Bendis

Bendis is the Thracian goddess of the hunt.

Greece

The Thracian huntress is an inscription repeatedly referred to as the Artemis with the epiclesis Bendis or in the Latin form as Diana with the same nickname.

Your image first appeared in the Archaic period in the Attic culture. At the time of Plato (ca. 430 BC ), there was an official festival in Athens, the Bendideia, which - as narrated by Strabo - once a year took place, in the month Thargelion. In a nightly torch relay, sometimes on horseback, approached to the sanctuary of the goddess, the Bendideion in Piraeus (Plato, Republic 327a, 328a ). This torch relay is shown on a relief in the British Museum. Cecil Smith assumed that led the run of which about 50 km away Laurion to Piraeus. The temple in Piraeus is corroborated by Xenophon ( Xenophon, Hell. 2, 4, 11). According to Thucydides, the foreign goddess Bendis was from the barbarian north - granted for a short time hospitality in Athens - as thanks for the Alliance of Thracians with the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War.

In Attica there was a temple of Bendis in Salamis and her cult is also detected in Laurium, where Bendis statue was discovered. Her cult came still to many places of the Greek cultural sphere, such as the Cyclades, Asia Minor, Cyprus, Egypt and Lower Italy. She reached under the expansionist policy of Athens in the late classical period also northern Greece, their home. Here, the notes focus on the presence and the cult of Bendis on since the Archaic period of Greek populated towns along the coast, where her cult adopted by the Greek inhabitants and partially integrated into the private everyday life or in some cases even in the official cult the polis was taken. The goddess lost at the end of the 4th century BC a their huge popularity, her cult came to a virtual standstill.

Roman time

Only at the beginning of the middle imperial period, ie since the 2nd century AD consecration reliefs were produced with the image of a hunter again. On the basis of isolated dedicatory inscriptions we know that Bendis is shown here, which was equated in northern Greece with Artemis / Diana. You no longer appears as the goddess of an ethnic minority, as in classical Athens, but was equally revered by all peoples of the Roman province of Thracia and Macedonia now.