Professor Roger T. Ames was the Director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaii for ten years, and has been the Editor ofPhilosophy East and West since 1987. His teaching and research interests focus on comparative philosophy, the philosophy of culture, environmental philosophy, classical Confucianism, and Taoism. He has written many interpretive works on Chinese philosophy and culture, and has over the past d...

Apollo and Diana Attacking the Children of Niobe by Jacques-Louis David (1772). Niobe, the queen of Thebes, shelters her youngest daughter from Apollo and Diana‘s arrows. The queen’s thirteen other children lie wounded or dead in the painting’s foreground. This violent scene, drawn from a 1st-century Roman poem, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, illustrates Niobe’s punishment for boasting of her own power and fertility and for refusing to pay ho...