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 ranges the mountains at the head of a band of nymphs and deals death as readily as she guards the young. She is a goddess of edges: the forest where the cultivated land gives out, the night before a wedding, the threshold a woman crosses in labor and may not return from. Her bow is loosed on the wild beasts she also protects, and on the people who trespass against her; the same arrows that kill in mercy can kill in wrath. The Romans identified her with Diana, and through that name she carried into the literature, art, and night-lore of later Europe.

Daughter of Leto, twin of Apollo

Her place in the Greek pantheon is fixed early and stays fixed. By Hesiod and the Homeric tradition she is the daughter of Zeus and the Titaness Leto, and the twin of Apollo, the two of them born when the pregnant Leto, hounded across the Aegean by the jealousy of Hera, found refuge at last on the small floating island of Delos. In the common version Artemis is born first, on the islet the poets call Ortygia, and stands as midwife to the long labor that brings her brother into the world — so that the goddess later invoked at every childbed has presided over one at the very hour of her own birth. Brother and sister are paired through the whole tradition: both archers, both swift and far-shooting, he the bright power of oracle and the lyre, she the power of the untamed country. Together they shoot down the children of Niobe.

The temper that organizes her myths is given its sharpest charter in the third hymn of Callimachus, where the goddess is a small child on her father’s knee asking for the gifts that will define her: perpetual maidenhood, a bow and arrows like her brother’s, a train of young nymphs, the mountains for her domain, and one city would be enough, since she means to spend her time in the wild. The Cyclopes forge her the bow; Pan supplies her hounds; she takes the high country and the hunt and asks for nothing of the household, the marriage bed, or the loom that ordered the lives of Greek women. The portrait is late and literary, but it gathers what the cult and the older poetry already held: Artemis is the one Olympian who steps permanently outside the order she nonetheless guards the entrance to.

The wilderness and the Mistress of Animals

The oldest layer of the figure is the goddess of wild nature and the creatures in it. Homer calls her potnia theron, mistress of wild beasts, and archaic art shows exactly that: a winged power gripping a lion or a stag in either hand, flanked by the animals she commands. The title is older than the Greek name attached to it, reaching back toward a Bronze Age and Near Eastern image of a goddess of the animal world; the historian of religion Walter Burkert treats the Homeric phrase as an inherited formula, a fossil of that earlier divinity carried into the Olympian system. Her cult sat at the margins of the settled world — by marshes, on mountain slopes, at the borders between one territory and the next — and her epithets map that ground: Agrotera, the wild one, the huntress of the open country; Limnaia, of the marsh; Orthia, the upright, worshipped at Sparta with a brutal rite in which youths were flogged at her altar. She is the goddess of the animal that is hunted and the animal that is bred, of the young of every species, human and beast alike, and so of the whole zone of life that has not yet been brought under the rule of the city.

This is why her anger falls so heavily on the hunter who forgets the limits she sets. Actaeon, out with his hounds, blundered on the goddess bathing naked in a mountain pool; for the sight she turned him into a stag, and his own dogs, no longer knowing their master, ran him down and tore him apart. The story is told across the tradition and given its most famous shaping in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It is not, in its oldest sense, a tale of prudish modesty so much as of the boundary the wild goddess keeps absolute: the hunter who would master the animal world is shown that he too is an animal in it, and the instruments of his mastery become the means of his death.

The arrows of grief: Niobe

The same arrows serve a colder office. Niobe, queen of Thebes, boasted that with her many children she had outdone Leto, who had borne only two. The two were enough. Apollo shot down her sons and Artemis her daughters, and Niobe, weeping until she turned to stone, became the type of the bereaved mother frozen in grief — a rock on a Lydian mountainside said still to run with water. The myth fixes the lethal edge of the childbirth goddess. The power that opens the womb and brings the infant safely through is the same power that can empty a house of children in an afternoon. Greek cult kept the two faces together without flinching: women who died in labor were sometimes said to have been struck by the gentle arrows of Artemis, and the goddess of the safe delivery was also the goddess of the death that delivery so often was.

The threshold of women’s lives

Artemis governs the passages of female life, and especially the dangerous crossings — from girl to wife, from wife to mother. Before marriage, girls served her; women in labor called on her, and in many places she bore the title Lochia, of childbed, or was simply identified with Eileithyia, the goddess of the birth-pang. The logic is consistent: the same divinity who presides over the threshold of birth governs its dangers, and a power that can guard a crossing can also refuse it.

The most vivid of these rites was the arkteia at Brauron in Attica, the sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia on the coast east of Athens. There girls approaching the age of marriage served the goddess for a season as her arktoi, her she-bears, dressed in saffron-dyed robes, dancing and running and playing the bear before they could be married off. The cult was explained by an aetiological story: a tame bear sacred to the goddess had been killed, Artemis sent a plague, and an oracle required that Athenian girls thereafter be consecrated to her as bears in recompense. Beneath the legend the rite is plain enough in function — a passage out of wild girlhood and into the ordered life of the household, supervised by the goddess who stands at the boundary between the two. The wildness has to be lived through and then surrendered. Brauron also held, by the account in Euripides, the cult of Iphigenia: the daughter Agamemnon was made to sacrifice at Aulis so that the becalmed Greek fleet might sail for Troy, whom Artemis snatched from the altar at the last moment, substituting a deer, and carried off to be her priestess among the Taurians. At the close of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris the heroine is sent home to tend the goddess at Brauron and to receive there, in death, the dedicated garments of women who had survived their labors — the very offerings the sanctuary’s excavated inventories record.

The figure of Hippolytus belongs to the same charged ground from the other side. In Euripides’ tragedy the young man’s exclusive devotion to the virgin Artemis, and his contempt for the rites of Venus — Aphrodite, the power of sexual desire — provokes the love-goddess to destroy him; Artemis, who cannot save her own worshipper from a rival god, appears at the end to honor him and to promise the cult that Greek brides would pay him before marriage. Between the two goddesses lies the whole tension of the transition Artemis guards: the chastity that must be kept until the threshold, and the desire that waits on the far side of it.

The Artemis of Ephesus

The most famous of her sanctuaries complicates everything else. At Ephesus, on the Anatolian coast, stood a temple counted among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world — the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Artemision — and the goddess worshipped there was an image quite unlike the lean huntress of the Greek mainland. Her cult statue, known from Roman copies, showed a rigid frontal figure sheathed in rows of animals and hung across the chest with rows of rounded swellings, long read as many breasts and so giving her the name many-breasted; their meaning is disputed, and scholars have variously taken them for breasts, eggs, gourds, or the offerings of sacrificed bulls. Whatever they are, the figure is plainly continuous with the older mother-goddesses of Anatolia, a power of fertility and abundance and the nursing of all life.

The relation between the two Artemises is one of convergence rather than inheritance. The Greeks who settled the coast found a great Anatolian goddess already in possession of the site, called her by the name of their own Artemis, and identified the two — and the difference rode quietly under the shared word. The huntress who refuses motherhood and the mother-goddess who embodies it were worshipped as one because the same name had been laid over both. The Ephesian cult was rich, ancient, and central to its city’s economy, holding the right of asylum and drawing pilgrims and their money from across the Roman province of Asia. That centrality is what surfaces in the Acts of the Apostles, where the silversmith Demetrius, seeing the trade in miniature silver shrines of the goddess threatened by Paul’s preaching that gods made by hand are no gods, rouses his fellow craftsmen and the city to a riot, the crowd filling the theater for two hours with the cry that Artemis of the Ephesians is great. The notice registers, from the side of her rivals, exactly how much a great cult was worth to the city built around it.

Interpretatio: Diana, the moon, and the night-goddess

Her long afterlife runs mostly through Rome. Roman religion identified Artemis early and thoroughly with Diana, the Italic goddess of the woodland and the hunt worshipped above all at the grove by Lake Nemi, and the two merged so completely that the attributes became a single inheritance: the bow and hounds, the protection of women in labor, the fierce guarding of chastity. Through Diana the goddess was bound ever more tightly to the moon — Cicero records the equation of Diana with Luna, as of Apollo with Sol, as a commonplace of the philosophical theology of his day — and a threefold figure took shape in the late-antique imagination: Diana on earth, Luna in the sky, and Hecate in the underworld, the three read as a single goddess in three aspects, mistress of the moon, the crossroads, and the dead. The lunar and chthonic associations belong to this composite, not to the lean archaic huntress; the moon is the inheritance of Diana-Luna-Hecate, and through that triad Artemis enters the world of the night and of magic. (The same translating habit that gave her Diana’s name set her, in the syncretism of the Hellenistic East, beside the great mother-goddesses — Isis, Cybele, the consort of Serapis — wherever a local power of women and fertility answered to a Greek silhouette.)

It is this night-goddess, not the huntress of Delos, who feeds the medieval and early-modern lore of women who fly out at night. A church text known as the canon Episcopi, circulating by the tenth century, condemned the belief that certain women rode out after dark in the train of Diana, goddess of the pagans — and in denying that any such flight occurred, it preserved her, against its own purpose, as the named patroness of a nocturnal society of women. Across the later trials the name recurs, sometimes as Diana, sometimes as Herodias, the patroness under whom suspected witches were said to gather. That whole thread runs through the Roman goddess and her composite, and is followed out under Diana.

Scholarship, texts, and the sources

The primary poetic foundations are early. The brief twenty-seventh of the Homeric Hymns sets the goddess over the shadowy hills and windy peaks, drawing her golden bow against the wild creatures before she goes to her brother’s house at Delphi to lead the dancing — the compact archaic portrait of the huntress; it is read in translation at the Perseus Digital Library. The fullest single ancient celebration is the third hymn of Callimachus, To Artemis, in which the child-goddess asks her father Zeus for her bow, her maidenhood, and the mountains; the freely accessible English of A. W. Mair’s Loeb translation is hosted at the Theoi Classical Texts Library. For the cult of female passage, Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris — which ties the heroine’s rescue from the altar at Aulis to the worship of Artemis at Brauron and Halae — survives in the standard editions and in translation at Perseus; the tragedy of Hippolytus, the chaste devotee destroyed in the quarrel of Artemis and Aphrodite, belongs to the same poet. The episode at Ephesus is set out in the nineteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.

The indispensable modern synthesis is Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (Harvard University Press, 1985; German original 1977; tr. John Raffan), whose treatment of Artemis sets her among the gods of the wild margins and reads the potnia theron formula as the survival of an older mistress of animals; portions of the text are freely posted by the University of Michigan. The fullest freely accessible gathering of the ancient sources on the goddess — cult title by cult title and myth by myth, in translation — is the Theoi Project’s Artemis compendium, which assembles the testimonia for the Brauron bear-rite, the Niobids, Actaeon, and the rest. The structuralist reading of Artemis as the goddess of the liminal — the marginal spaces and the rites of transition between wild and tame, girl and woman — was developed in the work of Jean-Pierre Vernant and the Paris school; the philosophical play on the divine names, including the ancient etymologies of the gods, runs through Plato’s Cratylus, mirrored in the Library.

The bear let go

What holds the figure together across all of this is the threshold. The huntress who protects the young of every species and then looses her arrows at them; the virgin who never crosses into marriage yet stands at the door of every woman who does; the goddess of the safe delivery and of the death in childbed; the wild power of Delos and the abundant mother of Ephesus — all of it is the single office of the goddess of the boundary, the one who governs the moment of crossing because she herself remains permanently on the far wild side of it. The Brauron rite says it most plainly. A girl spends her season as a bear, saffron-robed and running in the goddess’s precinct, living out the last of her own wildness under the eye of the power that owns it. Then she puts off the bear, and the robe, and goes back to the city to be married — and the next girl takes her place at the altar. Artemis keeps the wild; she only ever lends it, and she takes it back at the threshold.

→ In the library: Plato — Cratylus (Jowett; on the names of the gods)

→ Related: Apollo · Zeus · Diana · Hecate · Venus · Callisto · Orion · Hippolytus · Temple Of Ephesian Artemis · Acts Of The Apostles