Leto

The account

Leto is pregnant by Zeus and cannot find anywhere to give birth. Hera has forbidden any land to receive her, and the Homeric Hymn lists the places that refused, one after another, until she reaches Delos — a bare rock with nothing to lose — and asks. Delos is afraid the god will be born, look at the poor stony ground and kick it into the sea, so Leto swears a great oath by the Styx that Apollo will keep his first temple there. Then she is nine days and nine nights in hard labour, because Hera has kept Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth, from hearing about it; the other goddesses eventually bribe Eileithyia to come with a nine-cubit necklace. She bears Artemis and Apollo, and afterwards her role is entirely as their mother — most visibly when Niobe boasts of having fourteen children to Leto's two, and the two shoot all fourteen. She is honoured, in the end, exactly in proportion to what her children can do.