Childbirth, Girls, and the Goddess of Ephesus

Alongside the wilderness Artemis holds a domain that can seem to contradict it: she is a goddess of childbirth and of the passage of girls to womanhood. A virgin herself, she was believed to ease or to end the pains of labour, and her sanctuaries at Brauron and elsewhere in Attica received girls who served the goddess before marriage. Her most famous temple stood at Ephesus in Asia Minor and was counted a wonder of the world, but the figure worshipped there, the many-breasted Artemis Ephesia, grew out of an older Anatolian mother-goddess whose identity was folded into the Greek name. Scholars treat the Ephesian Artemis as a syncretism rather than a straightforward image of the huntress, a reminder that a single divine name could gather together very different local powers.

At Brauron in Attica, excavated remains and a body of inscriptions and dedicatory vases document a distinctive rite known as the arkteia, in which young Athenian girls, called arktoi or little bears, served the goddess for a period before marriage, reportedly wearing saffron robes and performing a ritual dance recalled in a fragment of Aristophanes's Lysistrata; the custom is generally linked to a myth in which a bear sacred to Artemis was killed and the goddess demanded that Athenian girls appease her before marrying. The site's stoa and finds of children's clothing dedicated to the goddess give Brauron the best physical evidence anywhere in Greece for how a specific, otherwise poorly documented, coming-of-age cult for girls actually operated.