Artemis

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Artemis is the Greek goddess of the hunt, of wild places and the animals in them, and of the moment a woman gives birth — a virgin huntress who roamed the mountains with a band of nymphs and was held to deal death as readily as she guarded the young. The Romans identified her with Diana, and that name carried her into later European literature and art.

Her place in the Greek pantheon is fixed early. Hesiod and the Homeric tradition make her the daughter of Zeus and Leto and the twin of Apollo, born on Delos; the two are often paired, he the archer of the sun-bright order, she the archer of the wilds. The myths that gather around her keep returning to a single temper: she is jealous of her chastity and swift to punish trespass. Actaeon, who stumbled on her bathing, was turned to a stag and torn apart by his own hounds; she and Apollo shot down Niobe’s children for their mother’s boast, Artemis striking the daughters and her brother the sons. Greek cult also knew her as a goddess of transitions — girls served her before marriage, and women in labour called on her, since the same power that presided over the threshold of birth was thought to govern its dangers.

The most famous of her sanctuaries complicates the picture. At Ephesus, on the Anatolian coast, stood a temple counted among the wonders of the ancient world, and the goddess worshipped there — Artemis of the Ephesians — was an image quite unlike the lean huntress of the Greek mainland: a many-breasted figure (the swellings have also been read as eggs or bull testes) sheathed in rows of animals, plainly continuous with older Anatolian mother-goddesses. Scholarship generally treats the Ephesian Artemis as a local deity assimilated under a Greek name rather than the Olympian huntress in another costume; the Greeks called both Artemis, and the difference rode quietly under the shared word. The cult was prominent enough to surface in the New Testament, where the silversmiths of Ephesus riot against Paul’s preaching for threatening the trade in her shrines.

Her later afterlife runs largely through Diana. Roman religion merged the two, and through Rome the goddess was bound ever more tightly to the moon, so that later writers spoke of a threefold figure — Diana on earth, Luna in the sky, Hecate below — and medieval and early-modern sources made “Diana” the name under which suspected night-flying women were said to gather. By that point the mountain huntress of archaic Greece had become something the inheriting cultures made of her, which is the usual fate of a god who outlives the people who first named her.

→ Related: Venus