The bow of Artemis was forged by the Cyclopes, the one-eyed giants who were master smiths, or by Hephaestus, the lame god of the forge, depending on which ancient poet you follow. Hephaestus was the son of Hera, the queen of Olympus, and the greatest craftsman the cosmos had ever known, a god who built the palaces of Olympus and forged armour that shone like starlight. The Cyclopes Brontes, whose name means Thunder, Steropes, whose name means Lightning, and Arges, whose name means Bright Flash, were the sons of Gaia, the earth, and Uranus, the sky, and they had forged the thunderbolt of Zeus, the trident of Poseidon, and the helm of Hades. Whoever made it, the bow was of silver, light as moonbeams in Artemis's hand, and its arrows flew straighter and farther than any mortal weapon, tipped with a power that could bring instant death to beast or man. The quiver was said to hold a hundred shafts, and Artemis never missed her mark.

Artemis was born on the island of Delos, the only place that would shelter her mother Leto from the wrath of Hera, the wife of Zeus, who had sworn that no land under the sun would give the Titaness refuge to bear Zeus's children. Leto wandered the earth in agony until the small floating island of Delos, then called Ortygia, accepted her, and there she gave birth first to Artemis and then, with Artemis's help as midwife, to Apollo. Artemis asked her father Zeus for three gifts while she was still a child: to remain a virgin forever, to have many names by which she would be called, and to carry a bow and arrows with which she would hunt. Zeus granted them all, smiling at his daughter's fierce independence, and from that day Artemis was the mistress of beasts, the protector of young women, and the huntress whose arrows struck with the certainty of fate.

The bow appears most famously in the story of Niobe, the queen of Thebes, a city in Boeotia in central Greece. Niobe was the daughter of Tantalus, a king who had once served the gods a meal of his own son and been punished with eternal thirst and hunger in Tartarus, the dark prison beneath the earth, and she had married Amphion, the king who had built the walls of Thebes with music. Niobe had seven sons and seven daughters, and in her pride she boasted before the people of Thebes that she was greater than Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis, for Leto had only two children while Niobe had fourteen. The boast reached Olympus, and Apollo and Artemis took up their silver bows in shared fury. They flew to Thebes, and Apollo shot the seven sons as they exercised in the fields, his arrows striking them down one by one, while Artemis shot the seven daughters as they wove in the palace, her shafts finding each heart with merciless precision. Niobe watched them all die and was turned to stone by grief, and her weeping image became a fountain on the mountainside. The bow had shown that no mortal pride could stand against the divine huntress, and that the goddess who protected young women would destroy any mother who mocked her own.

The bow appears again in the story of the Calydonian Boar Hunt, the greatest hunt in Greek legend. Oeneus, the king of Calydon in Aetolia, a region in western Greece, had offered the first fruits of every harvest to all the gods, but in one year he forgot Artemis. The goddess was enraged. She sent a monstrous boar down from the mountains, a beast the size of an ox with tusks like scythes and eyes that burned like coals, and it ravaged the fields and vineyards of Calydon, killing men and cattle alike. Oeneus called upon the heroes of Greece to hunt the beast, and they came in a company that had never been gathered before: Meleager, the king's own son, who had been blessed by the Fates with a life tied to a burning brand; Atalanta, the virgin huntress of Arcadia who had been raised by bears and who could outrun any man; Jason, the leader of the Argonauts; Peleus, the father of Achilles; and Telamon, the father of Ajax. Artemis watched the hunt from the mountain heights, her silver bow in her hand, and though the heroes eventually killed the boar, the hunt ended in murder and civil war, for Artemis's anger was not so easily appeased. Meleager gave the boar's hide to Atalanta, and his uncles tried to take it from her, and Meleager killed them in his rage, and his own mother Althaea, grieving for her brothers, burned the brand that held his life and destroyed her son. The bow had shown that a goddess slighted could send a beast that would tear a kingdom apart.

The bow appears in the story of Actaeon, a young hunter from Thebes who was the grandson of Cadmus, the Phoenician prince who had founded the city by sowing the teeth of the Dragon of Ares. Actaeon was out hunting on Mount Cithaeron with his hounds one day when he stumbled upon a grove where Artemis was bathing in a spring, attended by her nymphs. He saw the goddess naked, and she saw him seeing her. Artemis was a virgin goddess, and her modesty was sacred. She snatched up a handful of water from the spring and dashed it into Actaeon's face, and in an instant he was transformed into a stag, his own hounds no longer recognising him. The dogs turned on their master and tore him to pieces, and Artemis took up her bow and watched from the hillside, her arrows still in the quiver, for the hounds needed no help. The bow was not always needed. Sometimes the goddess's will was enough.

In another tale, the giant Orion was a hunter of such skill and size that he boasted he would kill every beast on the earth. Gaia, the earth herself, was angered by this threat to her creatures, and she sent a monstrous scorpion to sting Orion to death. But some say it was Artemis who killed him, either because he had tried to assault her or one of her nymphs, or because Apollo, jealous of his sister's friendship with the hunter, tricked her into shooting him. In the most common version, Artemis loved Orion as a hunting companion, and Apollo, fearing that his sister might break her vow of virginity, challenged her to hit a distant speck in the sea. Artemis, confident in her aim, drew her silver bow and let fly a shaft that struck the target perfectly, only to discover too late that the speck was Orion's head, swimming in the waves. Grief-stricken, she placed him among the stars as the constellation that bears his name, and the scorpion that killed him became the constellation Scorpio, placed on the opposite side of the sky so that the two would never meet again. The bow had shown that even the goddess's perfect aim could be turned to tragedy.

In later ages, the bow became inseparable from Artemis's image. The city of Ephesus in Asia Minor built her the greatest temple in the Greek world, one of the Seven Wonders, and her statue there showed her with a quiver on her back and a bow in her hand. The Amazons, the warrior women of myth, claimed her as their patron and carried her bow on their shields. Roman hunters prayed to her Roman equivalent, Diana, before every expedition, and her image appeared on coins from Sicily to Syria. In the modern world, the crescent moon and the bow have become symbols of female independence and strength, and the name Artemis has been given to space programs, conservation movements, and literary heroines who refuse to be tamed. From the island of Delos to the stars above, Artemis's Bow and Arrows remain the enduring symbol of the huntress who answers to no one, the virgin goddess whose aim is true and whose mercy is hers alone to give.