Artemis

Before dawn the forest belongs to her. Dew weighs down the fern, the air smells of crushed pine and wet stone, and somewhere ahead a stag lifts its head a half-second too late. The hounds are already moving. Artemis runs with them, her tunic cut short at the knee so nothing catches on the brush, and when she draws, the arrow goes where she looks. She does not miss. This is the oldest thing about her, older than Olympus, older than the poets who tried to tidy her into a single shape: a young woman alone in wild country, faster than the things she kills.

She was born on Delos, or on the rocky islet beside it, depending on who tells it. Her mother Leto, pregnant by Zeus and hunted across the world by a jealous Hera who had forbidden the solid earth to shelter her, finally found rest on a bare island that floated free of the seabed. Artemis came first. Then, according to the story the midwives liked best, the newborn turned and helped her mother through the long labor that brought her twin brother Apollo into the light. A goddess who delivered her own sibling at the moment of her birth keeps that office forever after. Women in childbirth called on her, and the same arrows that brought down deer were said to bring an easy death to those whose labor went wrong. She gave life passage and she took it cleanly. The Greeks saw no contradiction in this.

Sculptors and vase-painters settled on a consistent picture. A girl taller than her nymphs, in a short belted chiton, a quiver at her shoulder and a bow in her hand. The Cyclopes forged the bow for her in their fire under the mountains, and the sources argue over whether it was silver or gold while agreeing the arrows were gold. A crescent sometimes rides above her brow. Deer flank her, a pack of hounds runs at her heel, and a band of nymphs follows, sworn like their mistress to stay unmarried. She is never still in these images for long. Even standing, she looks about to break into a run.

Artemis asked Zeus for one thing as a small child and got it: to remain a maiden forever, to keep her bow and her hunting dress and the mountains, and never to be made a wife. She was one of three goddesses immune to desire, with Athena and Hestia, but she guarded that boundary more fiercely than either. Around her gathered the unmarried girls of the wild, and anyone who broke into that circle paid for it.

The hunter Actaeon learned this in the worst way. Out with his own hounds one afternoon, he pushed through a screen of trees into a shaded grove and found the goddess bathing in a pool, naked, her nymphs scrambling to cover her. He had not meant to. It did not matter. Artemis flung water in his face and the change took him at once: antlers splitting from his skull, his arms lengthening into forelegs, his shout collapsing into the bellow of a stag. His own dogs, fifty of them, did not know him. They ran him down and tore him apart while he tried with an animal’s throat to call their names. She did not lift a finger to stop it.

The same cold arithmetic governed her dealings with mortals who reached above themselves. When Niobe, queen of Thebes, boasted that her fourteen children made her a finer mother than Leto with only two, Artemis and Apollo answered the insult to their mother in a single afternoon. He shot the sons. She shot the daughters. Niobe wept until she turned to stone, and the stone went on weeping. When Agamemnon killed a stag in a grove sacred to Artemis and bragged that he had outshot her, she stilled the winds at Aulis and held the entire Greek fleet motionless on its way to Troy until he agreed to cut his own daughter’s throat on the altar. In the kinder version she swapped a deer for the girl at the last instant and carried Iphigenia off to serve at her distant shrine among the Taurians. In the harder version, the knife came down.

Not all of it was punishment. The giant Orion hunted at her side and may have been the one man she came near to loving, and the stories cannot agree on how that ended. A scorpion sent by the earth killed him in some tellings. In others her brother Apollo, uneasy about the friendship, dared her to hit a distant dark speck bobbing far out in the sea, and she split it with a single arrow before she understood it was Orion’s head. She set him among the stars. Grief is a strange look on her, and the poets reach for it rarely.

Her power was never subtle. She could strike from an impossible distance, send sudden death into a household or a camp, fill a forest with game or empty it, and turn a man into prey with a handful of water. Wild animals obeyed her, and the moon answered to her in the later traditions that braided her together with Selene and Hecate into a single three-faced presence over the night. What she could not do was bend. The rigidity that made her terrible also boxed her in. An affront could not be reasoned away or paid off, only answered, and the answer was usually a corpse. Her vows held her as tightly as they held her nymphs, so the rare moments of tenderness in her myths, a drowned hunter, a girl lifted from the altar, arrive already shadowed by loss. She protected the young of every species and the girls who served her, then demanded of them the same severe perfection she demanded of herself. The wilderness she ruled was beautiful and it was not safe, and she was both halves of that.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Artemis?

Artemis is the Greek goddess of the hunt, wild animals, wilderness, chastity, and childbirth, and in later tradition the moon. She is the daughter of Zeus and Leto and the twin sister of Apollo, and one of the twelve Olympian deities. The Romans identified her with their goddess Diana.

What is Artemis the goddess of?

Artemis rules the hunt, wild animals, and untamed wilderness, and she is also a protector of young girls and a goddess of childbirth. As a hunter she both kills game and guards it, especially the young, which earned her the title Potnia Theron, Mistress of Animals. In later myth she became associated with the moon alongside Selene and Hecate.

Why did Artemis turn Actaeon into a stag?

Artemis transformed the hunter Actaeon into a stag because he came upon her bathing naked with her nymphs and saw her body, even though he did so by accident. After the transformation, Actaeon’s own pack of fifty hunting dogs failed to recognize him and tore him apart. The story shows how absolutely Artemis defended her chastity and privacy.

Is Artemis a virgin goddess?

Yes, Artemis is one of the three great virgin goddesses of Greek myth, along with Athena and Hestia. As a young child she asked Zeus to let her remain a maiden forever, keeping her bow, her hunting clothes, and the mountains, and never to marry. Her nymph companions were expected to keep the same vow.

What weapon does Artemis use?

Artemis uses a bow and arrows forged for her by the Cyclopes, with her arrows described as gold and her bow as either silver or gold. With them she could strike targets at enormous distances, which is why epithets like hekatebolos, “far-shooter,” attached to her. The bow links her closely to her twin brother Apollo, who carries the same weapon.

Related Entries

Apollo, Leto, Zeus, Hera, Niobe, Callisto, Otus and Ephialtes, Selene, Hecate, Athena, Hestia, Aphrodite, Helios, Cyclops