^[19]

The final lines of Niobe are not preserved, so it is not known exactly how the play ended; it did follow the tradition of Niobe's return to her fatherland Lydia (a region in northwestern Asia Minor), but a drastic change of scenery from Thebes to Lydia is unlikely; it is more probable that a god or Niobe herself announced her departure.^[10]

• Phaethon
• The Bacchae
• Amaleus

• Apollodorus, The Library, with an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer, F.B.A., F.R.S. in 2 Volumes. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
• Gantz, Timothy (1996). Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. Vol. II. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-5362-3.
• Hathorn, Richmond Y. (1967). Crowell's Handbook to Classical Drama. NYC, United States: Thomas Y. Crowell Company. ISBN 0-690-22501-6.
• Homer, The Iliad with an English Translation by A. T. Murray, PhD in two volumes. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1924. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
• Lloyd-Jones, Hugh (1996). Sophocles: Fragments. Loeb Classical Library 483. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-99532-1.
• Kalamara, Zoe (2017). Ο μύθος της Νιόβης στις ομώνυμες τραγωδίες του Αισχύλου και του Σοφοκλή [The Myth of Niobe in the Homonymous Tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles] (PDF) (Thesis) (in Greek). Thessaloniki, Greece: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
• Pausanias, Description of Greece with an English Translation by W.H.S. Jones, Litt.D., and H.A. Ormerod, M.A., in 4 Volumes. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1918. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.