Her near relation to Apollo gives a certain grandeur to her position: but the inventive elements of the representation greatly obscure and even partially overbear the traditional.
Her side in the Trojan war is to be explained by her relation to Apollo. In all other points she seems to be a goddess of associations more properly Greek, perhaps in consequence of their greater addiction to hunting.
In treating the Homeric Diana as a personage principally ancillary to Apollo, and equipped with reflections, or stray fragments, of prerogatives chiefly belonging to him, I do not attempt to foreclose the question what may have been the origin of her name, or whether she may be connected with any mythological original in the religions of the East or of Egypt.
Döllinger conceives that the union of Diana with Apollo was Greek, and that they were not originally in relation with one another; while he justly observes, that this deity, like Apollo, has a great and inexplicable diversity of function. She, like other deities of Greece, has been thought to represent the Astarte of the Syrians. Again, Herodotus[256] has given us most curious information respecting the gods of the Scythians, whom we have found to be related to the Pelasgi. They worship, he states, the Celestial Venus under the name of Artimpasa. This name, it has been ingeniously conjectured[257], is composed (1) of the name Mitra, which the Persians gave to Venus[258], and which reversed becomes Artim, and (2) of the Sanscrit Bhas, meaning shine, and thus corresponding with the Φοῖβος of Apollo, and the Γλαυκῶπις of Pallas: all of them being, as it were, shreds of the tradition fully represented in the Shechinah of the Jews, and the ‘Light’ of Saint John. This also corresponds with the cluster of golden epithets, the χρυσηλάκατος, χρυσήνιος, and χρυσόθρονος, which Homer applies to Diana: and the very feebleness of Diana in the Theomachy suggests that the Eastern prototype of Venus, the Mitra of the Persians, was originally no more than a degenerate derivation from a higher tradition, which found a more natural, but still only a partial, expression in the majestic and chaste, as well as beautiful, Artemis.
The Latona of Homer.
We have next to consider the Homeric delineation of Latona, the mother of Apollo and of Diana.
It is scarcely possible to avoid being struck, on turning to this portraiture, with the contrast between the slightness of the outline and the real dignity of the features and position. This contrast, like the greater one relating to Apollo, seems to have its key in the traditional origin of the representation: and there is no one Homeric deity, whose case, when fully considered, can afford a more marked testimony to the hypothesis of a strong element of traditive theology in the religious system of the Poems.
Why has she a position so different from that of any other wife or concubine of Jupiter: such, for example, as Dione or Demeter?
Why is it so much elevated above that of any among them, except only Juno?
How comes she to have a son so incomparably superior in rank, in power, and in the affections of his father, to any child of Juno herself, the πρεσβὰ θεά?