Artemis is the goddess of hunting, wild animals, forests and mountains, and later of the moon. She protects girls until marriage, children and women in childbirth. Twin of Apollo, she was born first on Delos and, according to myth, immediately helped her mother deliver her brother. To the Romans she was Diana.
A free goddess
As a little girl, Artemis asked her father Zeus to let her stay a maiden and free forever, to have a bow and arrows like her brother and a band of nymphs to hunt with. She lives far from cities, in the woods, with her hounds and a deer. She is kind to those who respect her but terrible to those who offend her.
Main myths
- Actaeon: the young hunter came upon her bathing in a spring. The offended goddess turned him into a stag, and he was torn apart by his own hounds. See metamorphoses.
- Callisto: one of her nymphs was seduced by Zeus. Artemis drove her away and, in some versions, turned her into a bear; Zeus later placed her in the sky as the constellation of the Great Bear. See myths in the stars.
- Orion: the great hunter was her hunting companion; he died from a scorpion's sting, or an arrow from the goddess, and became the constellation that bears his name.
- Iphigenia: Agamemnon had offended the goddess by killing a sacred deer. To let the fleet sail for Troy he had to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia, but in one version Artemis saved her at the last moment, putting a deer in her place. See the Trojan War.
- Niobe: with Apollo she punished the queen who had insulted their mother.
Her cult
The temple of Artemis at Ephesus, in today's Turkey, was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. In Greece her most famous sanctuary is Brauron, in Attica, where Athenian girls spent a period serving the goddess, dressed as "little bears". At Sparta, at the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia, boys underwent harsh trials.
See also the twelve Olympians.