A Recreation of the Original Statue of Diana/ Artemis in Ephesus: the Comedy of Errors.

Artemis was a Greek Goddess, the virginal huntress and twin of Apollo, who supplanted the Titan Selene as goddess of the Moon. Of the Olympian goddesses who inherited aspects of the Great Goddess of Crete, Athena was more honored than Artemis at Athens. At Ephesus, a goddess whom the Greeks associated with Artemis was venerated in an archaic, pre-Hellenic cult image carved of wood and decorated with jewelry. The decorations of the primitive statue, which figure in Jerome's Christian attacks on pagan popular religion, have been read as many breasts or "eggs" — denoting her fertility (others say they represent the testicles of sacrificed bulls). On coins minted at Ephesus, the apparently many-breasted goddess wears a mural crown (like a city's walls), an attribute of Cybele. Something the Lady of Ephesus had in common with Cybele was that each was served by temple slave-women, under the direction of a priestess who inherited her role, attended by a college of eunuch priests and also by young virgins.

This figure with its seeming many breasts reflects a matriarchal culture to which Shakespeare's Abbess is surely devoted, not a Christian cult. It is also the same cult to which Emilia is devoted as a virgin in Shakespeare's The Two Noble Kinsmen. Both plays are appropriately about virginity, marriage and women's roles, with which Diana was chiefly concerned.

Artemis of Ephesus in an 18th-century engraving of a Roman marble copy of a Greek original, in the Vatican Museum. Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia)