Shadow and Stone: Niobe between Platonism and Stoicism

Andres V Matlock

Niobe is a fragment. Where comparable figures, like Antigone, are shaped by the generational relationships of mythic cycles and the interpretative histories of the stage, Niobe appears prismatic, always slightly different from our last glimpse of her. Even in Ovid's canonical retelling, the poet's singular focus on her revolt and its suppression by Leto's children is obstinate in its circumspection. We learn little about the motivations behind Niobe's vitriol against Leto, and her claim to a mythical genealogy as the daughter of Tantalus is undermined by the divine violence that seems to be the point of the story. 1 As often in Ovid's poem, metonymy takes precedent. 2 Niobe's actions stubbornly repeat Arachne's arrogance toward the gods, and her metamorphosis remains, somehow, incomplete: "Inside her body, she is stone. Yet she weeps still and, seized by a powerfully whirling wind, she is swept away to her own homeland. There, perched on the peak of a mountain, she dissolves (liquitur), and even now tears flow from the marble. " 3 Narrative cannot explain this recalcitrant Niobe, somehow both solid and fluid, heavy as a stone and light enough to be carried on the wind. Instead, as I propose in this chapter, we might approach