Editing Niobe (section)

===Literature===
[[File:Lineage Tantalus.svg|thumb|250px|Lineage of Tantalus]]
The story of Niobe, and especially her sorrows, is an ancient one. The context in which she is mentioned by [[Achilles]] to [[Priam]] in [[Homer]]'s ''[[Iliad]]'' is as a stock type for mourning. Priam is not unlike Niobe in the sense that he was also grieving for his son [[Hector]], who was killed and not buried for several days.

Niobe is also mentioned in [[Sophocles]]'s ''[[Antigone (Sophocles play)|Antigone]]'' where, as Antigone is marched toward her death, she compares her own loneliness to that of Niobe.<ref>[https://archive.today/20120711002217/http://magic.education2020.com/Websites/Literature/antigone.html Antigone], around line 940. ANTIGONE: I’ve heard about a guest of ours, daughter of Tantalus, from Phrygia – she went to an excruciating death in Sipylus, right on the mountain peak. The stone there, just like clinging ivy, wore her down, and now, so people say, the snow and rain never leave her there, [830] as she laments. Below her weeping eyes her neck is wet with tears. God brings me to a final rest which most resembles hers. [940] CHORUS: But Niobe was a goddess, born divine – and we are human beings, a race which dies. But still, it’s a fine thing for a woman, once she’s dead, to have it said she shared, in life and death, the fate of demi-gods.</ref> [[Sophocles]] is said to have also contributed a play titled ''Niobe'' that is lost.

The ''Niobe'' of [[Aeschylus]], set in Thebes, survives in fragmentary quotes that were supplemented by a papyrus sheet containing twenty-one lines of text.<ref>A. D. Fitton Brown offered a reconstruction of the form of the play, in {{cite journal|author=A. D. Fitton Brown|title=Niobe|journal=The Classical Quarterly|volume=4|issue=3/4|date=July 1954|pages= 175–180|doi=10.1017/S0009838800008077|s2cid=246875795 }}</ref> From the fragments it appears that for the first part of the tragedy the grieving Niobe sits veiled and silent.

Furthermore, the conflict between Niobe and Leto is mentioned in one of [[Sappho]]'s poetic fragments ("Before they were mothers, Leto and Niobe had been the most devoted of friends.").<ref>{{cite book|title = The poems of Sappho: an interpretative rendition into English |author= John Myers O'Hara | publisher=Forgotten Books|year= 1924}}</ref>

In [[Latin language]] sources, Niobe's account is first told by [[Gaius Julius Hyginus|Hyginus]] in his collection of stories in brief and plain ''Fabulae''.

[[Parthenius of Nicaea]] records a rare version of the story of Niobe, in which her father is called Assaon and her husband Philottus. The circumstances in which Niobe loses her children are also different, see {{section link|Niobids#Parthenius variant}}.

Niobe's iconic tears were also mentioned in [[Hamlet]]'s [[soliloquy]] (Act 1, Scene 2), in which he contrasts his mother's grief over the dead King, Hamlet's father – "like Niobe, all tears" – to her unseemly hasty marriage to Claudius.<ref>[[William Shakespeare]], "The [[Tragedy]] of [[Hamlet]], Prince of Denmark"  Act I, scii, l 149, of Queen Gertrude.</ref>

The quotation from Hamlet is also used in [[Dorothy L. Sayers]]' novel ''Murder Must Advertise'', in which an advertising agency's client turns down an advertisement using the quotation as a caption.<ref>[[Dorothy L. Sayers]], ''Murder Must Advertise'', Gollancz, London, 1933</ref>

In [[William Faulkner]]'s novel ''Absalom, Absalom!'' Faulkner compares Ellen, the wife of Sutpen and father of Henry and Judith, to Niobe, "this Niobe without tears, who had conceived to the demon [Sutpen] in a kind of nightmare" (Chapter 1).

Among works of modern literature which have Niobe as a central theme, Kate Daniels' ''Niobe Poems'' can be cited.<ref>{{cite book|title= The Niobe Poems|isbn= 0-8229-3596-1|author= Kate Daniels|publisher= [[University of Pittsburgh Press]]|year= 1988|url-access= registration|url= https://archive.org/details/niobepoems00dani}}</ref>