Artemis

Stephanie Lynn Budin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317448877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Artemis is a literary, iconographic, and archaeological study of the ancient Greek goddess of the hunt, who presided over the transitions and mediations between the wild and the civilized, youth and maturity, life and death. Beginning with a study of the early origins of Artemis and her cult in the Bronze and Archaic Ages, Budin explores the goddess' persona and her role in the lives of her worshippers.

This volume examines her birth and childhood, her place in the divine family, her virginity, and her associations with those places where the wilds become the "cities of just men." The focus then turns to Artemis' role in the lives of children and women, particularly how she helps them navigate the transition to adulthood and, perhaps too often, death. Budin goes on to reconsider some of the more harrowing aspects of Artemis' mythology, such as plague and bloodshed, while also examining some of her kinder, oft overlooked associations. Finally, the role of Artemis in the Renaissance and modern society is addressed, from the on-going fascination with the "breasts" on the statue of Artemis of Ephesos to the Artemisian aspects of Katniss Everdeen.

Written in an accessible style, Artemis is a crucial resource for students not only of Greek myth, religion and cult, but also those seeking to understand the lives and roles of girls and women in ancient Greece, as this goddess presided over their significant milestones, from maiden to wife to mother.

1

AN EARLY HISTORY OF ARTEMIS

Several deities in the Greek pantheon have origins that are relatively straightforward to trace. Zeus, for example, is a derivative of the Indo-European Sky Father (his name is etymologically related to dyaus pitar = “sky father”) who appears to have adopted some aspects, especially iconographic, of the Near Eastern storm gods, such as Semitic Hadad or Hittite Telipinu. Aphrodite, for her part, is originally a Cypriot adoption and adaptation of the Mesopotamian goddesses of sex, Inanna/Ištar and Iš

ara.

Other deities are more difficult to trace in this respect, and Artemis definitely falls into this more obscure category. It is perhaps more fruitful, then, to speak not so much of Artemis’ origins as it is to speak of her antecedents—iconographic and textual entities who show aspects of the Greek goddess’s persona, who foreshadow her in Bronze Age times, and who may have contributed to her formation in the Iron Age. The tentative nature of such a search is necessary because although there are numerous entities in the Aegean, and even Near Eastern, Bronze Age who show aspects of Artemis’ character, it is not yet possible to show continuity between these Bronze Age divinities and the goddess of the Classical period. One might hope that future excavations and research will shed greater light on these matters.

LINEAR B¹

What is probably the clearest evidence for Artemis in the Aegean Bronze Age is two, possibly three, appearances of her name in the Linear B corpus. Linear B is the name given to a syllabic writing system employed by the Mycenaean Greeks in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE. This system, adopted and adapted from the Minoan Linear A (hence the name), was used in the Mycenaean palaces at Thebes, Orchomenos, Athens, Eleusis, Mycenae, Pylos, Tiryns, Knossos, and Khania primarily to keep track of the economic affairs of the palatial elite, such as who owned what land, how much, and what animals and offerings were offered to what deities, when, and where. The corpus basically consists of lists traced into sheets and leaves of clay to serve as temporary records, later to be remoistened to keep track of the following year’s data. The main reason we have any at all now is that the clay was accidentally fired in the mass conflagrations that destroyed most of the palaces at the end of the Bronze Age in the thirteenth to twelfth centuries BCE.

Two documents from the site of Pylos in south-western Greece (homeland of Nestor in the Homeric epics) appear to list the name of Artemis. The first is document PY Un 219, where PY stands for Pylos, and the Un means that the text refers to provisions. The text reads:

e-ke-ra-ne, tu-wo 2 O 1[
pa-de-we, O 1 pa-de-we , O 1
ka-ru-ke, PE 2 KA 1 O 6
te-qi-jo-ne, O 1 a-ke-ti-ri-ja-i , KA 1
a-ti-mi-te, O 1 da-ko-ro-i , (E) 1
di-pte-ra-po-ro, RA 1 O 3 ko-(ro)[ ] (1)
(wa)-na-ka-te, TE 1 po-ti-ni-ja[
e-[ ] U 1 e-ma-a₂, U 1 pe-[
a-ka-wo-ne, MA 1 pa-ra-[ ]2
ra-wa-ke-ta, MA 1 KO 1 [ ]ME 1 O 1 WI 1
KE 1 [ ] vacat
vacat x 2

Translated, this comes out to:

To e-ke-ra-(wo), perfume, 2 units and 1 unit of oregano
To pa-de-u, 1 unit of oregano, to pa-de-u, 1 unit of oregano
To the herald, 2 units of seed, 1 unit of KA, 6 units of oregano
To te-qu-ri-jo, 1 unit of oregano, to the tailors, 1 unit of KA
To Artemis (a-ti-mi-te) 1 unit of oregano, to the sweepers of the temple 1 unit of E
To the animal skin carriers 1 unit of RA, 3 units of oregano, to the ko-ro . . .
To the king 1 unit of TE, to the Lady . . .
To . . . , to Hermes 1 unit of U, to pe- . . .
To a-ka-wo 1 unit of fennel, to pa-ra . . . 2 units
To the lawagetas 1 unit of fennel, 1 unit of coriander, 1 of ME, 1 of oregano, 1 of WI

The second text, also coming from Pylos, is PY Es 650, where the designation Es means that the text refers to grain and land-holding. The text has:

ki-ri-ti-jo-jo, ko-pe-re-u e-ke , to-so-de pe-mo GRA 6
a-re-ku-tu-ru-wo, e-ke (,) to-so-de pe-mo GRA 7
se-no e-ke to-so-de pe-mo, GRA 1
o-po-ro-me-no e-ke to-so-de (,) pe-mo , GRA 4
a₃-ki-wa-ro, a-te-mi-to, do-e-ro e-ke to-so-de pe-mo GRA 1
we-da-ne-wo, do-e-ro e-ke to-so-de pe-mo GRA T 4
wo-ro-ti-ja-o e-ke to-so-de pe-mo GRA T 4
wo-ro-ti-ja-o e-ke to-so-de pe-mo GRA 2
ka-ra-i e-ke, to-so-de pe-mo GRA T 3
a-ne-o e-ke to-so-de pe-mo GRA 1 T 5

The word e-ke means “has,” to-so-de means “so much,” pe-mo means “seed,” and GRA is an ideogram referring to seed. As such, the document gives the list of a number of personal names and how much seed each person has. In line five we see “a₃-ki-wa-ro, slave (do-e-ro) of Artemis (a-te-mi-to), so much seed—1 unit.”

There continues to be debate about whether the words a-ti-mi-te (dative) and a-te-mi-to (genitive) do in fact mean Artemis. Text PY Un 219 lists both deities and mortal functionaries, each receiving comparable gifts (oregano), while PY Es 650 lists no deities at all. Furthermore, the names are not spelled the same, with a-ti- in the former text, a-te- in the latter. In spite of these objections, it is now generally agreed that the Linear B texts do indeed refer to a goddess named Artemis, spelling variations notwithstanding. In PY Un 219 the name appears in a text that also refers to the god Hermes (e-ma-a₂) as well as the quintessential Mycenaean goddess Potnia (po-ti-ni-ja). In addition, the text refers to cult functionaries, such as the herald, and the highest ranking members of Mycenaean society, the king (wa-na-ka-te = wanax) and the lawagetas (ra-wa-ke-ta). A goddess would not be out of place; a named but unknown “commoner” would be. As for PY Es 650, it is well known that one category of cult functionary in Mycenaean Greece was known as the “slave of the deity” (do-e-ro te-o-jo). Thus, a reference to a “slave of Artemis” who, by the bye, seems to own land to the equivalent of one unit of grain, appears to indicate a cult official to the goddess in question.

One final, possible reference to Artemis appears in PY Fn 837, where the Fn refers to allocations of olive oil. Here is listed in line 5 one “i-je-re-u a-ti[” with the text broken after the a-ti signs; i-je-re-u is the Linear B orthography for ancient Greek hiereus, meaning “priest.” So it is evident that we have here a reference to a priest, and the first two signs of the name following make it possible, even likely, that he is specifically a priest of Artemis.

The textual evidence thus supports the high probability that the goddess Artemis was worshipped in Bronze Age Greece, at least in the region of Pylos. As Pylos has one of the two largest Linear B archives (the other being Knossos on Crete), this may have more to do with preservation than the actual expanse of the goddess’s cult. Unfortunately, the presence of Artemis’ name reveals nothing about the persona of the goddess at the time, or the nature of her cult. As Françoise Rougemont noted in her study of divine names in the Linear B corpus:

A certain number of theonyms do appear, but one must note from the start that the Mycenaean documentation does not allow one to separate the study of the gods and goddesses from the study of their names: We have no idea about their personalities, and we have only fragmentary glimpses of what their cults were like, or the rites to which they were attached.²

So, the documentary evidence indicates that Artemis was worshipped as early as the Late Bronze Age in Greece, but the data reveal nothing about her character or cult.

NATURE GODDESS

In addition to the textual evidence, there are also iconographic data that suggest that an Artemis-like goddess was recognized and worshipped in the Bronze Age Aegean. One such iconographic datum is what might be termed the Aegean Nature Goddess. This image, of which there are two examples in the extant fresco repertoire with similar iconography in the glyptic, shows a young goddess in an outdoor setting. She is accompanied and/or adorned by wild animals, and, most significantly in the case of a Proto-Artemis, is associated with girls.

The most famous portrayal of an Aegean Nature Goddess is the Goddess of Building Xeste 3 (Room 3a, North Wall) at Akrotiri on the Cycladic island of Thera (Figure 1.1), dating to c. 1700 BCE.³

Figure 1.1 Nature Goddess of Room 3a, North Wall of Building Xeste 3, Akrotiri, c. 1700 BCE. Courtesy of the Cycladic Museum, Athens, Greece.

This goddess sits enthroned upon a Minoan-style tripartite shrine. Before her a blue monkey offers the goddess crocus stamens, while right behind her is a griffin with wings outstretched and tethered to a nearby window. The goddess has a full head of long hair, including a snake-like tress on the top of her head, and one well-developed breast is visible in profile. Based on what is known of the conventions of portraying age in Minoan (including Theran) art, the hairstyle plus the developed but not pendulous breast indicated that this female is in mid- to late adolescence. The Minoans shaved the heads of their children, but left a few tresses of hair growing on the scalp. These tresses were allowed to grow long even with repeated shavings, and thus older children had longer locks on an otherwise shaven scalp. Later, the rest of the hair was allowed to grow in, leading to depictions of adolescents with long locks and shorter curls. Finally, the hair grew in fully. Likewise, standard Minoan garb for females reveals the breasts. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Artemis
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Foreword
• List of Figures
• Abbreviations
• Introducing Artemis
• 1 An Early History of Artemis
• 2 The Childhood and Perpetual Virginity of Artemis
• 3 Artemis of the Wilds
• 4 Artemis and Children
• 5 Artemis and Women
• 6 Artemis as Goddess of Plague and Cruelty
• 7 Some Underappreciated Aspects of Artemis
• 8 Artemis Afterwards
• Bibliography
• Index