Artemis
Who did Artemis fall in love with?
What is Artemis the goddess of?
Who was Artemis’s twin?
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Artemis, in Greek religion, the goddess of wild animals, the hunt, vegetation, and chastity. She was also associated with the moon and childbirth. Her Roman equivalent was Diana. Artemis was the daughter of Zeus and Leto and the twin sister of Apollo, with whom she was counted among the 12 Olympian gods. Among the rural populace, Artemis was the favorite goddess. Her character and function varied greatly from place to place, but, apparently, behind all forms lay the goddess of wild nature, who danced, usually accompanied by nymphs, in mountains, forests, and marshes. Artemis embodied the sportsman’s ideal, so besides killing game she also protected it, especially the young; this was the Homeric significance of the title Mistress of Animals.
Family and attributes
In the commonly held account, Zeus’s union with Leto aroused the jealousy of Zeus’s wife, Hera, who persecuted the pregnant Leto. Pursued by the monster Python and, by Hera’s wrathful command, unable to give birth on either land or water, Leto eventually found shelter on the floating island of Delos. In the commonly held account, Artemis was born first and assisted in delivering Apollo, by which time Leto was also attended by Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth, who had been delayed by Hera. Some variants of the legend report that Eileithyia was present at the birth of both Artemis and Apollo.
According to myth, as a child Artemis demanded and was granted several gifts by Zeus, including eternal chastity, several names, a retinue of nymphs and Oceanids, and a bow and arrows of divine construction. The weapons were crafted out of gold or silver by either Hephaestus or the Cyclopes, and Artemis became famous for her expertise in archery and the hunt. In some traditions, she also received 13 hounds from the god Pan, and her chariot was drawn by 6 deer.
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Artemis’s anger
Artemis was known for the punishments she visited on those who outraged her virginal modesty, whether by intention or by chance. In one myth, she famously killed the hunter Orion, who had fallen in love with and attempted to violate her. In other versions of the story, Orion attempted to assault not Artemis herself but one of her attendants, or was punished for daring to compete with Artemis in throwing the discus. Another transgressor was Actaeon, also a hunter, who came upon Artemis as she was bathing. Depending on the account, he did so accidentally or deliberately, or was punished for claiming that his hunting prowess was greater than that of Artemis. Either way, Artemis transformed him into a stag and he was torn apart by his own hounds.
Artemis’s wrath extended even to members of her own retinue, who were also subject to the vow of chastity. She turned her attendant Callisto, a nymph, into a bear after she had been assaulted and impregnated by Zeus. In some accounts Callisto was transformed by either Zeus or Hera and was killed by Artemis.
In a myth related to the Trojan War, the Greek fleet was stranded at the port of Aulis by calm or contrary winds sent by Artemis, whom the Greek commander Agamemnon had offended in some manner. To appease the goddess, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter, Iphigeneia; in some variants of the story, Artemis saved Iphigeneia and substituted an animal for sacrifice. Artemis also sent a wild boar to kill the mortal Adonis, beloved of Aphrodite, in revenge for Aphrodite’s part in the death of Artemis’s favorite, Hippolytus.
On more than one occasion, Artemis and Apollo conspired to avenge offenses against their mother, Leto. When the Theban queen Niobe boasted of her progenitive superiority to Leto, Artemis and Apollo slew Niobe’s six daughters and six sons (seven daughters and seven sons in some versions). The weeping Niobe was eventually turned into a rock. In some accounts Artemis helped Apollo kill Leto’s tormentor Python, and the mortal Tityus, who had attempted to assault Leto.
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Worship and representation
The worship of Artemis probably flourished in Crete or on the Greek mainland in pre-Hellenic times. Many of Artemis’s local cults, however, preserved traces of other deities, often with Greek names, suggesting that, upon adopting her, the Greeks identified Artemis with nature divinities of their own. The virginal sister of Apollo is very different from the many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus, for example. Such local variations reflected the diversity of cult practice within Greek polytheism, in which the attributes and forms of worship associated with a deity could differ from one community to another.
Dances of maidens representing tree nymphs (dryads) were especially common in Artemis’s worship as goddess of the tree cult, a role especially popular in the Peloponnese. Throughout the Peloponnese, bearing such epithets as Limnaea and Limnatis (Lady of the Lake), Artemis supervised waters and lush wild growth, attended by nymphs of wells and springs (naiads). In parts of the peninsula her dances were wild and lascivious.
Outside the Peloponnese, Artemis’s most familiar form was as Mistress of Animals. Poets and artists usually pictured her with the stag or hunting dog, which served as attributes of Artemis in visual representations, helping viewers identify the goddess and emphasizing her association with hunting and wild nature. However, the cults showed considerable variety. For instance, the Tauropolia festival at Halae Araphenides in Attica honored Artemis Tauropolos (Bull Goddess), who received a few drops of blood drawn by sword from a man’s neck.
The frequent stories of the love affairs of Artemis’s nymphs are supposed by some to have originally been told of the goddess herself. The poets after Homer, however, stressed Artemis’s chastity and her delight in the hunt, dancing and music, shadowy groves, and the cities of just men. The wrath of Artemis was proverbial, as in myth, it often symbolized wild nature’s hostility to humans. Yet Greek sculpture avoided Artemis’s unpitying anger as a motif. In fact, the goddess herself did not become popular as a subject in the great sculptural schools until the relatively gentle spirit of the 4th century bce prevailed.