the daughter of Tantalus, King of Lydia. The incidents in her life are related differently by different authors; but the following is the simple legend given by Homer.—She was married to Amphion, King of Thebes, and bore to her husband six sons and six daughters. Proud of the number of her children, she began to assert a scornful superiority over Latona, who was a less happy wife. Heremon Apollo and Diana, enraged at the insult cast upon their mother, bent their bows, and slew the sons and daughters of the doting Niobe. The childless queen, in her distracted sorrow, found her way eastward to her father's kingdom. As she stood one day on Mount Sipylus, in the motionless attitude of mute despair, she was changed by the commiserating Jupiter into stone. There for many ages afterwards the simple-minded believer of legends could still detect in the rough outline of a crag the weeping figure of the unhappy Niobe. This story was the subject of several ancient sculptures. One of these, a group of fourteen statues, representing the mother in the midst of her dying children, was dug up at Rome at some date before 1583, and was conveyed to Florence in 1775. It now stands in the Uffizi gallery of the latter city, exciting by its grandeur the admiration of connoisseurs. (See ARTS, Fine.) Various conjectures have been made regarding the authorship and the original position of these statues. Winckelmann supposed that they were the work of Scopas; and the English architect Cockeckell has shown that they were probably arranged on the tympanum of a temple.