HKB
so many deaths, I am the conqueror.” {Thus} she spoke; {when} the string twanged from the bent bow, which affrighted all but Niobe alone; she {became} bold by her misfortunes.
The sisters were standing in black array, with their hair dishevelled, before the biers[43] of their brothers. One of these, drawing out the weapon sticking in her entrails, about to die, swooned away, with her face placed upon her brother. Another, endeavoring to console her wretched parent, was suddenly silent, and was doubled together with an invisible wound; and did not close her mouth, until after the breath had departed. Another, vainly flying, falls down; another dies upon her sister; another lies hid; another you might see trembling. And {now} six being put to death, and having received different wounds, the last {only} remains; her mother covering her with all her body, {and} with all her garments, cries, “Leave me but one, and that the youngest; the youngest only do I ask out of so many, and {that but} one.” And while she was entreating, she, for whom she was entreating, was slain. Childless, she sat down among her dead sons and daughters and husband, and became hardened by her woes. The breeze moves no hair {of hers}; in her features is a color without blood; her eyes stand unmoved in her sad cheeks; in her form there is no {appearance} of life. Her tongue itself, too, congeals within, together with her hardened palate, and the veins cease to be able to be moved. Her neck can neither be bent, nor can her arms give any motion, nor her feet move. Within her entrails, too, it is stone.
Still did she weep on; and, enveloped in a hurricane of mighty wind, she was borne away to her native land. There, fixed on the top of a mountain,[44] she dissolves; and even yet does the marble distil tears.
[Footnote 31: Had known her.--Ver. 148. This was the more likely, as Tantalus, the father of Niobe, was king of both Phrygia and Lydia.]
[Footnote 32: Sipylus.--Ver. 149. This was the name of both a city and a mountain of Lydia.]
[Footnote 33: Go all of you.--Ver. 159. Clarke renders the words ‘Ismenides, ite frequentes,’ ‘Go, ye Theban ladies in general.’]
[Footnote 34: Sister of the Pleiades.--Ver. 174. Taygete, one of the Pleiades, was the mother of Niobe.]
[Footnote 35: As my father-in-law.--Ver. 176. Because Jupiter was the father of her husband, Amphion.]
[Footnote 36: Seven daughters.--Ver. 182. Tzetzes enumerates fourteen daughters of Niobe, and gives their names.]
[Footnote 37: When in travail.--Ver. 187. She alludes to the occasion on which Latona fled from the serpent Python, which Juno, in her jealousy, had sent against her; and when Delos, which had hitherto been a floating island, became immovable, for the convenience of Latona, in labor with Apollo and Diana. That island was said to have received its name from the Greek, δῆλος, ‘manifest,’ or ‘appearing,’ from having risen to the surface of the sea on that occasion.]
[Footnote 38: Like her father’s.--Ver. 213. Latona alludes to one of the crimes of Tantalus, the father of Niobe, who was accused of having indiscreetly divulged the secrets of the Gods.]
[Footnote 39: Gives rein.--Ver. 230. This was done with the intention of making his escape.]
[Footnote 40: Glowing with oil.--Ver. 241. Clarke renders this line, ‘Were gone to the juvenile work of neat wrestling.’ It would be hard to say what ‘neat’ wrestling is. He seems not to have known, that the ‘Palæstra’ was called ‘nitida,’ as shining with the oil which the wrestlers used for making their limbs supple, and the more difficult for their antagonist to grasp. Juvenal gives the epithet ‘ceromaticum’ to the neck of the athlete, or wrestler, which word means ‘rubbed with wrestler’s oil.’]
[Footnote 41: Now had they brought.--Ver. 243-4. Clarke thus translates ‘Et jam contulerant arcto luctantia nexu Pectora pectoribus;’ ‘And now they had clapped breast to breast, struggling in a close hug.’]