The female divinities of the Greek religion have so much of common character as to suggest the belief that they are all different forms under different names of the same divine personage. Such a theory can only be criticized a posteriori, after a minute examination of the various cults and the various ideas attaching to those cults. And it is at any rate convenient to study side by side such cognate forms as Artemis, Hekate, Demeter, Persephone, and Aphrodite. Of these the most prominent among the scattered tribes and communities of the Greek world was Artemis. Perhaps no other figure in the Greek Pantheon is so difficult to understand and explain, not because the conceptions that grew up in her worship are mystic and profound, but because they are, or at first sight appear, confusing and contradictory.

Most of her cult is genuinely Hellenic, although in some places we can discover Oriental influences and ideas. We can trace it back to a prehistoric period, and it is found in all the chief places of prehistoric Greek settlement; in Thessaly, Euboea, Boeotia, Phocis, Locris, Aetolia, Sicyon, Achaea, Elis, Argolis, and, in its most primitive form, in Attica Laconia and Arcadia. Partly from its wide prevalence, and partly from certain most primitive features that it possessed, we must hold that this cult was either an aboriginal heritage of the Greek nation, or that it was borrowed by all the tribes at some very remote time, and as no trace or remembrance of its foreign origin has been preserved in the earliest traditions that were rife in the chief centres of the worship, the latter supposition appears idle and gratuitous.