Who's Who Greek Myth: Artemis Virgin Goddess of the Moon and Hunting

This goddess was likely a very ancient deity adopted by the Greeks as goddess of the wild. According to Greek myth, the twin sister of Apollo was born before him and helped assist in his birth.

Artemis was goddess of the moon (her brother Apollo of the sun), as well as of hunting, unmarried (virgin) maidens and wild nature. As a child she asked to be free of marriage bonds, and lived in the mountains, hunting wild animals and dancing, her companions young girls (nymphs) who left when their time came to marry.

She is usually pictured with a stag, which was sacred to her, and dressed in a short tunic, with quiver, bows and arrows, attended by her nymphs. She was also pictured with lions. Artemis was quite vengeful on many occasions. She turned Aktaeon into a stag and had her fifty hounds tear him apart (though some say that she set his own hounds on him), all for the sin of watching her bathe naked in the mountain stream.

She killed the huntsman, Orion, for attempting to rape her. It was she who demanded of Agamemnon the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia, because he had killed a stag (sacred to herself) when hunting.

She turned the nymph Kallisto into a bear on learning that she had become pregnant, because she had broken her earlier promise that she would remain a virgin. Artemis' important shrines are at Brauron in Attica, at Sparta, and at Ephesos in Asia Minor.