Artemis

Ovid's Metamorphoses tells the story of the huntsman Actaeon, out on Mount Cithaeron with his hounds, who stumbles by accident onto a hidden grotto where Artemis is bathing naked with her attendant nymphs. Artemis, the virgin goddess already recorded as guarding her own modesty fiercely, has no interest in Actaeon's innocence. Unable to reach for a weapon with the goddess unarmed before him, she flings water at his face instead, and where the drops land antlers begin to grow; Actaeon flees into the forest already becoming a stag, his human voice gone, unable to call out to the very hounds that are his own pride as a hunter. Those hounds catch his scent, not recognizing the animal ahead of them as their own master, and pull him down and tear him apart exactly as they have been trained to do to any stag they run to ground. Some tellings put the number of hounds at fifty, each one named in the text as it joins the kill. The myth turns Actaeon's own skill and his own pack into the instrument of his death, and it is told less as an account of Actaeon's fault, which the myth treats as an accident rather than a violation, than as a demonstration of exactly how absolute a claim Artemis makes on her own privacy.

Artemis's two major historic sanctuaries mark two very different sides of her cult. The Artemision at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, housed a cult image strikingly unlike the virgin huntress this entity otherwise describes, covered in rounded protrusions read as symbols of abundance and nourishment, a local form of the goddess focused on fertility rather than the hunt. At Brauron in Attica, closer to Athens, her sanctuary hosted the arkteia, a rite in which young Athenian girls, roughly ten to fourteen years old, served for a time as arktoi, bear-women, wearing saffron robes and performing ritual dances before returning to ordinary life on the path toward marriage and motherhood, a rite of passage that made Artemis, virgin though she was, the goddess who oversaw the process by which Athenian girls became eligible for adult womanhood. Both sanctuaries are historically attested in real depth, one as a wonder of the ancient world, the other in the archaeological and literary record of the arkteia itself. Neither carries a continuous cult into the present. The temple religion that once made Ephesus and Brauron destinations ended with the wider closure of Greek and Roman temples in late antiquity, and nothing since has restarted either practice.