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Artemis: Roman Diana
Twin sister of Apollo, an eternally virgin huntress who haunts wild places. She is
sometimes referred to as Potnia Theron (Mistress of the Beasts) indicating her
concern for and power over wild animals. She is also concerned with women's
transition from girlhood to adulthood (via marriage) and with childbirth, a concern
she shares with Hera and Eileithyia. Women who die are said to be struck down by
her arrows.
Euripides' Hippolytus shows her in opposition to Aphrodite. Actaeon and Hippolytos
are two young men who, in different ways, are destroyed by their association with
Artemis.
Artemis demands the sacrifice of the virgin Iphigeneia at Aulis before she will allow
the Greek fleet to sail against Troy. The reasons given for her anger vary:
Agamemnon kills a deer in her sacred grove (mentioned in Sophocles, Electra); or he
boasts that he is a better shot than Artemis herself (Apollodorus). For the motif of
Artemis' concern to protect her animals against marauding heroes see the story of
Heracles and the Kerynitian hind; for the motif of mortals boasting of their
superiority to the gods see the stories of Arachne, Actaeon, Marsyas, Niobe, the Lesser
Ajax.
Kallisto was one of Artemis' nymphs who offended the goddess by becoming
pregnant by Zeus and was banished. The jealous Hera then further punished her by
turning her into a bear. The stories of Actaeon and Kallisto were known in the
Renaissance through Ovid's Metamorphoses and were popular subjects for artists.