Artemis protected children and midwives, yet Greek myth made her fearsome
The Greek goddess of the hunt also watched over childbirth, young girls and animal cubs. Her temple at Ephesus ranked among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Yet in tragedy and myth she could be merciless, punishing slights with wild beasts and even demanding human sacrifice in the Iliad.
Artemis presided over hunting, wilderness, wild animals, vegetation, transitions, chastity and the care of children, and roamed forests and mountains with a band of nymphs. The Romans identified her with Diana. She was the daughter of Zeus and Leto and twin of Apollo. Because Hera, furious at Zeus's affair, barred Leto from giving birth on solid ground, only the island of Delos would take her in, and in one telling Artemis was born first and helped deliver her brother.
As a child-nurturing goddess she was worshipped and feared alongside Eileithyia and Hera as a patron of birth and midwifery, and she was thought to send health, sickness or death to women and children. Her classical image is a young huntress in a short skirt and boots, carrying a quiver and a gold or silver bow; the deer was sacred to her. Stories show her harsh side: the hunter Actaeon, who saw her bathing, was turned into a stag. Later she was merged with Selene, the Moon.
Her name puzzles linguists. Robert Beekes saw signs of a pre-Greek origin, supported by a Lydian form, Artimus, and by its appearance in Mycenaean texts. Another theory links it to the Greek word for bear, pointing to her bear cult at Brauron in Attica and to the story of Callisto, which may once have been about Artemis herself. Others proposed Phrygian or Persian roots, and Plato connected it to a word meaning safe or unharmed.
She was among the oldest and most widely worshipped Olympian deities, honoured under many local names and forms. In the classical period those varied identities gradually settled into the single familiar picture of the maiden huntress, celebrated in the Homeric Hymn as the golden-arrowed sister of Apollo.
Source: Artemis
