. e mostcommonly received number in later times ap-pears to have been 14—namely, 7 sons and7 daughters (Apollod., Ov., II. cc.; Ael. V. H. ; Gell. xx. 6; Schol. ad Eur. Phoen. 156;Eustath. Horn. p. 1367; Hyg. Fab. 11; Lyc. 520). According to Homer all thechildren of Niobe fell by the arrows of Apolloand Artemis; but later writers state that one ofher sons, Amphion or Amyclas, and one of herdaughters, Meliboea, were saved, but that ileli-boea, having turned pale with terror at thesight of her dying brothers and sisters,
. e mostcommonly received number in later times ap-pears to have been 14—namely, 7 sons and7 daughters (Apollod., Ov., II. cc.; Ael. V. H. ; Gell. xx. 6; Schol. ad Eur. Phoen. 156;Eustath. Horn. p. 1367; Hyg. Fab. 11; Lyc. 520). According to Homer all thechildren of Niobe fell by the arrows of Apolloand Artemis; but later writers state that one ofher sons, Amphion or Amyclas, and one of herdaughters, Meliboea, were saved, but that ileli-boea, having turned pale with terror at thesight of her dying brothers and sisters, wasafterwards called Chloris (Apollod. ; 21, 9, v. 16, 3). The time and place atwhich the children of Niobe were destroyed arelikewise stated differently. According to Homer,they perished in their mothers house. Accord-ing to Ovid, the sons were slain while theywere engaged in gymnastic exercises in a plainnear Thebes, and the daughters during thefuneral of their brothers. This is owing to thefact that the story also belonged to Thebes, where. Head of Niobe from the Florentine group. Amphion reigned, and the tombs of Niobeschildren were shown at Thebes (Paus. ix. 16,17). Others make Niobe, after the death ofher children, go from Thebes to Lydia, to herfather Tantalus on Mount Sipylus, where Zeus,at her own request, changed her into a stone,which during the summer always shed idea of the slaughter of the children byApollo is probably a poetical myth of streamsflowing down a rock-face from the melted snowin spring and dried up by the heat of thesummer sun ; but the localisation at MountSipylus has a more definite cause. Here wererock sculptures with the figures of the goddessCybele, which the author of the description inthe Iliad must have seen himself. Pausanias(i. 21, 5) says that he saw it ; but of coarse inhis time, as in the time of the Iliad, it wasconnected with the legend of Niobe. It islikely that this was one of the two sculp-tured figures (pro
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