The birth of a child is one of the most important events in a woman’s life. In ancient times, people invented deities that protected childbirth, because the risk of complications was high, as medicine was still far from the leaps achieved in our days. In Homer’s epics, the main goddess of childbirth, Eileithyia, stands by goddesses and heroines during the birth of their children. Apart from the texts of the ancient literature, the support of the goddess is also depicted iconographically and declared epigraphically on vases as early as the first half of the 6th c. BC, e.g. in the scene of the miraculous birth of Athena from the head of Zeus.
Five votive inscriptions to childbirth-protecting deities survive at Dion.
Later, the Homeric Eileithyia lends sometimes her properties to Artemis and is also worshiped as Artemis Eileithyia. The goddess is referred to with this name on an inscribed marble base of a statue of Hellenistic times found at the sanctuary of Isis:
ΑΡΙΣΤΙΩ ΜΕΝΤΟΡΟΣ/ΑΡΤΕΜΙΔΙ ΕΙΛΕΙΘΥΙΑΙ (Fig. 1)