Diana was the Roman goddess of the hunt, of wild animals and wild places, of the woodland and, in time, of the moon. Her name is connected with the bright sky (dium), and her worship was old and Italian, but from early on she was identified with the Greek Artemis and absorbed that goddess's character as the virgin huntress, the mistress of beasts, and the protector, and bringer of danger, in childbirth. Like Artemis she was pictured with bow and quiver, a short tunic, and a hound or a stag, roaming the mountains by night, and later poetry made her a triple goddess, Diana on earth, Luna in the sky, Hecate in the underworld. Yet her Italian cults kept a distinct social colour that Artemis did not have, above all a strong association with the common people, with slaves, and with women.
Diana's grove-sanctuary at Lake Nemi kept an unusual priesthood recorded by several ancient writers: its priest, the rex Nemorensis, or King of the Wood, held office only so long as he could defend it, since any runaway slave who first broke a golden bough from a sacred tree in the grove earned the right to challenge the reigning priest to combat, killing him and taking the priesthood in his place, a violent rule of succession unique among Roman cults. This custom became the founding image of Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough, first published in 1890, an enormously influential comparative study of myth and ritual that opens with the Nemi priesthood and reads it as a survival of a much older pattern of sacred kingship, a work that shaped the whole later academic study of religion and mythology.