Niobe and Her Children

About Niobe and Her Children

Niobe, daughter of Tantalus and queen of Thebes through her marriage to Amphion, was a mortal woman whose boast that she surpassed the goddess Leto in the number and beauty of her children provoked the destruction of those children by Apollo and Artemis, Leto's divine offspring. The myth, transmitted most fully in Ovid's Metamorphoses (6.146-312) and referenced in Homer's Iliad (24.599-620), is a foundational narrative of hubris and divine retribution — a story about the catastrophic consequences of comparing oneself to the gods.

Niobe bore either seven sons and seven daughters (the number most frequently attested, following Ovid and the mythographic tradition) or six of each (following some earlier sources). She was wealthy, powerful, and, by all accounts, justified in her pride — her children were beautiful and accomplished, her husband was the legendary musician Amphion, and her father Tantalus had once dined with the gods. But Niobe's error was not pride in general; it was the specific act of claiming superiority over a goddess, thereby transgressing the boundary between mortal and divine that Greek religion carefully maintained.

The slaughter of the Niobids is among the most graphically violent episodes in Greek mythology. Apollo kills the sons with his arrows — in the gymnasium, the hunting field, or the plain outside Thebes, depending on the source — and Artemis kills the daughters. The children die one by one, each death described with individual detail, until Niobe is surrounded by the corpses of her entire family. In some versions, one daughter survives (Chloris, later the wife of Neleus of Pylos); in most versions, all perish.

Niobe's response to the massacre completes the myth. Overcome by grief, she cannot move, cannot speak, cannot weep — she turns to stone. Zeus transforms her into a rock on Mount Sipylus in Lydia (modern Turkey), from which water eternally flows, identified by ancient travelers as Niobe's tears. This metamorphosis — the transformation of a grieving mother into a weeping stone — is the myth's most enduring image, combining the permanence of stone with the fluidity of water, the silence of death with the expressiveness of tears.

The story's placement in Homer's Iliad is significant. Achilles tells the story of Niobe to Priam in the poem's final book, using it to persuade the bereaved king to eat — even Niobe, who lost all her children, eventually ate. This context transforms the myth from a cautionary tale about hubris into a meditation on the limits of grief and the necessity of continuing to live even after devastating loss.

The myth also functions as a genealogical hinge connecting the Tantalid dynasty to the broader patterns of divine punishment that characterize Greek mythology. Niobe's father Tantalus suffered eternal torment in Tartarus for his own transgressions against the gods, and her story extends this family pattern of hubris and catastrophe into the next generation. The Tantalid curse — the hereditary tendency toward transgression — receives its most emotionally devastating expression in the slaughter of Niobe's children. The myth's treatment of maternal grief — grief that exceeds the capacity for human expression and must therefore be transformed into something permanent and inhuman — gives it an emotional power that has sustained its cultural presence for nearly three millennia.

The Story

The story begins with Niobe at the height of her power and happiness. She is queen of Thebes, wife of Amphion (the great musician who built Thebes' walls by playing his lyre so beautifully that the stones moved of their own accord), and mother of fourteen children — seven sons and seven daughters in Ovid's account. Her father was Tantalus, who had been admitted to the table of the gods; her grandfather was Zeus himself. She had, by any mortal standard, everything.

In Ovid's version (Metamorphoses 6.146-312), the crisis begins when the Theban people gather to worship Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis, at the instigation of the seer Manto (daughter of Tiresias). Niobe interrupts the worship. She appears in magnificent robes, attended by her retinue, and addresses the crowd with a speech that combines genuine grievance with fatal arrogance. Why do you worship Leto, she asks, when I am here? Leto has only two children; I have fourteen. Leto wandered as an exile before giving birth; I am a queen in my own city. My father dined with the gods; my husband built these walls with his music. I am happier than any goddess — who could deny it? Even if some of my children were taken, I would still have more than Leto.

The speech is carefully constructed — Ovid gives Niobe genuine rhetorical skill, making her boast persuasive even as the reader recognizes its danger. Her error is precise: she does not merely praise herself but denigrates Leto, a goddess, and does so in the context of disrupting religious worship. This compounds the offense from personal vanity into sacrilege.

Leto, hearing the insult, appeals to her children. Apollo and Artemis respond immediately. Apollo descends to Thebes first. He finds the sons of Niobe outside the city walls — some exercising horses, some wrestling, some practicing with javelins. Ovid narrates each son's death individually: Ismenus, the eldest, is struck while riding; Sipylus hears the arrow's whistle and tries to flee but is caught; Phaedimus and Tantalus (named for his grandfather) are wrestling and die in each other's arms, pierced by a single shaft; Alphenor rushes to help his brothers and falls; Damasichthon is hit in the knee and, as he tries to pull the arrow out, receives another through his throat; Ilioneus, the youngest, prays to the gods for mercy, and Apollo pities him but the arrow has already been released.

The city is in chaos. Amphion, learning of his sons' deaths, kills himself with his own sword (in some versions; in others, Apollo kills him). Niobe rushes to the scene and throws herself over the bodies of her sons. Her grief is ferocious, but even now, her pride survives. She declares that even in her sorrow she still surpasses Leto — she still has her seven daughters.

Artemis strikes. The daughters die as swiftly as the sons. In Ovid's account, they are standing near their brothers' biers, mourning, when the arrows fall. One is hit while pulling an arrow from her brother's body. Another tries to comfort her mother and collapses mid-word. Others attempt to flee or to hide. One by one, they fall, until only the youngest remains. Niobe shields her with her body, crying out: "Leave me the youngest! Of all the many, I ask only for the youngest!" But even as she speaks, the last daughter dies.

Niobe sits among the corpses of her fourteen children and her husband. She does not move. The wind does not stir her hair. Her blood drains from her face. Her eyes fix. Her tongue freezes to the roof of her mouth. She turns to stone — not suddenly but gradually, the life departing from her body until she is a rock. A whirlwind carries the stone to Mount Sipylus in Lydia, where it is set on a cliff face. From the rock, water flows perpetually — Niobe's tears, still flowing from a body that has become part of the landscape.

Homer's version (Iliad 24.599-620) is shorter and serves a different narrative purpose. Achilles tells Priam the story to persuade him to eat: "Even Niobe, with her beautiful hair, took thought of food, she who lost twelve children in her halls — six daughters and six sons." Homer's Niobe eventually eats, and Achilles uses this detail to urge the grieving Priam to do the same. The emphasis here falls not on the slaughter but on the aftermath — on the question of how one continues to live after unimaginable loss.

The aftermath of the slaughter raises further questions. The bodies of the Niobids lay unburied for nine days in some traditions (Homer says the people were turned to stone by Zeus, preventing burial), and on the tenth day the gods themselves buried them. This detail — divine burial of divine victims — suggests that the children, innocent of their mother's offense, receive posthumous honor that their mother's pride could not secure for them in life.

The geographic detail of Niobe's petrification on Mount Sipylus carries cultural significance beyond the aetiological explanation of a rock formation. Mount Sipylus was located in Lydia, the homeland of Niobe's father Tantalus, making her final resting place a return to her family's origin. The stone weeps in Lydia, not in Thebes where the children died — suggesting that grief follows the sufferer home, to the place of origin rather than the place of loss.

Symbolism

The Niobe myth is structured around the symbolism of counting — the enumeration of children, the comparison of numbers, and the reduction of those numbers to zero.

Niobe's boast is fundamentally numerical: she has fourteen children; Leto has two. This quantitative comparison expresses a qualitative error — the assumption that divine worth can be measured by mortal standards. The gods do not compete on the terms Niobe sets. Apollo and Artemis, two divine children, can destroy fourteen mortal children, demonstrating that divine quality overwhelms mortal quantity. The systematic, individual killing of each child is itself a form of counting — an answer to Niobe's enumeration that inverts its meaning.

The stone into which Niobe transforms is a symbol of grief pushed beyond the human capacity to express it. Stone represents permanence, silence, and the end of change — a state beyond tears, beyond speech, beyond the possibility of recovery. But the weeping stone — a rock from which water flows — contradicts the silence of stone by preserving the sign of grief in perpetuity. Niobe is neither alive nor dead; she is frozen in a state of permanent mourning, unable to die and unable to stop grieving. This image has been a powerful representations of maternal sorrow in Western culture.

The arrows of Apollo and Artemis carry symbolic associations with sudden death. In Greek thought, when a person died suddenly without visible cause, the death was attributed to the arrows of Apollo (for men) or Artemis (for women). The Niobe myth literalizes this metaphorical convention: Apollo shoots the sons, Artemis shoots the daughters. The division of victims by gender and divine archer reinforces the binary structure that organizes Greek divine pairs — male/female, sun/moon, music/hunting.

Niobe's relationship to her father Tantalus carries symbolic weight. Tantalus, who fed the gods human flesh and stole their secrets, suffered eternal punishment in Tartarus. His daughter's punishment — the destruction of all she values — mirrors and extends his: where Tantalus reached too far into the divine world and was cast down, Niobe reaches too far in her comparison with divinity and loses everything. The family's tragedy is hereditary, suggesting that hubris runs in bloodlines.

Mount Sipylus, where the Niobe rock was located, served as a symbolic boundary between Greek mythology and Anatolian landscape. The identification of a specific natural rock formation with a mythological figure gave the myth a physical anchor in the real world, allowing visitors to see the "tears" flowing from the stone and to experience the myth as a feature of the landscape rather than merely a story.

Cultural Context

The Niobe myth functioned within Greek culture as a primary example of hubris — the transgression of boundaries between mortal and divine that Greek religion considered the gravest of errors.

The concept of hubris in Greek thought was not identical to modern "pride" or "arrogance." Hubris specifically denoted the violation of one's proper place in the cosmic order — claiming divine prerogatives, comparing oneself to gods, or disrupting religious worship. Niobe's offense is precise: she does not merely boast about her children but explicitly claims superiority over a goddess and interferes with that goddess's cult. This specificity matters because Greek religion tolerated a high degree of self-assertion among mortals (heroes regularly boasted of their achievements) but drew an absolute line at comparison with the divine.

The myth's setting in Thebes connects it to the broader Theban mythological cycle, which is characterized by transgression and punishment. Thebes is the city where Oedipus violates the incest taboo, where Pentheus denies Dionysus, and where Niobe challenges Leto. This concentration of mythological offenses in a single city suggests that Thebes functioned in Greek imagination as a cautionary space — a city where the boundaries between mortal and divine were repeatedly tested and violently enforced.

The cult of Leto, which Niobe disrupts, was a genuine feature of Greek religion. Leto was worshipped across the Greek world, particularly at Delphi and Delos (the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis). Her status as the mother of two of the most important Olympian deities gave her cult considerable prestige, and the Niobe myth reinforces this status by demonstrating the consequences of disrespect.

The rock on Mount Sipylus was a real geological feature that ancient travelers identified with Niobe. Pausanias (1.21.3) reports visiting the site and describes a rock face that, from a distance, resembles a weeping woman but from close up is merely a cliff with a stream running over it. This rationalistic observation did not diminish the myth's power; rather, it demonstrates the Greek capacity to maintain mythological associations alongside empirical observation.

The number of Niobe's children varied across sources — Homer says twelve (six and six), Hesiod apparently said twenty, and the common later tradition settled on fourteen (seven and seven). This numerical variation suggests that the specific count was less important than the principle: Niobe had many children and lost them all. The seven-and-seven count may reflect the calendrical significance of the number seven in Greek religious thought.

Niobe's Lydian (Anatolian) origins — her father Tantalus was king of Lydia — connect the myth to the broader Greek engagement with the cultures of Asia Minor. The myth's resolution on Mount Sipylus places its climax outside the Greek mainland, in a region associated with wealth, antiquity, and the origins of civilizations that preceded and influenced Greek culture.

Cross-Tradition Parallels

The destruction of all a parent's children — through divine violence, through the parent's own choices, or through forces that refuse to distinguish guilty from innocent — recurs across traditions. What varies is the question each culture asks through the catastrophe: whether the parent caused it, whether grief can reshape stone, and whether the violence between parent and child can reverse direction.

Mesoamerican — Coatlicue and the Four Hundred Sons

The Aztec birth narrative of Huitzilopochtli inverts the Niobe pattern. Where Niobe's children are destroyed by divine agents acting against the parent, Coatlicue's children — Coyolxauhqui and the Centzon Huitznahua, the four hundred sons — attack their mother. When Coatlicue becomes pregnant from a ball of hummingbird feathers at Coatepec, her children interpret the pregnancy as dishonor and march to kill her. Huitzilopochtli springs from the womb fully armed, beheads Coyolxauhqui, and scatters the four hundred into the sky as stars. In the Greek version, a mother's boast provokes the gods to destroy her children; in the Aztec, the children's rage provokes a god to destroy them in defense of the mother — the same catastrophe viewed from the opposite side.

Persian — Rostam and Sohrab in the Shahnameh

Ferdowsi's tenth-century epic locates child-loss not in divine punishment but in parental choice. Rostam, Iran's greatest champion, fathers a son during a brief union with Tahmineh of Samangan. Pride in his warrior reputation prevents Rostam from revealing his identity when the two meet on opposing sides of a battlefield; Sohrab asks whether the champion facing him is his father, and Rostam denies it. He kills Sohrab in single combat and recognizes his son only by the jeweled armband left with Tahmineh. The difference is instructive: Niobe's pride is verbal — a boast that invites external punishment — while Rostam's pride is a silence that makes him the instrument of his child's death. The Shahnameh needs no gods to deliver the blow.

Chinese — Meng Jiangnu and the Great Wall

The legend of Meng Jiangnu, counted among China's Four Great Folktales and transmitted for over two thousand years, shares with Niobe the conviction that grief has physical force. After her husband Fan Qiliang is conscripted to build the Great Wall under the Qin Dynasty and dies of exhaustion — his body buried within the wall — Meng Jiangnu travels to the site and weeps until a four-hundred-kilometer section collapses, exposing the bones. Both women's sorrow reshapes stone. But the Greek version freezes grief into permanence — Apollo and Artemis leave Niobe weeping forever on Mount Sipylus — while the Chinese version gives grief a destructive, liberating power that shatters what an empire built.

Biblical — Job and the Destruction of Ten Children

The Book of Job opens with a catastrophe that mirrors Niobe's in scale: Job's seven sons and three daughters are killed when a desert wind collapses the house where they feast. A parent who possesses everything loses them all in a single episode. But the frameworks diverge: Niobe's children die because of her transgression; Job's die despite his righteousness — not punishment but a wager about whether faith survives loss. And where Niobe receives no restoration, Job eventually gains seven new sons and three new daughters. The replacement raises a question the Greek myth never asks: can lost children be compensated? Job's new family is presented as divine generosity; read against Niobe's eternal weeping, it feels like a second cruelty.

Inuit — Sedna and the Father's Hand

The Inuit myth of Sedna reverses the direction of parental violence. When Sedna's marriage to a bird-spirit brings storms that threaten her father's kayak, he throws her overboard. As she clings to the gunwale, he cuts off her fingers joint by joint — the severed pieces becoming the seals, walruses, and whales that sustain Inuit life. She sinks to the ocean floor and becomes the goddess who controls all sea creatures. Where Niobe watches helplessly as divine arrows strike, Sedna's father wields the blade himself. And where Niobe's transformation into weeping stone is diminishment — a queen reduced to geology — Sedna's transformation is an apotheosis. The Inuit tradition refuses the Greek conclusion that such destruction produces only grief.

Modern Influence

The Niobe myth has exercised persistent influence on Western art, literature, and cultural discourse as the archetypal narrative of maternal grief and divine punishment.

In sculpture, the Niobe group — a set of Roman copies of a lost Greek original (attributed variously to Scopas or Praxiteles, fourth century BCE) — is preserved in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. These statues, depicting the Niobids in various stages of death and flight, are among the most important surviving examples of Hellenistic pathetic sculpture. Their rediscovery during the Renaissance profoundly influenced European sculpture and the artistic representation of suffering.

In literature, Niobe appears in works from Shakespeare (who references her several times, most memorably in Hamlet: "Like Niobe, all tears") through the Romantic poets and into modern literature. The image of the weeping mother has been invoked by writers addressing war, genocide, and the loss of children in contexts ranging from the English Civil War to the Holocaust. Sylvia Plath and other twentieth-century poets have engaged with the Niobe figure as an image of grief pushed beyond the capacity for expression.

In music, the myth has been set as an opera (by Agostino Steffani, 1688, and by Giovanni Pacini, 1826) and referenced in numerous other musical works. The Niobe story's combination of dramatic action, emotional extremity, and mythological grandeur makes it well suited to operatic treatment.

In psychology, Niobe has been used as a figure for the pathological dimensions of parental pride and for the experience of grief that exceeds the capacity for processing. The concept of petrification through grief — the inability to move, speak, or respond after devastating loss — resonates with clinical descriptions of traumatic shock and dissociative states.

In feminist analysis, the myth has been examined as a story about the punishment of female assertion. Niobe's boast is not qualitatively different from the boasts of male heroes (who routinely claim superiority over rivals), but the consequences are total destruction. Some scholars have argued that the myth encodes a patriarchal warning against female self-assertion; others see it as a critique of divine cruelty that invites sympathy for Niobe rather than condemnation.

The phrase "tears of Niobe" has entered common usage as an expression for inconsolable grief, and the image of the weeping stone is among the recognizable mythological metaphors in Western culture. The geological feature on Mount Sipylus continues to attract visitors, demonstrating the myth's power to transform landscape into narrative — a weeping rock that functions as a permanent monument to grief.

Primary Sources

The Niobe myth is attested across a wide range of ancient sources, from the earliest surviving Greek poetry to late Roman mythography.

The earliest and most authoritative reference appears in Homer's Iliad (24.599-620), where Achilles tells the story to Priam to persuade the grieving king to eat. Homer's account is brief but establishes the essential elements: Niobe had twelve children (six sons, six daughters), Apollo killed the sons and Artemis killed the daughters, the bodies lay unburied for nine days (because Zeus turned the people to stone), and the gods buried them on the tenth. Niobe eventually ate, and she was turned to stone on Mount Sipylus, where she still weeps. Homer's version names twelve children; later traditions would increase the number.

The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (fragments) apparently contained a fuller account, and the lyric poets Sappho and Pindar referenced the myth. Sappho (fragment 142 Voigt) called Niobe and Leto companions — possibly reflecting a pre-tragic version of the myth in which their relationship was more complex. Pindar (Paean 52f) referenced the myth in a context that is now fragmentary.

Sophocles wrote a tragedy called Niobe, now lost except for fragments. The fragments suggest a powerful dramatization of the massacre and its aftermath. Aeschylus also apparently treated the myth in a lost play. The existence of these tragedies confirms that the Niobe story was a major subject in fifth-century Athenian theater.

Ovid's Metamorphoses (6.146-312), composed around 8 CE, provides the fullest surviving literary treatment. Ovid names all fourteen children (seven sons: Ismenus, Sipylus, Phaedimus, Tantalus, Alphenor, Damasichthon, Ilioneus; seven daughters, mostly unnamed or variably named) and narrates each death individually. Ovid's version emphasizes Niobe's rhetoric, the pathos of the children's deaths, and the transformation into stone. This account became the standard reference for later Western retellings.

Apollodorus (Bibliotheca 3.5.6) provides the mythographic summary, listing variant numbers of children from different sources (Hesiod's twenty, Homer's twelve, others' fourteen) and noting that some versions spare one daughter (Chloris). Hyginus (Fabulae 9-10) provides a parallel Latin summary.

Pausanias (1.21.3) provides the topographical evidence, describing the rock on Mount Sipylus that was identified with Niobe. His account includes the rationalistic observation that the rock only resembles a weeping woman from a distance.

Diodorus Siculus (4.74) and Parthenius of Nicaea (Erotica Pathemata 33) provide additional references. Quintus Smyrnaeus (Posthomerica 1.294-306) includes a simile comparing the grief of the Trojans to Niobe's grief.

Archaeological and artistic evidence includes the Niobid Painter's name-vase (a red-figure calyx-krater in the Louvre, c. 460-450 BCE) depicting the massacre of the Niobids, the Niobe group sculptures (Roman copies of a fourth-century BCE Greek original) in the Uffizi, and numerous other vase paintings, relief sculptures, and sarcophagi from the Greek and Roman periods.

Significance

The significance of the Niobe myth lies in its function as the Greek tradition's most concentrated expression of several interrelated themes: the limits of mortal happiness, the danger of hubris, the nature of grief, and the theological problem of disproportionate punishment.

As a myth of hubris, Niobe's story is both specific and general. The specific offense — comparing oneself to a goddess — is a form of transgression that the Greek religious system explicitly prohibited. But the general principle — that extreme happiness invites reversal, that the prosperous should not boast — is a foundational concern of Greek ethical thought from Solon's advice to Croesus (Herodotus 1.32) through Aristotle's analysis of tragic reversal (Poetics). Niobe embodies the Greek insight that the distance between supreme happiness and total devastation can be crossed in a moment.

As a myth of grief, Niobe's transformation into a weeping stone has provided Western culture with its most enduring image of sorrow beyond words. The petrification motif suggests that some losses exceed the human capacity for emotional processing — the body shuts down, movement ceases, but the tears continue. This image has been applied to contexts ranging from individual bereavement to collective trauma, and it remains the reference point for discussions of grief that exceeds the ability to express or recover from it.

The theological dimension of the myth raises uncomfortable questions about divine justice. The punishment is, by any human standard, disproportionate: Niobe's boast, however offensive, does not warrant the death of fourteen children and the petrification of their mother. This disproportion is the myth's point — the gods do not operate by human standards of proportionality, and the gulf between mortal understanding and divine action is the space in which tragedy occurs. Achilles' use of the myth in the Iliad adds another dimension: even after such loss, one must eat, one must continue, one must acknowledge the necessities of the living body even in the midst of overwhelming grief.

The myth's placement in both the Iliad (the culminating work of the Trojan War tradition) and the Metamorphoses (the culminating work of mythological transformation narrative) ensures its centrality to the two literary traditions that most shaped Western engagement with Greek mythology.

The myth's power also lies in its treatment of innocence destroyed by another's transgression. The children of Niobe committed no offense; they die because of their mother's boast. This disproportion between the guilty party and the actual victims is characteristic of Greek divine punishment, where the consequences of hubris fall not on the transgressor alone but on those they love most.

The myth's placement in Homer's Iliad — told by Achilles to Priam — gives it a secondary significance as a story about the function of stories themselves. Achilles uses the Niobe myth not as a warning but as a consolation: even the most bereaved mother eventually ate. This instrumental use of myth — narrative deployed to achieve a practical purpose — reflects the Greek understanding that stories serve the living as well as commemorating the dead.

Connections

The Niobe myth connects to multiple pages across satyori.com through its characters, genealogical implications, and thematic resonances.

Apollo and Artemis are the agents of destruction, and their roles in this myth connect to their broader mythology as gods who protect their mother's honor and enforce divine prerogatives.

Niobe's character page carries the genealogical and biographical details that the story page dramatizes in narrative form.

Tantalus, Niobe's father, connects the myth to the broader cycle of Tantalid transgression that includes Pelops, the House of Atreus, and ultimately Agamemnon's murder and the Oresteia.

Tartarus, where Tantalus suffers his eternal punishment, provides the underworld context for the family's pattern of divine transgression and retribution.

Arachne provides the closest thematic parallel in Ovid's Metamorphoses — both women challenge divine superiority and are transformed. The two myths are juxtaposed in Ovid's Book 6.

The House of Atreus page connects through Tantalus's genealogy: Niobe's brother Pelops is the founder of the Pelopid line that produces the cursed kings of Mycenae.

Oedipus and the Theban cycle connect through the myth's Theban setting. Niobe's Thebes is the same city where Oedipus will later rule and where the Seven will later war.

The Marsyas myth and the Midas donkey ears story connect through Apollo's pattern of punishing those who challenge or deny his superiority.

The Calydonian Boar Hunt connects through the Theban setting and through Artemis's role as divine punisher — Artemis sends the Calydonian Boar to punish Oeneus for a similar offense (neglecting her worship).

The Binding of Prometheus connects through the theme of divine punishment that seems disproportionate to the offense, raising questions about the nature of divine justice that both myths leave unresolved.

Peleus connects through the broader Tantalid genealogy, and Iphigenia's sacrifice connects through the pattern of parents whose actions lead to the destruction of their children.

The Calydonian Boar Hunt connects through Artemis's role as divine punisher for neglect of worship. The Binding of Prometheus connects through the theme of disproportionate divine punishment. Iphigenia's sacrifice connects through the pattern of parents whose actions lead to their children's destruction — though in Niobe's case, the destruction is the direct punishment rather than a military sacrifice.

The Death and Apotheosis of Heracles connects through the theme of a mortal's relationship with the gods producing both honor and catastrophe. Lycaon provides another example of a mortal who transgresses divine boundaries — in his case, by serving human flesh to Zeus — and suffers transformation as punishment.

Further Reading