Laudator Temporis Acti

Edith Hall, Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014), p. 257:

The New Testament says little on the topic of the hedonistic old religion that Dionysius and Damaris now abandoned. It mentions only Zeus, Hermes, and Artemis at all, and it was Artemis who was seen, especially in the eastern Aegean and Turkey, as the most potent symbol of paganism. Pagan authors such as Artemidorus of Daldis in Lydia (Asia Minor) attest to the continuing authority of the cult of Artemis in Ephesus in the second century AD during the age of the Antonines: One of the hundreds of dreams he records in his five-book Interpretation of Dreams (the ancient book that inspired Sigmund Freud) was dreamed by a prostitute in Ephesus who wanted entry to the temple. Inscriptions confirm the regional importance of the goddess: One, found on the island of Patmos, shows how seriously Artemis was still being taken by her priestess, Vera, in the third century AD: "Artemis herself, the virgin huntress, herself chose Vera as her priestess, the noble daughter of Glaukias, so that as water-carrier at the altar of the Patmian goddess she should offer sacrifices of the fetuses of quivering goats which had already been sacrificed." Patmos, described as "the most sacred island" of Artemis (Artemis of the Ephesians) in Acts 19:28, was under Ephesian governance. But it was also the site of some of the principal early Christian activities and traditions. In Glaukias's proud description of his daughter's selection as priestess to carry the lustral water, and her bloodthirsty sacrifice of pregnant goats and their fetuses, we can hear the defiance of the old pagan religion against the perceived encroachments of the new Christian faith.

Translation of the entire inscription by Edith Hall, Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris: A Cultural History of Euripides' Black Sea Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 142-143:

Artemis herself, the virgin huntress, herself chose Vera as her priestess, the noble daughter of Glaukias, so that as water-carrier at the altar of the Patmian goddess she should offer sacrifices of the foetuses of quivering goats which had already been sacrificed. As a young girl Vera was raised in Artis [i.e. Lebedos, north of Ephesus], but she was born and nursed on Patmos, the island of which Leto's daughter is most proud, which she protects as her throne in the deeps of the Aegean Sea, from the time when the warrior Orestes, having brought her from Scythia, installed her, and he was cured of the terrible madness which followed the murder of his mother. Now the lovely Vera, daughter of the wise doctor Glaukias, has sailed by the will of Scythian Artemis over the wintry swell of the waters of the Aegean in order to bring lustre to the rites and the festival, as the divine law instructed.

Greek text from Reinhold Merkelbach and Josef Stauber, Steinepigramme aus dem griechischen Osten, Bd. I: Die Westküste Kleinasiens von Knidos bis Ilion (Stuttgart; B.G. Teubner, 1998), p. 169:

αὐτὴ παρθενικὴ Ἐλαφήβολος ἀρήτειραν
    θήκατο κυδαλίμην Γλαυκίεω θύγατρα
ὑδροφόρον Βήραν Πατνίηι παραβώμια ῥέξαι
    σπαιρόντων αἰγῶν ἔμβρυα καλλιθύτων.
εἰν Ἄρτει δ' ἐτράφη νεαρὴ παῖς, ἡ δὲ τιθήνη
    ἐκ γενετῆς Βήρας κὲ τροφός ἐστι Πάτνος,
νῆσσος ἀγαυοτάτη Λητωΐδος, ἧς προβέβηκε
    βένθεσιν Αἰγαίοις ἕδρανα, ῥυομένην
ἐξότε μιν Σκυθίηθεν Ἀρήϊος εἷσεν Ὀρέστης
    παυσάμενος στυγερῆς μητροφόνου μανίης·
νῦν δ' ἐρατὴ Βήρα, θυγάτηρ σοφοῦ ἰητῆρος
    Γλαυκίεω βουλαῖς Ἀρτέμιδος Σκυθίης
Αἰγαίου πλώσασα ῥόου δυσχείμερον οἶδμα
    ὄργια κὲ θαλίην, ὡ̣ς θέμις, ἠγλάϊσεν.