Artemis

Artemis is the goddess of everything outside the settled, cultivated world: the mountains and forests, the wild animals that live there, and the hunt that pursues them. Twin sister of Apollo and daughter of Zeus and Leto, she roams the uplands with a band of nymphs and a silver bow, and she guards her own chastity and that of her companions fiercely. The myths that cluster around her turn on the danger of crossing her: the hunter Actaeon, who chanced upon her bathing, was turned into a stag and torn apart by his own hounds, and Niobe's daughters were shot down when their mother boasted against Leto. As Potnia Theron, Mistress of Animals, she is at once the protector of the young of every species and the one who looses the arrow.

Artemis is named already in the Linear B tablets from Pylos, as a-ti-mi-te, showing her cult reaches back into Mycenaean Greece of the thirteenth century BCE, centuries before the huntress of Homer and Classical art took her familiar shape. Her earliest surviving images, from the seventh century BCE, show a winged Potnia Theron flanked symmetrically by lions or other beasts, a composition scholars trace to Near Eastern and Anatolian prototypes rather than to any native Greek invention; only over the following centuries did Greek art gradually shed the wings and the rigid heraldic pose in favour of the youthful, moving huntress with bow and short chiton familiar from Classical sculpture.

Alongside the wilderness Artemis holds a domain that can seem to contradict it: she is a goddess of childbirth and of the passage of girls to womanhood. A virgin herself, she was believed to ease or to end the pains of labour, and her sanctuaries at Brauron and elsewhere in Attica received girls who served the goddess before marriage. Her most famous temple stood at Ephesus in Asia Minor and was counted a wonder of the world, but the figure worshipped there, the many-breasted Artemis Ephesia, grew out of an older Anatolian mother-goddess whose identity was folded into the Greek name. Scholars treat the Ephesian Artemis as a syncretism rather than a straightforward image of the huntress, a reminder that a single divine name could gather together very different local powers.

At Brauron in Attica, excavated remains and a body of inscriptions and dedicatory vases document a distinctive rite known as the arkteia, in which young Athenian girls, called arktoi or little bears, served the goddess for a period before marriage, reportedly wearing saffron robes and performing a ritual dance recalled in a fragment of Aristophanes's Lysistrata; the custom is generally linked to a myth in which a bear sacred to Artemis was killed and the goddess demanded that Athenian girls appease her before marrying. The site's stoa and finds of children's clothing dedicated to the goddess give Brauron the best physical evidence anywhere in Greece for how a specific, otherwise poorly documented, coming-of-age cult for girls actually operated.