Leto

Leto's importance in cult is as the mother of the twin archer-gods Apollo and Artemis, and her worship is generally bound up with theirs. The story of her persecuted wandering, unable to find any land willing to risk Hera's anger by sheltering her labour until the floating island of Delos received her, made Delos one of the holiest places in the Greek world, a Panhellenic sanctuary of Apollo whose sanctity in the historical period forbade both birth and death on the island.

Leto had her own strong local cult in Lycia in southern Anatolia, where the Letoon near Xanthos was the chief federal sanctuary of the Lycian League, and where a local tale, retold by Ovid, had her turn insolent peasants who fouled her drinking-water into frogs. The Romans called her Latona. Delos itself preserves physical evidence of Leto's cult: the Sanctuary of Apollo there included, alongside the god's own precinct, structures associated with his mother, and the island's Sacred Lake, drained only in the twentieth century, was traditionally linked in antiquity to her labour, though modern archaeology treats such specific identifications of individual features with the myth cautiously, as pious topography rather than settled fact.

Leto's revenge on Niobe is one of the most frequently retold cruelties in Greek myth, and it survives through several independent strands of evidence rather than one single source. The core story, that Niobe, queen of Thebes and proud mother of many children, boasted of her fertility above Leto's own two, provoking Apollo and Artemis to kill every one of Niobe's sons and daughters with their arrows, is referenced already in Homer's Iliad, where Achilles cites Niobe's grief to comfort the bereaved King Priam, showing the story was already familiar audience knowledge in the earliest surviving Greek epic. Later sources add that the grief-stricken Niobe was turned to stone, and ancient travelers, including the geographer Pausanias, identified an actual rock formation on Mount Sipylus in Lydia, in modern Turkey, as the petrified, eternally weeping Niobe, a natural feature whose water-streaked appearance was read by ancient viewers as the stone mother's endless tears.

The myth also left a lasting mark on Greek art: a celebrated group of large marble sculptures depicting the death of Niobe's children, known collectively as the Niobids and now held chiefly in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, illustrates how central the subject became to Greek and Roman sculptors, and the story's popularity on painted pottery was significant enough that scholars have given the conventional name the Niobid Painter to an anonymous fifth century BCE Athenian vase painter identified purely by the distinctive Niobid scenes attributed to his workshop. Between a line in Homer, a mountain identified by ancient travelers, and a modern art-historical attribution built around the subject, few myths connected to Leto left as wide a trail of surviving evidence as her revenge on a boastful mother.