Scroll I. Attica
subject heading(s): Niobe; Mount
Sipylos; pentheîn ‘lament’; katēphēs ‘with sunken eyes’
The picturing of Niobe as a rock exuding the tears of a fresh-water
mountain stream is attested in the
Homeric Iliad 24.614–617:
νῦν δέ που ἐν πέτρῃσιν ἐν οὔρεσιν οἰοπόλοισιν
ἐν Σιπύλῳ, ὅθι φασὶ θεάων ἔμμεναι εὐνὰς
νυμφάων, αἵ τ’ ἀμφ’ Ἀχελώϊον ἐρρώσαντο,
ἔνθα λίθος περ ἐοῦσα θεῶν ἐκ κήδεα πέσσει.
And now, somewhere amidst the rocks, on the desolate heights,
in Sipylos, where they say goddesses have places to sleep,
the goddess nymphs, the ones who dance on the banks of the Akhelōios,
there does she \[= Niobe\], though she has been turned into stone,
digest her sorrows inflicted by the gods.
I offer some detailed comments on this passage in HC
1§34. Relevant is the
use of the word tēkesthai ‘dissolve’ in
Sophocles’ Antigone (828)
picturing a weeping Niobe in a state of petrifaction. This word, as I
analyze it in HC
2§§254–255 and
2§§346–348, comparing parallel wording elsewhere in Greek poetry,
conjures the image of a cold mountain stream that flows without
interruption from the heights where Niobe turned into stone; her tears
are the uninterrupted source of that eternal stream.
Here is an epitome from my interpretation of other passages referring to
the ‘dissolving’ of Niobe in Greek poetry (HC
1§34):
The sorrows of Niobe are so overwhelming that she continues to weep
eternally even after the gods turn her into stone. A petrified figure
should be drained of emotion, as we read in the framing narrative
of Iliad 24.601–620:
when the population in the land of Niobe is petrified, there can be no
weeping, no mourning, and therefore no funeral, so that the gods
themselves must conduct a funeral and bury the children of Niobe. But
Niobe, even after she is petrified, is like a human figure in that she
continues to dissolve into tears. So overwhelming are her sorrows.
Unlike the dissolving of a human in mourning, however, this petrified
figure takes forever to dissolve because the tears that pour out of her
sunken eyes flow out of an inexhaustible source of sorrows.
