Artemis, A Compendium of the Ancient Gods

Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo, daughter of Zeus and Leto, born on Delos before her brother (and assisting at his birth, though herself only newly arrived). She was the goddess of the hunt, of wild places, of untamed nature, of unmarried women, of childbirth (a curious double-office for a virgin goddess, but the Greeks held that her own painless emergence on Delos qualified her to assist others), and — as her brother absorbed the sun — she increasingly absorbed the moon, becoming in late antiquity inseparable from Selene. She was a virgin, like Athena and Hestia; her chastity was severe and was protected with sometimes lethal vigilance.

The hunter Actaeon, having accidentally come upon her bathing naked in a forest pool, was turned by her into a stag and torn apart by his own hounds. Her companion the nymph Callisto, having been seduced by Zeus in disguise as Artemis herself, was discovered to be pregnant and was either turned into a bear by Artemis (in some versions) or by Hera (in others), and was eventually placed in the heavens as the constellation Ursa Major. The giant Orion — a great hunter, her companion, in some versions her beloved — was killed at her own hand (or her brother's, in tactful versions) when his presumption became too great; he became the constellation Orion, with his hunting-dog Sirius. The mortal Niobe, having boasted that her many children made her greater than Leto with her two, saw her seven daughters slain by Artemis's arrows and her seven sons by Apollo's. Iphigeneia, daughter of Agamemnon, was demanded as sacrifice by Artemis when the Greek fleet was becalmed at Aulis on its way to Troy; the sacrifice's accomplishment (or, in tactful versions, its substitution at the last moment by a deer) loomed over the entire Trojan-War cycle and provided the matter of two of Euripides's tragedies.

Her cult was widespread. Her great pan-Ionic sanctuary at Ephesus housed the famous many-breasted statue (the so-called "Diana of Ephesus," a much-debated iconography in which the original Anatolian mother-goddess of Ephesus was identified with Artemis without losing her older many-breasted form); her temple there, rebuilt repeatedly through the centuries, was reckoned among the Seven Wonders. At Brauron in Attica, girls served her in the years before marriage in the cult of the bear; at Sparta, young men were ritually whipped at her altar (the Artemis Orthia rite). Her Roman counterpart was Diana, with whom her identification was thoroughgoing.

Curator’s note

What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay

The Homeric Hymn to Artemis (Hymn 27, brief); Homer, Iliad and Odyssey passim; Apollodorus 1.4.1, 3.4.4 (Actaeon), 3.8.2 (Callisto); the Iphigeneia narrative is in Aeschylus's Agamemnon and in Euripides's two Iphigeneia plays. The Diana of Ephesus iconography is treated extensively in modern scholarship; the much-discussed "breasts" have been variously interpreted as bee-eggs, sacrificed bull-testicles, or the original elements of an indigenous Anatolian fertility-figure. The temple at Ephesus was destroyed multiple times (most famously by arson in 356 BCE, on the night of Alexander's birth, by Herostratus seeking fame) and rebuilt; the final temple was demolished by St. John Chrysostom or by the Goths.

Kin in the sources

Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.

Sibling ofApolloArtemis was the twin sister of Apollo, daughter of Zeus and Leto, born on Delos before her brother
Child ofZeusArtemis was the twin sister of Apollo, daughter of Zeus and Leto, born on Delos before her brother
Child ofLetoArtemis was the twin sister of Apollo, daughter of Zeus and Leto, born on Delos before her brother
Named as the same god asSelenebecoming in late antiquity inseparable from Selene
SlewActaeonwas turned by her into a stag and torn apart by his own hounds
Named as the same god asArtemis of Ephesusthough the Greeks gave her the name of their virgin huntress
Named as the same god asPakhetfor the Greeks identified Pakhet with Artemis the huntress
Named as the same god asHecateIn late antiquity she was identified with Selene and with Artemis
SlewAriadneArtemis is said to have killed her on Naxos at Dionysus's bidding
Named as the same god asBendisThe Greeks who knew her identified her with their own Artemis

The same god in other rooms

The ancient sources themselves name these as one god under different names. See Artemis of Ephesus, Pakhet, Selene, Artemis, Hecate and Bendis hung together

When the sources speak

Dated witnesses for Hades and the Lesser Olympians. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline

c. 1600–1100 BCE: Mycenaean palace tablets in Linear B record offerings and divine names, but little continuous myth.
c. 1100–800 BCE: Post-palatial oral traditions and changing cult landscapes precede the surviving alphabetic epics.
late 8th–7th centuries BCE: The Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiodic Theogony and Works and Days give influential but non-exclusive divine orders.
7th–6th centuries BCE: Homeric Hymns, lyric poetry, colonization, and local sanctuary traditions multiply regional narratives.
6th–5th centuries BCE: Orphic, Pythagorean, and mystery materials develop alternative cosmogonies and afterlife doctrines.
5th century BCE: Athenian tragedy and comedy recast heroic houses and divine justice for civic audiences.
4th century BCE: Philosophers, antiquarians, and local historians interpret or criticize inherited myth.
323–31 BCE: Hellenistic poets and scholars systematize variants across an enlarged Greek world.