Wild
Artemis
ἌρτεμιςRoman: Diana
Mistress of animals, and entirely willing to kill you for a mistake.
Wall painting, House of the Vettii, Pompeii — 1st century BCE–1st century CE
- 4
- epithets
- 4
- cult sites
- 0
- offspring
- 0
- unions
- 1
- recorded birth
Vitals
- Kind
- Olympian
- Generation
- 3
- Domains
- the hunt, wild animals, childbirth, girls before marriage
- Accent
- Wild — the hunt, the mountain, the uncultivated
- Sacred symbols
- the bow, the deer, the crescent, the hunting dog
- Principal cult sites
- Ephesos, Brauron, Sparta (Orthia), Delos
What they were called
Ποτνία Θηρῶν
mistress of animals
ἰοχέαιρα
arrow-pourer
Ὀρθία
the upright — of her savage Spartan cult
Λοχεία
of childbed
Lineage
See in the tree
Offspring in this roster
None recorded among the figures modelled here.
Notable myths
Aktaion
The hunter Aktaion came on Artemis bathing in a pool. She had no arrow to hand, so she threw water in his face and told him to go and say he had seen her naked, if he could. Antlers came up through his forehead, his neck lengthened, and his own hounds ran him down and killed him while he tried to say his name.
Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.138-252 (Roman-era)
The Fleet at Aulis
The Greek fleet could not sail from Aulis because Artemis held the wind, offended over a killed deer and a boast. The seer said the price was Agamemnon's daughter Iphigeneia. He sent for her on the pretext of a marriage to Achilles and had her killed. In some tellings Artemis substituted a deer at the last moment and took the girl to Tauris; the play is careful to leave it uncertain.
Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis
The account
Artemis was born first and, in the version the Greeks liked, immediately helped deliver her brother — which is why the goddess of virginity is also the goddess women call on in labour. She belongs to the country outside the walls: the hunt, the mountains, the animals nobody has domesticated, and the stage of a girl's life before she is handed to a husband. At Brauron, Athenian girls served her as bears before marriage. She is not gentle. Aktaion saw her bathing and she turned him into a stag so that his own fifty hounds tore him apart. Niobe boasted about her children and Artemis and Apollo shot all fourteen. Agamemnon killed a deer in her grove and she held the entire Greek fleet becalmed at Aulis until he cut his daughter's throat on an altar. The pattern is consistent: she does not negotiate and there is no proportionality. The Ephesian Artemis, covered in what may be breasts or bulls' testicles, is a quite different and much older eastern goddess wearing the same name.
Ancient sources
- Hesiod, Theogony 918-920
- Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.138-252
- Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis
Where a line reference is not given, the work is cited without one rather than guessed at.
Image credit
- Title
- House of the Vettii VI 15,1 Pompeii 2023 Detail from east wall of painting of Apollo and Diana after the killing of the python room q (Mau plan) courtesy of Johannes Eber
- Artist
- Unknown 1st century CE Roman artist; original photograph by Johannes Eber
- Date
- 1st century BCE - 1st century CE
- Licence
- Public domain
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