followers. Pythagoras was closely associated with Apollo – indeed he was his son,
some said. But one can also take a deep breath and reach the insight of a Walter Otto:
The chaotic must take shape, the turbulent must be reduced to time and measure,
opposites must be wedded in harmony. This music is thus the great educator, the sources
and symbol of all order in the world and in the life of mankind. Apollo the musician is
identical with the founder of ordinances, identical with him who knows what is right,
what is necessary, what is to be. In this accuracy of the god’s aim Ho ̈lderlin could still
recognize the archer... (Otto 1954:77)Artemis
Artemis is the sister of Apollo. This bond in mythic genealogy results from their
association in cult. Here we can observe the special role of Delos, where both were
born to Leto, as we have seen, and where both had a temple in the same precinct, as
did Zeus and Hera at Olympia. This contrasts markedly with Delphi, which is
exclusively Apollo’s site (except that Dionysus shares it during the winter months).
In the mythology, Artemis is a huntress, accompanied by the nymphs. Hunting is,
however, in reality a man’s pursuit and a dangerous one, pursued in wild and
uninhabited places. Myth tells of boar hunts, notably that of Meleager, and warriors
in Homer and in the Mycenaean age could wear a boar’s tusk helmet. Odysseus had a
wound from a boar hunt in which he had engaged at adolescence whilst under the
tutelage of his maternal grandfather, and in historical times no Macedonian noble
might become a man until he had slain his first boar. Why then is a virgin goddess
hunting in the wilds with nubile (but untouchable) teenage goddesses? And why is it
that the nubile maiden Iphigeneia must be sacrificed to her at Aulis, or swapped for a
deer, and why is it that Callisto in Arcadia must be turned into a bear? The myths
bring together themes of importance for the dynamics of a successful society. It is
only through confrontation with the wild, if usually in myth rather than cult, and
through a dangerous but protected transition, where their normal roles are inverted,
that girls can become tamed in subjection to men through the institution of marriage.
A similar logic pervades the mythology of the Amazons, where the transitional
independence of young women is marked even more strongly by their impossible
characterization as warriors. Artemis, then, is the goddess of the transition, a transi-
tion in which men have no part – as is shown by the myth of Actaeon, torn apart by
his own hounds as a result of witnessing Artemis and the nymphs, a forbidden
mystery. She completes this transition as Artemis Locheia, to whom women may
appeal and childbirth and in whose shrine they may gratefully hang up clothing as a
thank-offering, their transition to womanhood complete.
Artemis is accordingly the goddess at Brauron, a moist, marshy place at the coastal
fringes of Attica where Athenian girls’ rites are practiced. The place itself has a
‘‘marginal’’ feel, an almost eerie combination of fertility and remoteness. At Patrae
too, the priestess of the major cult of Artemis Triclaria was a girl, who retained
that priesthood until she married (Pausanias 7.19). Here there were grim tales that
the most attractive boy and girl had been sacrificed to Artemis annually, owing to
an adolescent pair, Melanippus and Comaetho, prematurely having had sex in the
Olympian Gods, Olympian Pantheon 51