We know of this epithet in ancient sources only from a single mention in the geographer Pausanias's Description of Greece.
[2] It is sometimes assumed that this epithet comes from Artemis's cessation of the Amazons' military campaign, however not all scholars agree.
The scholar Lewis Richard Farnell in his Cults of the Greek States advanced the hypothesis that this epithet was a linguistic corruption of the ancient Near Eastern goddess Astarte, and proposes that the connection with the Greek words strateia or astrateia came from a local folk etymology to account for a word the original meaning of which had been lost.
[5] As Pyrrhichus was located on the Laconian coast, it is not unlikely it may have overlaid some aspects of Near-Eastern influence on the template of an ostensibly Greek goddess, or vice versa.
[2] Some scholars, such as Isabella Solima, have gone as far to suggest that Pausanias was simply wrong, and the true epithet was some other name lost to time.