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Hollywood Has Nothing on the Insanity of the Real Greek Myths

Khalid Elhassan July 21, 2022 38 min

24. Greek Deities Didn’t Like It When Mortals Talked Smack About Them

Mythology - An ancient statue of Niobe — An ancient statue of Niobe. Pinterest

Niobe, in Greek mythology, was a daughter of Tantalus, who got his own dose of terrible divine punishment from the gods – see previous entry. She was a queen of Thebes, and was blessed with great fortune. However, she committed the sin of hubris – a mixture of extreme pride, dangerous overconfidence, and overweening arrogance. For that, the gods subjected her to a terrible punishment. It was a great fall for a blessed mortal who in addition to her noble birth and descent from a king, was also a stunning beauty. She took great pride in both her good birth and her good looks.

What Niobe took the greatest pride in was her large brood of fourteen children – seven sons, and seven daughters. One day, the people of Thebes went out to celebrate the feast of Latona – a religious festival in honor of Leto, the mother of the gods Apollo and Artemis. Unfortunately, Niobe uttered something impious: she mocked Leto. That impiety shocked the Thebans, and they returned to their daily pursuits in awestruck silence and trepidation. As seen below, they had good reason for trepidation, because as Niobe found out, taunting Leto turned out to be a very bad idea.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.