[595]
[597] ἔνθεν, ‘from which.’
[598] τοίχου τοῦ ἑτέρου, see note on I 219.
[603] τῇ περ κτλ., ‘although her twelve children’ etc.
[608] τεκέειν, understand Leto as subject.
614-617. These lines look like a later addition to the story just recited; for nothing has previously been said which would lead one to believe that Niobe herself was turned to stone; in fact the point of the whole recital lies in the statement that Niobe forgot her sorrow enough to eat food (l. 613). And how could a stone eat food? as a scholiast pertinently suggests. The Alexandrians (Aristophanes, Aristarchus) rejected the lines altogether.
A later myth does make Niobe herself one of those turned to stone. The scholiast, repeating her story, adds: “So Zeus took pity on Niobe who was weeping over such a great misfortune and changed her to stone, as even up to the present time she is seen by all on Phrygian [“τῆς Φρυγίας”] Sipylus, shedding fountains of tears.” Pausanias (2d century A. D.) was acquainted with this Niobe, and repeats the story of the tears (I, 21, 5; VIII, 2, 3), evidently alluding to a stream of water trickling down over a face of natural rock. But it seems to be hardly possible to-day to identify “with any approach to certainty or even probability” such a Niobe as he describes. The (formerly) so-called Niobe of Mt. Sipylus is really a sculpture representing “Mother Plastene,” i. e. Cybele [cf. Frazer, Pausanias's Description of Greece (London, 1898), vol. iii, pp. 552-555].
[616] ἐρρώσαντο, here ‘dance’ § 184).
[617] θεῶν ἒκ κήδεα πέσσει, ‘she nurses her god-given sorrows.’
[630] ὅσσος ἔην οἷός τε, ‘how tall and how handsome he was.’
[635] λέξον, root “λεχ”, ‘make me to lie down,’ ‘give me a bed.’
[638] With this long wakefulness of Priam a scholiast compares the vigil of Odysseus, who, while piloting his raft, went without sleep for seventeen days, and then swam with the aid of a life-buoy (Leucothea's veil) for three days continuously (Od. 5.278, 279, 388 ff.).
