structural:expansion, linguistic:voice_change
Birth

Various conflicting accounts are given in Greek mythology regarding the birth of Artemis and Apollo, her twin brother. In terms of parentage, though, all accounts agree that she was the daughter of Zeus and Leto and that she was the twin sister of Apollo. In some sources, she is born at the same time as Apollo; but in others, earlier or later.

Although traditionally stated to be twins, the author of The Homeric Hymn 3 to Apollo (the oldest extant account of Leto's wandering and birth of her children) is only concerned with the birth of Apollo, and sidelines Artemis; in fact in the Homeric Hymn they are not stated to be twins at all.

It is a slightly later poet, Pindar, who speaks of a single pregnancy. The two earliest poets, Homer and Hesiod, confirm Artemis and Apollo's status as full siblings born to the same mother and father, but neither explicitly makes them twins.

According to Callimachus, Hera, who was angry with her husband Zeus for impregnating Leto, forbade her from giving birth on either terra firma (the mainland) or on an island, but the island of Delos disobeyed and allowed Leto to give birth there. According to some, this rooted the once freely floating island to one place.

According to the Homeric Hymn to Artemis, however, the island where she and her twin were born was Ortygia. In ancient Cretan history, Leto was worshipped at Phaistos, and in Cretan mythology, Leto gave birth to Apollo and Artemis on the islands known today as Paximadia.

A scholium of Servius on Aeneid iii. 72 accounts for the island's archaic name Ortygia by asserting that Zeus transformed Leto into a quail (ortux) to prevent Hera from finding out about his infidelity, and Kenneth McLeish suggested further that in quail form, Leto would have given birth with as few birth-pains as a mother quail suffers when she lays an egg.

The myths also differ as to whether Artemis was born first, or Apollo. Most stories depict Artemis as firstborn, becoming her mother's midwife upon the birth of her brother Apollo. Servius, a late fourth/early fifth-century grammarian, wrote that Artemis was born first because at first it was night, whose instrument is the Moon, which Artemis represents, and then day, whose instrument is the Sun, which Apollo represents. Pindar however writes that both twins shone like the Sun when they came into the bright light.

After their troubling childbirth, Leto took the twin infants and crossed over to Lycia, in the southwest corner of Asia Minor, where she tried to drink from and bathe the babies in a spring she found there. However, the local Lycian peasants tried to prevent the twins and their mother from making use of the water by stirring up the muddy bottom of the spring, so the three of them could not drink it. Leto, in her anger that the impious Lycians had refused to offer hospitality to a fatigued mother and her thirsty infants, transformed them all into frogs, forever doomed to swim and hop around the spring.