06/01/2026
Hera’s response to learning that Leto was pregnant with Zeus’s children was systematic and merciless.
She forbade every land and island to offer the Titan goddess a place to give birth.
Leto wandered the known world in labor, refused by territory after territory until she came to the small floating island of Delos, which, being unfixed to the earth, could defy Hera’s curse.
The island agreed to receive her on the condition that Apollo’s cult would be centered there forever.
Artemis was born first, and according to Callimachus’s third Hymn to Artemis, written in the 3rd century BC, her own birth was painless for her mother.
What followed was not. Hera’s final cruelty was to detain Eileithyia, her own daughter and the goddess of childbirth, preventing her from attending Leto. Without Eileithyia, the labor stalled.
Nine days and nine nights passed while Leto clung to a palm tree in agony, the assembled goddesses watching but unable to help.
The Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo, the oldest surviving account, records this as among the most terrible labors in the history of gods or mortals.
The other goddesses eventually sent Iris to bribe Eileithyia with a long amber necklace and smuggle her to Delos past Hera’s watch. When Eileithyia arrived, Leto finally gave birth to Apollo.
The newly born Artemis had already positioned herself as midwife, and it was her hands that delivered her brother into the world.
That act is precisely where her role as patron of childbirth originates.
