Artemis

The daughter who delivered her twin

Leto, the mother of the twins, reached the island of Delos and gave birth to Artemis. In the version told by Apollodorus, whose Library retells the Greek myths, the newborn Artemis at once became her mother’s midwife and brought her brother Apollo into the world. So she is a child and a helper at a birth before the story says anything about her bow.

Apollodorus then moves on quickly. Artemis chose hunting and stayed unmarried for ever. Apollo gets the longer account, about prophecy, Delphi and the serpent Python.

The short account still tells us a good deal. Independence, wild country and power over the danger of childbirth already define her. She stays outside marriage, yet she watches over a danger that married and unmarried women both face.

Where the twins were born

Not every account puts the twins together. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo, an early poem in his honour, says Leto bore Artemis at Ortygia and Apollo on rocky Delos.

The hymn does not say where Ortygia was. Ancient writers linked the name with different places. Apollodorus gives both births to Delos, and the hymn separates them. The two versions disagree, and pointing to a place on a modern map would not settle the question.

Delos kept Artemis beside Apollo in worship, even where the poets disagreed about where she was born. The island had a sanctuary, a sacred place set aside for the gods, where both twins were honoured.

Names that describe her

The Greeks called on Artemis by titles that named her in two ways. Letogeneia means the one born of Leto. It places her inside her family’s story. Elaphevolos means the deer-shooter. It places her outdoors with the bow that sets her apart.

The Romans knew her as Diana, and Diana took over much of this range. Greek Artemis grew out of many local forms of worship, though, and no single portrait can bring them together into one personality.

Hunting and childbirth may seem like opposites. Hunting takes an animal’s life, and childbirth guards the arrival of a new one. Artemis rules the dangerous edge in both: bodies out beyond the safety of the house, and moments when survival is not certain. Her own birth story joins the two. She comes into life and at once watches over another birth.

Niobe’s boast

In the last book of the Iliad, Homer’s poem of the Trojan War, the Greek hero Achilles tells the grieving king Priam about Niobe. He tells the story to persuade Priam to eat, and he gets there through a harsh punishment.

Niobe boasted that she had 12 children while Leto had only two. Apollo killed Niobe’s six sons, and Artemis killed her six daughters. For nine days the bodies lay unburied, because Zeus had turned the people around them to stone. On the tenth day the gods buried them. Niobe herself became stone on Mount Sipylus, still mourning.

The size of the punishment does not follow a modern sense of justice. It follows the honour of the gods. Niobe turned motherhood into a contest and belittled Leto, so Leto’s two children wiped out the advantage Niobe had claimed.

Artemis did not argue about the insult or warn Niobe first. She appears only through the work of her arrows. The answer to an offence came before anyone could bargain over it.

Calm in the moment of killing

The archaeological museum on Delos holds a marble statue of Artemis Elaphevolos, made in a workshop in Attica, the region around Athens. The goddess is in the act of killing a deer. Her face stays calm.

The sculptor did not make a mistake. Artemis’s calm is what makes the action divine. Human strain and panic do not touch the face of the goddess who decides whether the hunted animal escapes, whether a birth goes well, or whether an offence is answered.

Her myths can be brief because they rarely show her stopping to think. The baby midwife, the unmarried hunter and the daughter who answers Niobe are one figure. In each story she stands where others cannot act safely, and she acts there without hesitating.