‘Sing, Muses, sing to me a story of Olympus and the deathless gods who govern earth, sea and sky.’
So asks young Melanthus as he bundles himself up against the cold on Mount Sipylos. He has not come alone; he leads Nestor by the arm, helping the old king navigate the mountain path on frail, faltering legs.
Nestor calls Melanthus grandson, and the young boy does not correct him. The truth – the thirteen generations that separate them – it would only confuse the old man now, and he has already lived too much of his long life in a fog.
This desire, this compulsion, to visit Sipylos has become Nestor’s only constant.
Why, Melanthus cannot say. Nestor will not explain; perhaps he does not even know himself. And yet, as they walk, Melanthus notices the old king’s mumblings cease, his eyes focus. Senility burning off like morning mist.
And then they finish the climb. It is a barren tor, but for a single hunk of stone. Only when they get closer does Melanthus realise that it is a statue: a woman kneeling. Perhaps it is just the sleet and the rain, but her eyes seem to water.
And now tears start to stain Nestor’s face too.
‘Who is she?’ Melanthus asks.
But it is not the old king who replies. Another figure has joined them on the tor and as sure as Melanthus knows day from night, he knows him for a god: Apollo, the archer. His bow is slung across a shoulder.
‘She is Niobe,’ Apollo explains. ‘Ask the Muses. They will tell you of her punishment, of her grief, and of my gift to her grandson, Nestor.’
The Muses’s song starts with screaming and the spilling of blood. But it is not upon the battlefield. It is upon two birthing beds.
One is in Thebes. The other in Delos.
One is covered with silken sheets, attended by midwives and priestesses. The other is simply the hard earth, a dark cave attended only by beasts and howling winds.
On one bed strains a mortal, the princess Niobe. On the other, a deathless goddess, the titan Leto.
And when nine days pass, when their labours finally end, when the threads of life unspool, all effort spent, the difference becomes most stark.
One bed sees the birth of two. The other fourteen.
All Thebes marvels when Niobe presents her brood at court: seven perfect boys and seven perfect girls. They say the children are the foundation stones on which Thebes’s future will be built. They say no woman has produced such progeny since Gaia of the good earth – she who birthed the world itself.
And Niobe breathes deep the court’s delight.
But it is merely the popular breeze and before long, the wind turns, bringing word of that other birth to Thebes. The birth of gods: the archer twins, Apollo and Artemis.
For years then, all the world fetes their mother, Leto. The details of her tryst with Zeus – they become sonnets that lovers share. The woes of her exile by Hera – they become tragedies that playwright’s stage. And as for her devotion to her children – it becomes the exemplar of motherhood for mortal and deathless alike.
Niobe seethes. Thebes has all but forgotten her children.
And so one evening, when she hears praise of Leto once again, she snaps:
‘I have carried seven times her children, so what would Leto know of motherhood that I do not know seven times over?’
It is a fateful boast.
What is it about hubris that so attracts the gods’ attention? Are boasts like a sheen of oil, floating atop the spoken sea? Perhaps Apollo spies Niobe’s words in the breaking waves on Delos’s shore.
Or is it that when they say all words are winged, a boast is some great feathered thing, an ocean bird far-ranging and borne aloft on so much hot air? Perhaps it is with an arrow from his bow that Apollo brings down the boast and learns of the insult to his mother.
Leto’s fury is terrifying.
Motherhood has cost her too much to hear it slighted by a mere mortal. She demands retribution. She demands her children tip the scales.
Niobe’s seven perfect boys are hunting in the forest when they hear the rattle of shafts in a quiver. Seven adamantine arrows from the forge of Hephaestus. The only mercy Artemis offers is a quick death.
Apollo carries the quiverful for Niobe’s seven perfect girls, but these arrows he has fletched himself, each tipped with pestilence. You see, he is not merely a god of medicine, but the tail of that coin too: a god of epidemic. When an army is struck with sickness and plague, it is Apollo’s barrage that has laid them low. He scores bullseyes with blister, boil and bruise.
Niobe has only just learnt of the slaughter of her boys when her eldest girl collapses.
Before dusk falls, she has lost three daughters. Before day dawns, another three till only one child is left, her last born daughter, Chloris.
In desperation, Niobe climbs to the heights of Mount Sipylos to pray for some deliverance, to beg some explanation for this suffering reaped upon her family.
And Leto is ready to oblige.
‘You have only one child now, Niobe, whereas I have two. So what could you know of motherhood that I do not know twice over.’
But Leto’s arithmetic is wrong. There is something of motherhood that she will never know greater than Niobe. Not merely twice over. Not merely seven times over. It is beyond all counting. For Leto’s children are deathless gods and so she will never know the grief of losing a child.
That sinking weight in Niobe’s stomach that drives her too her knees. That freezes her muscles and fuses her bones. It robs her of every movement. She petrifies. Stone weathered by the wind, overgrown by the moss.
Apollo watches her long petrification, and he recalls his own mother on the shore of Delos. Her stillness. Her silence. The grief of her exile.
And he feels something almost like regret.
So, he rebalances the scales.
The end of the Muses’s story is lost in a thud. It is the sound of Nestor sinking to his knees till he and Niobe are one and the same. Statues unmoving.
‘Those years I gave you were a reparation,’ Apollo says, confused at this lack of appreciation for his generosity, his magnanimity. ‘Thirteen generations. One for each of your aunts and uncles. For the siblings of your mother, Chloris.’
And still Nestor does not move, does not reply.
Apollo turns to young Melanthus then, searching for some answer. But what could a boy say to make a god understand his error, the fault in his arithmetic. How could a boy explain that, like his mother, Apollo too has never known the grief of losing a child.
But Nestor has. The fog of his age has cleared completely and now he remembers. Thirteen generations he has lived, so how many generations has he seen die? His children, his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren and on and on and on.
His grief is not twice Niobe’s.
It is not seven times Niobe’s.
It is beyond all counting.
Commissioned by HistoryHit for The Ancients podcast
Written by Andrew Hulse