Artemis is usually imagined as the huntress, bow drawn in some far-off forest. But the Artemis worshipped here had a gentler, more anxious portfolio. As Artemis Brauronia she was the protector of women through pregnancy and childbirth, an ancient world where both could easily end in death. Her main shrine stood at Brauron on the east coast of Attica, and this hilltop outpost on the Acropolis brought her power into the heart of the city. The sanctuary was first dedicated under the tyrant Peisistratos in the sixth century BC, then rebuilt around 430 BC in step with the new Propylaea rising beside it. Women who came to petition the goddess left offerings of clothing, draping garments around her wooden cult statue until she wore the hopes of the city like layered robes.

The cult's most haunting ritual belonged to its girls. At intervals, young daughters of Athenian families served the goddess as arktoi, the "little bears," wearing saffron-yellow robes and moving through processions and dances in imitation of the animal sacred to Artemis. The custom traced back to a grim myth: a tame bear at the sanctuary had blinded a girl who teased it, the girl's brothers killed the bear in revenge, and a vengeful Artemis sent plague until the Athenians agreed that their daughters would "play the bear" before marriage. Stripped of the legend, the rite marked a passage. Before these girls could become wives and mothers, the very roles Artemis governed, they spent time in her keeping, half-wild and under divine protection.

Architecturally, the Brauroneion broke the rules. It had no formal temple at all. Instead a long covered portico, a stoa roughly 38 metres by 7, stood against the southern Acropolis wall and faced north, with short wings angling forward at each corner to give the precinct its unusual trapezoidal shape. Part of it rested on the ruins of a far older Mycenaean fortification wall, layering one civilization's defenses beneath another's worship. Inside one wing stood the ancient wooden xoanon of the goddess. In 346 BC a second cult image was added, which the travel writer Pausanias, walking the Acropolis centuries later, attributed to the great sculptor Praxiteles.

Pausanias is our eyewitness to a sanctuary already old in his day. He recorded the two statues of Artemis, and something stranger nearby: a large bronze sculpture of the Trojan Horse, its design suggesting the Greek warriors hidden inside. He described Menestheus and Teucer peering out, with the sons of Theseus behind them. The base of that bronze still survives on the rock, inscribed with the name of its dedicator, Chairedemos, and its sculptor, Strongylion, allowing scholars to date it before 415 BC. When the Roman Empire turned Christian and emperors banned the old worship, the sanctuary fell silent. Today only foundations cut into bedrock, a few worn limestone blocks, and those seven steps remain, marking a doorway into a vanished world of women, girls, and a goddess who watched over both.