During the second half of the 2^nd century B.C., the city of Bargylia, in Caria, undertook a major reorganization of the cult of Artemis Kindyas, who manifested herself to help the city when it was threatened by war. A few remarkable inscriptions provide evidence of the regulations designed to «increase the honours» of the goddess, which mainly consist in making an ox sacrifice more splendid. Less than a century beforehand, a similar situation is observed in the cult of Artemis Leukophruēnḗ in Magnesia of the Meander, and of Artemis Hiakunthotróphos in Cnidus. Based on these three examples, this paper aims at showing how these epiphanies were used to settle a given deity into its function of patron deity of the city, both from an external and from an internal point of view.