Artemis, Apollo’s sister, goes armed with bow and arrows and, like him, has the power to send both plagues or sudden death among mortals, and to heal them. She is the protectress of little children, and of all sucking animals, but she also loves the chase, especially that of stags.

One day, while she was still a three-year-old child, her father Zeus, on whose knee she was sitting, asked her what presents she would like. Artemis answered at once: 'Pray give me eternal virginity; as many names as my brother Apollo; a bow and arrows like his; the office of bringing light; a saffron hunting tunic with a red hem reaching to my knees; sixty young ocean nymphs, all of the same age, as my maids of honour; twenty river nymphs from Amnisus in Crete, to take care of my buskins and feed my hounds when I am not out shooting; all the mountains in the world; and lastly, any city you care to choose for me, but one will be enough, because I intend to live on mountains most of the time. Unfortunately, women in labour will often be invoking me, since my mother Leto carried and bore me without pains, and the Fates have therefore made me patroness of child birth.'

She stretched up for Zeus's beard, and he smiled proudly, saying: 'With children like you, I need not fear Hera's jealous anger! You shall have all this, and more besides: not one, but thirty cities, and share in many others, both on the mainland and in the archipelago; and I appoint you guardian of their roads and harbours.'

Artemis thanked him, sprang from his knee, and went first to Mount Leucus in Crete, And next to the Ocean stream, where she chose numerous nine-year-old nymphs for her attendants; their mothers were delighted to let them go. On Hephaestus's invitation, she then visited the Cyclopes on the island of Lipara, and found them hammering away at a horse trough for Poseidon. Brontes, who had been instructed to make whatever she wanted, took her on his knee; but disliking his endearments, she tore a handful of hair from his chest, where a bald spot remained to the day of his death; anyone might have supposed that he had the mange. The nymphs were terrified at the wild appearance of the Cyclopes, and the din of their smithy - well they might be, for whenever a little girl is disobedient her mother threatened her with Brontes, Arges, or Steropes. But Artemis boldly told them to abandon Poseidon's trough for a while, and make her a silver bow, with a quiver of arrows, in return for which they should eat the first prey she brought down. With these weapons she went to Arcadia, Where Pan was engaged in cutting up a lynx to feed his bitches and their whelps. He gave her three lop-eared hounds, two parti-colored and one spotted, together capable of dragging live lions back to their kennels; and seven swift hounds from Sparta.

Having captured alive two couple of horned hinds, she harnessed them to a golden chariot with golden bits, and drove north over Thracian Mount Haemus. She cut her first pine torch on Mysian Olympus, and lit it at the cinders of a lightning-struck tree. She tried her silver bow four times: her first two targets were trees; her third, a wild beast; her fourth, a city of unjust men.

Then she returned to Greece, where the Amnisian nymphs unyoked her hinds, rubbed them down, fed them on the same quick growing trefoil, from Hera's pasture, which the steeds of Zeus eat, and watered them from golden troughs.

Artemis requires the same perfect chastity from her companions as she practices herself. When Zeus had seduced one of them, Callisto, daughter of Lycaon, Artemis noticed that she was with child. Changing her into a bear, she shouted to the pack, and Callisto would have been hunted to death had she not been caught up to Heaven by Zeus who, later, set her image among the stars. But, some say that Zeus himself changed Callisto into a bear, and that jealous Hera arranged for Artemis to chase her in error. Callisto's child, Arcas, was saved, and became the ancestor of the Arcadians.