Apollo was two gods in one body — the archer who sent plague, and the musician whose lyre stopped hell. His twin sister ran on exactly the same design, and the split in her is even wider. By day, Artemis (Diana to the Romans) hunted. She was hard, fast, entirely uninterested in men, and the stories about what happened to people who annoyed her are the most disproportionate in Greek myth. By night, as goddess of the moon, she was the opposite. She measured the tides. She moved slowly across the sky. She watched over things while they slept. The two myths in this chapter belong one to each half, and reading them side by side is the fastest way to understand her.
The Company She Kept
Artemis lived in the woods with a band of nymphs who had all made the same choice she had: no marriage, no men, no household work, no interest in any of it. They hunted, and that was the arrangement. The names in that company keep turning up elsewhere in Greek myth, and always in stories with the same shape. Syrinx ran from Pan and became the reeds he made his pipes from. Daphne ran from Apollo — Artemis's own brother — and became the laurel. Arethusa, pursued by the river god Alpheus, was turned into a fountain to escape him and was reached anyway. Atalanta, the fastest runner alive, set lethal conditions on her suitors. That's four stories in a row about a woman being chased. Whatever else the Greeks were doing with Artemis, they were using her to explore a very specific and very persistent anxiety — and the fact that most of these women end up as plants or water rather than free is worth sitting with.
Her territory was protected absolutely. Peabody notes that even the satyrs and fauns — who were reckless enough to go swimming in the river Styx if they'd fancied it — kept away from Artemis's groves. She laid a spell on their unruly wits, Peabody says, the way the moon controls the tides. Except once.
The nymphs who ran with Artemis had made the same choice she had. Every name in that company turns up in another story about a woman being chased.
Actaeon: The Hunter Who Saw Too Much
Actaeon was a grandson of Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, and a keen hunter. One hot noon he left his companions and wandered off through the woods on his own. Ovid is careful — and this is important — to say that he did not do it on purpose. It was chance, not blasphemy. There was no plan. He followed a stream, drawn on by the sound of running water and laughter somewhere ahead. Peabody notes that the air was wondrously clear and sweet, and the trees leaned across his way, and that any ordinary sense of religious caution should have told him to turn round. He didn't. He pushed the laurel branches aside at the mouth of a grotto and looked in. Artemis was bathing with her nymphs. The nymphs screamed and crowded round her to hide her — and Ovid can't resist noting that the goddess was a head taller than all of them, so it didn't work. She went red with anger and had no bow within reach. So she used what she had. She flung a handful of water in his face and said the only words she speaks in the entire episode: now go and tell people you saw Artemis undressed. If you can.
The Transformation
The change came on him while he was still walking away. Antlers pushed up through his forehead. His neck lengthened, his ears sharpened to points, his arms became legs and his hands became hooves, and his skin roughened into a dappled hide. He tried to speak and couldn't. He went down onto four feet and ran. Then he stopped at the stream, looked into it, and saw a stag looking back — the same animal he'd come out that morning to kill. Ovid gives him one line of interior monologue that is among the cruellest things ever written: he wants to cry out I am Actaeon, recognise your master — and the words won't come. Because his dogs had found him. Ovid names them. Over thirty of them, individually, in a long catalogue — Blackfoot, Tracker, Gnasher, Whirlwind, Wolf, Glance. His own pack, that he'd raised and trained and been proud of. They pulled him down. And his hunting companions, arriving late, stood round the kill shouting for Actaeon to come and see what they'd caught, and complaining he was missing it. Peabody's summary — and so he perished, hunter and hunted — is exactly right.
He wanted to cry out "I am Actaeon, recognise your master" — and the words wouldn't come. Hunter and hunted.
Was It Fair?
No. And Ovid says so outright, which is unusual for him. He notes that people who talked about it afterwards were divided: some thought Artemis had gone too far, others thought a virgin goddess is entitled to defend herself absolutely. Then he moves on and lets you decide. That ambivalence is the whole reason the story survived. Actaeon commits no crime. He takes a wrong turn on a hot afternoon and is torn apart by his own dogs for it. If you want a single myth to explain what the Greeks thought about the gods and fairness, it's this one. The sacred is not safe, and it does not care whether you meant it. Titian's Diana and Actaeon (1556–59), now shared between the National Gallery in London and the National Galleries of Scotland, is the greatest painting of the moment — Actaeon frozen mid-step at the instant the curtain comes back, everything about to happen.
Endymion: The Other Artemis
Now the night side, and it could hardly be more different. Endymion was a young shepherd who took his flocks high up the slopes of Mount Latmos in Caria, on the coast of Asia Minor, to get them into cleaner air. He was beautiful, and, Peabody says simply, very lonely. He spent his days and nights on the high empty ground, dreaming. And the moon, crossing the sky above him one night — equally alone up there — saw him. She was moved by how tired and solitary he was, and what she did about it is one of the strangest acts of love in mythology. She put him to sleep. Permanently. With eternal youth, so he would never age and never wake and never be tired again. Then she watched his sheep for him. That's the picture. Every night, the goddess of the moon coming down to do a shepherd's job on a Turkish hillside, like any farm girl walking slowly through the pastures after the flock, spinning wool as she goes, alone and perfectly content.
Endymion dreamed the sort of dreams that only happy poets get, and even in the waking moments Peabody allows him, he walked in a light nobody else could see. Peabody makes the connection explicit and it's the point of the whole chapter: just as Apollo watched over the sheep of Admetus because he had to, Artemis kept the flocks of Endymion because she wanted to.
Every night she came down to do a shepherd's job on a Turkish hillside, spinning wool as she went, alone and perfectly content.
A Note on Which Goddess
Strictly speaking, most ancient sources give Endymion to Selene, the older and more literal moon goddess, not to Artemis. The two were merged over centuries as Artemis absorbed lunar functions — the same way Apollo absorbed Helios's solar ones. By the time of the Roman poets, Diana and Luna were largely interchangeable, and Renaissance and Victorian retellings inherited that fusion. So Peabody isn't wrong, exactly; she's just using the late version. If you want the sharpest treatment in English, Keats's Endymion (1818) is the poem — it opens with the line everybody knows and almost nobody can place: a thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
Reading the Two Together
Set the two stories side by side and the design becomes obvious. Actaeon moves through dense forest at noon; Endymion keeps watch on an open mountainside at night. Actaeon is the one doing the looking — he intrudes on the goddess; Endymion is simply seen, and never even knows it. Actaeon enters a closed grotto; Endymion is out in open air. One story is all motion — pursuit, flight, a kill — and the other is absolute stillness. And the outcomes divide accordingly: Actaeon is torn apart by his own dogs, while Endymion sleeps forever in eternal youth. The Greeks weren't being inconsistent. They were saying something about the natural world that they clearly believed: it is dangerous when you go looking, and gentle when you leave it alone. Which, as observations about wilderness go, is not bad.
Sources
Actaeon is told at length in Ovid, Metamorphoses Book 3 — including the full catalogue of dogs, Ovid's note that it was chance and not blasphemy, and his remark that people disagreed about whether the punishment was just. Earlier versions in Apollodorus give different reasons for Artemis's anger. Endymion appears in Apollodorus, in Theocritus, in the Homeric Hymn to Selene, and in Pausanias, with details varying wildly — some accounts give him fifty daughters by the moon, which sits oddly with the eternal sleep. Josephine Preston Peabody's Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew (1897) pairs the two in a single chapter, which is a genuinely clever piece of editing.
