Artemis is the goddess of everything outside the settled, cultivated world: the mountains and forests, the wild animals that live there, and the hunt that pursues them. Twin sister of Apollo and daughter of Zeus and Leto, she roams the uplands with a band of nymphs and a silver bow, and she guards her own chastity and that of her companions fiercely. The myths that cluster around her turn on the danger of crossing her: the hunter Actaeon, who chanced upon her bathing, was turned into a stag and torn apart by his own hounds, and Niobe's daughters were shot down when their mother boasted against Leto. As Potnia Theron, Mistress of Animals, she is at once the protector of the young of every species and the one who looses the arrow.
Artemis is named already in the Linear B tablets from Pylos, as a-ti-mi-te, showing her cult reaches back into Mycenaean Greece of the thirteenth century BCE, centuries before the huntress of Homer and Classical art took her familiar shape. Her earliest surviving images, from the seventh century BCE, show a winged Potnia Theron flanked symmetrically by lions or other beasts, a composition scholars trace to Near Eastern and Anatolian prototypes rather than to any native Greek invention; only over the following centuries did Greek art gradually shed the wings and the rigid heraldic pose in favour of the youthful, moving huntress with bow and short chiton familiar from Classical sculpture.