ABSTRACT
Artemis was first and foremost a goddess of the wilds and the hunt. The grand majority of her epithets pertain to hunting and the natural world, just as most of her iconography shows her with bow and quiver, often dominating one or more wild animals. From Greece's earliest literature she is portrayed as the tall, beautiful huntress, the dominant theme in her best preserved Homeric Hymn and her exclusive role in the extant drama. As a goddess of transitions, it is perhaps reasonable that Spartans would sacrifice to her when entering into battle, and the Athenians would credit her help in defending threatened borders. Pseudo-Aristotle in his Constitution of the Athenians does indeed note that one of the duties of the Athenian General-in-Chief, the Polemarkhos, was to offer sacrifices to Artemis Agrotera and Enyalios, an epithet of Ares. Aristophanes makes a humorous reference to sacrificing goats to Agrotera in his Knights.
