The Artemision and Brauron: Artemis's Historic Standing

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.