Expert: Maria - 10/23/2008

Question
I was wondering if you would tell me a difference in myth between the Roman goddess Diana and the Greek goddess Artemis. I need to know a myth that is shared between them that I can compare for a compare and contrast essay. I am supposed to find a myth that about Artemis and a similar one that the Romans modified about Diana to change it to fit with them culturally and socially.I would also like to know what images and symbols are associated with Artemis and compare/contrast them with the images and symbols associated with diana. In addition, i would like to know how these symbols are important in our modern culture and in Greek/Roman culture. Thank you very much if you answer this I have researched for hours and still haven't found very much.

Answer
Hello,

First of all  the Roman goddess Diana (perhaps meaning “the shining one”), whose worship in Rome  was on the Aventine Hill, where she was invoked to protect the harvest against storms, was originally an indigenous woodland goddess  of light, animals, vegetation and fertility, so that, just as 'Bona Dea' (Latin meaning “the Good Goddess”), the Roman goddess of fertility, she was worshipped mainly by women as the giver of fertility and easy births.

Diana was often associated with the Roman  nymph Egeria, her servant and assistant midwife, and the hero Virbius, a minor Roman deity who was said to have been the first priest of Diana’s cult and is sometimes mentioned as the consort of Diana.

Only later under Greek influence the original Roman goddess Diana  was equated with Artemis, daughter of Zeus and Leto,  and assumed many of her aspects so that she became also a  goddess of the moon, hunting and chastity  who demanded all of her followers to dedicate themselves to purity.

Symbols and images originally associated with Roman goddess Diana were  oak tree, wild animals and forests as well as light.  
Only later, i.e. under Greek influence,  Diana was represented in Roman art as a huntress with bow and arrow, along with a hunting dog or a stag, while the symbols  and images associated with the Greek goddess Artemis  were especially crescent moon, bow and arrow, deer, stag.
Such symbols were important in Greek/Roman culture, of course, but they have no importance at all in our modern culture.


With regard to a myth shared between Diana and Artemis  and  modified  by the Romans about Diana to make it fit  their culture, the only one legend I can quote is that of  Virbius / Hippolytus where  the Roman deity Virbius is identified with the resurrected Hippolytus, as we read in Virgil VII, 765 and  especially in Ovid’s Metamorhoses, XV, 543-545.

In this myth the Romans used the Greek hero Hippolytus and his story as a faithful  chaste follower of Artemis to change him into Virbius, a woodland god, maybe a tree spirit of the  sacred grove of Aricia, at the foot of the Alban Mount, near Rome, as here there was the temple of Diana Aricina.

This way the myth which linked Artemis to Diana  was in harmony with the original Roman religiousness which followed a rural animistic tradition, in which many spirits were each responsible for specific aspects of human activities, such as  e.g. sowing, ploughing, reaping, fertility and fruitfulness.

Hope these  suggestions can be helpful to you so that you can develop them, after reading the sites and notes below.

Have a good work,
Maria
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1-See VIRBIUS  (Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (1898)at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0062%3Ai...

2-See HIPPOLYTUS at: http://www.pantheon.org/articles/h/hippolytus.html and http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.04.0062&que...

3- See Ovid’s Metamorhoses, XV, 543-545 at:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0028:book=15...
(Latin "qui  fuisti Hippolytus, nunc idem Virbius esto!"= You were Hippolytus, but now instead you shall be Virbius!’).

4-See Virgil’s Aeneid VII, 765 at:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0052;lay...


Finally note that  this question should have been asked in the category 'Mythology' at http://www.allexperts.com/el/Mythology/