Latona

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Story in short – Leto ( Latona in the Latin ) is a Titan – one of the older gods – and the daughter of Phoebe the moon and Coeus whose Latin name is Polus, the North and South Poles.
Her sister is Asteria who is the last of the old gods to leave Earth in disgust at the general deterioration of almost everything and who is now in the stars as Virgo, the Celestial Virgin. Her return to Earth would herald the return to a new Golden Age, the way it was under the rule of Saturn when people were kind and everyone was happy. It is greatly hoped for but it hasn’t happened yet .

Meanwhile

Latona is pregnant and with twins by Jupiter. Juno finds this situation quite intolerable both due to annoyance at her husband’s infidelities and because the unborn children would combine two lots of Greek god royalty and she suspects they would outshine her own two children. These two children of Jupiter and Juno are both slightly problematic – Mars the god of War is disliked by absolutely everyone and his brother, Hephaestus the Smith, is a talented craftsman but is lame and prefers a quiet life, making things, and is not obvious Ruler Of the Universe material .

So she did what ruling families always do (not least in Imperial Rome from where Ovid was writing) and decided to eliminate the competition. She made the Earth promise not to let Latona give birth anywhere and she gets a promise from the sea as well that Latona can not give birth in its waters and neither of them dare to defy Juno. She also kidnaps the goddess of childbirth.

So Latona is roaming the world – stateless and a refugee – unable to give birth anywhere on earth or even in the water,

Finally she comes to Delos which is a floating island and so, in a sense, neither land nor sea.
Even here the people want to drive her off for fear that Juno would not exactly see it that way, but Latona in desperation persuades them with the promise that the children when born would be so Divine that people would be visiting the island just to see their birthplace and the tourist trade would benefit greatly. So the Delians taking the long view, allow her to stay.

There was still the problem that the goddess of childbirth was in the custody of Juno and being told to keep her legs together so obstructing the birth of anyone anywhere … but finally between an olive tree and a date palm on the island of Delos, Latona managed to give birth to Artemis who the Romans call Diana.
Diana being a goddess grew quickly and was able to act as a midwife to her mother and help her give birth to her twin, Apollo, although his birth still takes thirteen nights.

So after all her wandering and much suffering,the twins were finally born and the sanctuary between the two tree on the island of Delos – which is no longer a floating island but attached to the sea floor by giant pillars – did become a major pilgrimage centre in the ancient world and over the centuries has sold a heap of souvenirs to the pious and the simply curious.

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Latona and the frogs

So now Latona has twins to feed and carry around because she is still fleeing Juno and without any home or any one that will take her in and is wandering the Earth as a refugee

Somewhere in Lycia ( modern Turkey ), the country of the Chimera, and now desperately thirty under the hot sun – she finds a small lake. Countryfolk there were cutting rushes but when she bent down to drink from the lake they went to chase her away

She has something to say about that – one of the epic speeches of all time

 ‘Why do you forbid me your waters? The use of water is everyone’s right. Nature has not made the sun, or the air, or the clear waves, private things. I come for a public gift, and yet I beg you to grant it to me as a suppliant. I was not preparing to bathe my limbs and my weary body here, only to quench my thirst. My mouth lacks moisture from speaking, my throat is dry, and there’s scarcely a path here for speech. A drink of water would be nectar to me, and I would bear witness to accepting life from it, as well: you will be giving life from your waves. Let these children move you, also, who stretch their little arms out from my breast.’

But this plea does not work on them. They paddle their feet in the water deliberately to muddy it and make it unfit to drink

She – being a goddess even though friendless and destitude – turns them into frogs

There is a huge fountain representing this scene built in 1670. It is called the Latona Fountain and is the centrepiece of the gardens …

    At Versailles .  Go figure …

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Latona and Niobe

This unhappy incident happened when the twins were grown up, Apollo had become the god of the sun and Diana of the moon and the fores , and both were spectacularly good at archery.

Juno by now was off persecuting some other unlucky woman on whom her awful husband’s eye had lighted and Latona had found a home and was being worshipped as a local goddess

All would seem to be going well enough but Niobe, Queen of Thebes, on seeing the women of the city taking laurels down the street to worship at Latona’s shrine, threw a massive hissy fit.

Niobe considered herself, being the daughter of Tantalus and of one of the Pleiades, to be quite the equal if not superior to Latona. Better bred – herself personally more beautiful, more powerful and very much richer with a nicer home and in every way more deserving of being worshiped than Latona – but above all and the thing she was most proud of -to have produced an awful lot more children. Seven grown sons and seven daughters – as opposed to Latona’s paltry two.

So she tells the women of Thebes to take the laurel leaves from their hair and stop the ridiculous worshiping of this practically childless woman and they dare not disobey the queen so they have to leave the rite half-finished – just muttering the rest of it to themselves.

Latona is NOT pleased by any of this and has a word with her twins – they needed no second telling and were on their way to Thebes before their mother had even stopped complaining.

On the plain outside Thebes where the princes of the city were wearing their royal purple cloaks and exercising and showing off with tricks on their horse , the eldest suddenly clutched at his chest and slipped slowly over the horse’s right shoulder, the end of a feathered arrow sticking out between his ribs.

Then ensues a scene of carnage described in graphic anatomical detail which ends in all the sons of Niobe – one by one – being hunted down and killed by either Apollo the Archer or his equally lethal sister, Diana, the Divine Huntress.

Their bodies are piled in a heap. This is hideous and tragic and you would think at this point that Niobe would be quiet but she throws herself on the bodies of her sons weeping and lamenting but even in the middle of her grief she can’t help pointing out that she has a heap of daughters so she still has loads more children than Latona. The psychotic twins of course hear her and start shooting at the girls until every single one of them is dead or dying too .

Niobe, completely broken by this, sitst among the bodies of all her children, frozen in grief. She is turned to marble but still she weeps and a whirlwind comes and takes her away to her home country of Lydia – to a mountain top where a stream still flows from out of the white marble

Here’s the thing – Apollo and Diana are rather like the Kray twins – you couldn’t say they were nice people but they were always completely devoted to their mother. A.G.

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And that is all the stories we have about Latona

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TEXT

Then, inside the borders of Lycia, home of the Chimaera, as the fierce sun scorched the fields, the goddess, weary from her long struggle, and parched by the radiant heat, felt her thirst: also her hungry children had drunk all her rich milk. By chance she saw a smallish lake in a deep valley. Countrymen were there, gathering bushy osiers, rushes, and the fine marsh sedges. The Titan’s daughter approached, and putting her knee to the ground, rested, to enjoy a drink of the cool water. The group of rustics denied it to her. The goddess, denied, spoke. ‘Why do you forbid me your waters? The use of water is everyone’s right. Nature has not made the sun, or the air, or the clear waves, private things. I come for a public gift, and yet I beg you to grant it to me as a suppliant. I was not preparing to bathe my limbs and my weary body here, only to quench my thirst. My mouth lacks moisture from speaking, my throat is dry, and there’s scarcely a path here for speech. A drink of water would be nectar to me, and I would bear witness to accepting life from it, as well: you will be giving life from your waves. Let these children move you, also, who stretch their little arms out from my breast.’

And it chanced that they did stretch out their arms. Who would not have been moved by the goddess’s winning words? Yet, despite her prayers they persisted in denying her, with threats, if she did not take herself off, and added insults besides. Not content with that, they also stirred the pool with their hands and feet, and churned up the soft mud from the depths, by leaping about, maliciously. Anger forgot thirst, for now the daughter of Coeus could not bear to beg from the unworthy, nor speak in words inferior to those of a goddess, and stretching her palms to the heavens, she said ‘Live in that swamp for ever!’ It happened as the goddess wished: It is their delight to be under the water, now to submerge their bodies completely in the deep pool, now to show their heads, now to swim on the surface. Often they squat on the edges of the marsh, often retreat to the cool lake, but now as before they employ their ugly voices in quarrelling, and shamefully, even though they are under the water, from under the water they try out their abuse. Now their voices are also hoarse, their inflated throats are swollen, and their croaking distends their wide mouths. Their shoulders and heads meet, and their necks appear to have vanished. Their backs are green; their bellies, the largest part of their body, are white, and, as newly made frogs, they leap in their muddy pool.

Bk VI:313-381 The story of Latona and the Lycians

Now all men and women are indeed afraid of the anger manifested by divine being, and all pay more respect to the great power of the goddess, the mother of the twins. As often happens, because of recent events they tell old stories, and one says ‘In Lycia’s fertile fields, in ancient times, also, the farmers spurned the goddess, and not without suffering for it. The thing is not well known, it is true, because the men were unknown, nevertheless, it was wonderful. I myself saw the place, and the lake made notable by the strangeness of it, since my father, getting old, and unable to endure the journey, had ordered me to collect some choice cattle from there, and one of the men of that country had offered himself as a guide. While I crossed the pastureland with him, there was an old altar, black with ashes, standing in the middle of a lake, surrounded by trembling reeds. My guide stopped and, shivering with fear, said in a murmur ‘Have mercy on me!’ and I, similarly, said in a murmur ‘Have mercy!’

Then I asked him whether it was an altar to the Naiads, Faunus, or a local god, and my friend replied ‘Young man, it is no mountain spirit in this altar. She calls it hers, whom the queen of heaven once banned from the world, and whom vagrant Delos, a lightly floating island, would barely accept, at her prayer. There, between Pallas’s olive tree and a date-palm, Latona bore her twins, against their step-mother Juno’s will. Having endured her labour, even then she fled Juno, carrying the divine twins clasped to her breast.

Then, inside the borders of Lycia, home of the Chimaera, as the fierce sun scorched the fields, the goddess, weary from her long struggle, and parched by the radiant heat, felt her thirst: also her hungry children had drunk all her rich milk. By chance she saw a smallish lake in a deep valley. Countrymen were there, gathering bushy osiers, rushes, and the fine marsh sedges. The Titan’s daughter approached, and putting her knee to the ground, rested, to enjoy a drink of the cool water. The group of rustics denied it to her. The goddess, denied, spoke. ‘Why do you forbid me your waters? The use of water is everyone’s right. Nature has not made the sun, or the air, or the clear waves, private things. I come for a public gift, and yet I beg you to grant it to me as a suppliant. I was not preparing to bathe my limbs and my weary body here, only to quench my thirst. My mouth lacks moisture from speaking, my throat is dry, and there’s scarcely a path here for speech. A drink of water would be nectar to me, and I would bear witness to accepting life from it, as well: you will be giving life from your waves. Let these children move you, also, who stretch their little arms out from my breast.’

And it chanced that they did stretch out their arms. Who would not have been moved by the goddess’s winning words? Yet, despite her prayers they persisted in denying her, with threats, if she did not take herself off, and added insults besides. Not content with that, they also stirred the pool with their hands and feet, and churned up the soft mud from the depths, by leaping about, maliciously. Anger forgot thirst, for now the daughter of Coeus could not bear to beg from the unworthy, nor speak in words inferior to those of a goddess, and stretching her palms to the heavens, she said ‘Live in that swamp for ever!’ It happened as the goddess wished: It is their delight to be under the water, now to submerge their bodies completely in the deep pool, now to show their heads, now to swim on the surface. Often they squat on the edges of the marsh, often retreat to the cool lake, but now as before they employ their ugly voices in quarrelling, and shamefully, even though they are under the water, from under the water they try out their abuse. Now their voices are also hoarse, their inflated throats are swollen, and their croaking distends their wide mouths. Their shoulders and heads meet, and their necks appear to have vanished. Their backs are green; their bellies, the largest part of their body, are white, and, as newly made frogs, they leap in their muddy pool.

THE LEGEND OF LATONA

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Latona, mother of Apollo and Diana and mistress of Jupiter, was forced to flee owing to the jealousy of her rival Juno. One day, after arriving in present-day Turkey, she approached a pool in a marsh to drink the water. Local peasants prevented her and in her fury she laid a curse on them which changed them into frogs. It was this episode, recounted by Ovid in the Book VI of his Metamorphoses, which inspired the Latona fountain.

​The rivalry between Latona and Juno

Latona, known as Leto in Greek mythology, was the daughter of the Titan couple Coeus and Phoebe. She became the mistress of Jupiter and conceived two children by him, Diana and Apollo. 

When she discovered this pregnancy, Juno, Jupiter’s wife, was filled with fury. She decreed exile from the universe for her rival, forbidding any land from accepting her to give birth there. Condemned to perpetual flight, Latona began an endless wandering across the Earth, before managing to find a temporary refuge on the island of Delos where she gave birth to Apollo and Diana. 

Her two twins had hardly seen the light of day when Latona had to flee once again to escape from the fury of Juno. Her wanderings took her to the border of Lycia, and it was here that the episode occurred which is illustrated in the garden of Versailles.

The encounter between Latona and the peasants of Lycia

During her wanderings, Latona one day reached Lycia, a region in Asia Minor located in present-day southern Turkey. Exhausted and parched, she decided to halt and saw down in a valley a pond around which peasants were busy gathering rushes and algae. Attracted by its clear water, she went to drink from it. But the peasants objected and forbade her from drinking from the pond. Surprised, Latona tried to appease then by saying:

“Why do you forbid me this water? Water belongs to everyone. Good and wise nature made for all of us the air, the light and the waters. I only want to use what is every person’s right but here I have to beg you for it as if it was a favour. I do not intend to wash my exhausted body but only to quench my thirst. My mouth is dry and I can hardly talk. This water will be like nectar for me; let me drink it and I will owe you my life. Oh! Let yourselves be moved by these two children at my breast who reach out their feeble arms to you.”

Unmoved by these supplications, the peasants persisted in their refusal. They ordered Latona to leave the place and, to make sure she could not drink, they rushed into the pond where they trampled on the bed with their feet and churned up the water with their arms, so that the pond water was soon filthy with mud. 

The anger of Latona and the metamorphosis

Enraged, Latona forgot her thirst, raised her hands to the sky and cried out: “May you live forever in the slime of your pond!” Her curse took effect immediately and the metamorphosis began.

As if driven mad, all the peasants dived into the pool, emerged and dived in again, swimming to the bottom and back up to the surface, showing their heads above the water before disappearing under it again. They continued to shout abuse at Latona and even under the water their insults could still be heard. But already their voices had changed, their throats swelled and their mouths widened, their heads shrunk into their shoulders, their backs turned green and their bellies grew round and white. After becoming frogs, the peasants of Lycia were to live forever like this in the slime of their pond, fulfilling the curse of Latona. 

This episode of the encounter between Latona and the peasants of Lycia is depicted in the Latona fountain in the centre of the garden of Versailles. 

At the top is the white marble sculpture group. The two children, Apollo and Diana, hold out their arms to beg the peasants. Latona already has her eyes raised to the sky and her open mouth suggests the curse she is uttering against the peasants. The brilliance of the marble group offers a striking contrast with the gilt lead figures installed on the lower tiers. 

Half-human and half-frog, six peasants are undergoing their metamorphosis. Some have kept their human appearance almost intact. Others have nearly completed their transformation: their mouths are wide and round, and their hands have been transformed into flippers. The water that they spout evokes the insults they shouted at Latona and which led to their metamorphosis