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As Apollo was the ideal of Greek youth, so Artemis was the model of Greek girlhood – strong, athletic, graceful, chaste; and yet again she was the patroness of women in childbirth, who prayed to her to ease their pains.  At Ephesus she kept her Asiatic character as a goddess of motherhood and fertility.  In this way the ideas of virgin and mother became confused in her worship; and the Christian Church found it wise, in the fifth century of our ear, to attach the remnants of this cult to Mary, and to transform the mid-August harvest festival of Artemis into the feast of the Assumption.

The Story of Civilization II, The Life of Greece, by Will Durant, page 183