With all of her children dead around her, Niobe is described as sitting motionless among the bodies for days, unable to eat, sleep or move, until the gods take pity, or in a harsher reading simply complete her punishment, by turning her to stone even as she continues weeping. Ancient sources locate the transformation on Mount Sipylus in Lydia, her father Tantalus's homeland, and travelers as late as the Roman period, Pausanias among them, describe a rock formation on the mountainside that resembles a grieving woman's face, with water running down it that observers read as Niobe's tears continuing even through solid stone.
Whether the water is genuinely a natural spring feature of the rock or an interpretation later travelers imposed on an already famous myth is not something the ancient accounts distinguish, and the site was shown to visitors as Niobe herself well into the Roman era regardless. The story became proverbial for grief carried past the point of expression, "all tears" and "a Niobe of nations" both entering later literary usage as shorthand for inconsolable, ongoing mourning, and for the specific danger of pride measured against the gods rather than against other mortals.