as she wished, but then in fear of Niobe's reaction to the murder she knowingly killed her own child as well.

Aëdon mourned her only son greatly, and thus Zeus, the father of Amphion and Zethus, transformed her into a nightingale when Zethus began to hunt her down following Itylus's murder. A Homeric scholiast attributed the story of Aëdon killing her son in her effort to murder Niobe's to Pherecydes, a historian who lived during the fifth century BC. In this story Aëdon becomes Niobe's