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The Lycian peasants, also known as Latona and the Lycian peasants, is a short tale from ancient Greek mythology and Roman mythology centered around Leto (known to the Romans as Latona), the mother of the Olympian twin gods Artemis and Apollo, who after much exhausting wandering was prohibited from drinking water from a pond in Lycia by the unhospitable people living there. The goddess then turned the peasants into frogs as punishment.
The myth's theme tackles the ancient Greek concept of xenia, or sacred hospitality, as well as Leto's special connection to the land of Lycia, a historical region in southwestern Asia Minor. The impious Lycians refuse to exercise the due hospitality, the ritualized guest-friendship termed xenia by the ancient Greeks, or else also called theoxenia, which refers specifically to the instances when a god, such as Leto and her infant children, is involved.
This myth is most famously known from Ovid's rendition of it in his first-century narrative poem the Metamorphoses. The myth has inspired a lot of post-classical art.
The grammarian Servius implied that the birth of the twins took place between her two visits to Lycia, the first in which she was rejected, and the second where she returned to enact her punishment. Antoninus Liberalis mentions that the spring Leto tried to drink from on her way to the river Xanthos was called Melite; after being driven away by cattle herders who wished to keep the water for their cattle, some wolves befriended her and led her to the Xanthos, where she bathed her children. She then returned to the spring to transform the Lycians into frogs.Antoninus Liberalis, Collection of Transformations 35
One of the Vatican Mythographers records the story and supplants Leto with Ceres/Demeter, who tried to drink from the spring, thirsty as she was after days of looking for her abducted daughter Persephone, who had been snatched by Hades, the king of the Greek Underworld. The anonymous author is the only one to record the variation with Demeter.
The region's name Lycia had been (erroneously) connected by the ancient Greeks to their word for wolf, lykos, and held that the land had taken its name after the friendly wolves who, unlike the rejecting humans, showed hospitality to Leto. Similarly, Leto's son Apollo bore the epithet Lyceus, an epithet which, although usually indicating his youth and connection to light ( lyke), had been interpreted occasionally to denote Apollo's connection to wolves and Lycia.
Stephanos of Byzantium recounts a story of how an elderly Lycian woman named Syessa received and entertained Leto in her cottage, a sharp contrast to the unhospitable peasants, and more like the friendly wolves; Polycharmos held that Apollo and Leto had been both born in Araxa, up in the Xanthos valley, which seems to be a Hellenistic innovation. Stitching those fragments together, a story can be assembled, in which the twins are born in Araxa, Leto arrives in Xanthos, the wolves lead her to the water while Syessa offers her food, and Leto finally establishes her shrine. Thanks to Antoninus Liberalis citing the earlier writers Menecrates of Ephesus and Nicander as the sources for his tale, Leto's arrival in Lycia can be dated to around the early fourth century BC, a period during which the city of Xanthos would have been a mixed settlement of Greeks and local Lycians.
The Lycian peasants, who callously attempted to stop a fatigued mother and her young children from using the water of the pond thus broke a very sacred rule and concept of ancient Greek culture, and thus paid by being transformed into creatures that were regarded as hideous and disgusting.
In the Gardens of Versailles, France, lies the Latona Fountain, built in 1670, which depicts the myth; on the top tier stands a statue of Leto with her children Artemis and Apollo surrounded by six lead half-human, half-frog sculptures placed around the perimeter of the basin. The four tiers are covered in 230 pieces of marble, composed of the white and grey-veined Carrara marble, greenish marble from Campan, and red marble from Languedoc. A copy of the Latona fountain was built in the gardens of Herrenchiemsee, a palace complex in Bavaria, Germany.
The tale has also inspired music, like the Verwandlung der lycischen Bauern in Frösche ("Transformation of the Lycian Peasants into Frogs") by Austrian composer Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, one among the several symphonies composed based on tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
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