Amazons

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Amazons

• Women in Ancient Greece and Rome

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Amazons

• The female warriors of Greek mythology appear in
  the earliest epic literature (7th century BCE),
  and in visual art beginning in the 6th century
  BCE.
• They are portrayed as an all-female group, rather
  than women warriors within a mixed society
• They are both allies and enemies of conventional
  male heroes
• but many male heroes (Herakles, Theseus, and
  Achilles, e.g.) have noteworthy battles and/or
  love affairs with Amazons

Amazons a paradoxical mixture of youthful
attractiveness and a danger that must be
suppressed. (Fantham)
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Were the Amazons Real?
Is there independent archeological evidence of
Amazons? Not of groups of women living
exclusively of men all communities for which
archeological remains have been found are of
mixed gender, across human history. (Some
religious groups, e.g. convents or monasteries,
may have burials where only adults of one gender
are found this is not true of any prehistoric
remains.) Is there evidence that women
participated in war and government in societies
contemporary with the ancient Greeks?
The Greeks tend to put Amazons as far away as
possible in Scythia (on the Black Sea), or in
Ethiopia in Africa. So, there were not Amazon
groups living anywhere easily accessible to
Greeks they were thought of as living in
distant, even mythic, lands (Ethiopia). Nobody
could prove they didnt exist, but we have no
contemporary historical records of anyone ever
seeing one.
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Historical Amazons?
You see, although I was already convinced by
some ancient stories I have heard, I now know for
sure that there are pretty well countless numbers
of women, generally called Sarmatians, around the
Black Sea, who not only ride horses, but use the
bow and other weapons. There, men and women have
an equal duty to cultivate these skills, so
cultivate them equally they do. (Plato, Laws)
Fifty ancient burial mounds near the town of
Pokrovka, Russia, near the Kazakhstan border,
have yielded skeletons of women buried with
weapons, suggesting the Greek tales may have had
some basis in fact. (Archeology Magazine)
Reconstruction of the costume of a
warrior-priestess
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Nomads known as the Sauromatians buried their
dead here beginning ca. 600 B.C. according to
Herodotus the Sauromatians were descendants of
the Amazons and the Scythians, who lived north of
the Sea of Azov. After ca. 400 B.C. the Pokrovka
mounds were reused by the Sarmatians, another
nomadic tribe possibly
related to the Sauromatians. In general,
females were buried with a wider variety and
larger quantity of artifacts than males, and
seven female graves contained iron swords or
daggers, bronze arrowheads, and whetstones to
sharpen the weapons. (Archeology Magazine)
Grave goods, including arrowheads and a sword,
buried with a female
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Some scholars have argued that weapons found in
female burials served a purely ritual purpose,
but the bones tell a different story. The bowed
leg bones of one 13- or 14-year-old girl attest a
life on horseback, and a bent arrowhead found in
the body cavity of another woman suggested that
she had been killed in battle. The Pokrovka
women cannot have been the Amazons of Greek
myth--who were said to have lived far to the
west--but they may have been one of many similar
nomadic tribes who occupied the Eurasian steppes
in the Early Iron Age. (Archeology Magazine)
Female warrior burial in situ
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How did Greeks describe the Amazons?
Although the real women warriors they might have
encountered lived and worked with men who also
practiced war, the Greeks invented the Amazons as
an all-female group. They created different
ethnologies to describe how Amazons bore and
raised children, and managed to live without
men. They situated them far away, to the East or
North or South. They put them in contact with
many major heroes, either as lovers or as enemies
defeated in war or, more commonly, both. Almost
all visual art with Amazons shows them in defeat
often looking sensuous at the same time.
Wounded Amazon, original c. 425 BCE, made for the
Sanctuary of Artemis, Ephesus.
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Exotic Amazons
Most early vase paintings of Amazons show them in
conventional male clothing. Here Herakles
(identified by his lionskin), heroically nude,
attacks an Amazon who is dressed in traditional
hoplite garb.
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Other representations show Amazons in the long
pants and pointy caps associated with Persians,
the Eastern Empire that was the powerful enemy of
Greece from 490 BCE onwards. The Greeks thought
of the Persians as slavish (since they were
subjects of a king, not citizens of a polis) and
effeminate. Naturally, they dressed in
form-concealing pants rather than manly tunics
their aversion to nudity was gendered as feminine
by Greek culture.
An Amazon in Persian clothes worships at an altar
(in a pose often seen of Greeks worshipping)
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Amazons were thought of as horsewomen, and in
some accounts (e.g. Herodotus) were portrayed as
nomads. Here an Amazon is shown taming a horse
with reigns and a stick.
The view of Amazons as nomadic horsewomen fits
the evidence of historical warrior women.
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Amazons are sometimes shown with exotic weaponry,
such as crescent-shaped shields (seemingly
impractical but probably historical, for some
peoples). The moon is evoked by the
crescent. This Amazon fights with a (probably
double-headed) axe, a weapon associated with
ancient history (e.g. the axes of the archery
contest in the Odyssey) and with ritual use
(especially in Crete, where the labyrinth is the
house of the double-ax, or labrys).
12
Amazons are usually shown in a favorable light in
early Greek art Here an Amazon (dressed in
Hoplite armor) carries a wounded companion from
the battlefield Men might also be portrayed in
such a scene
13
Mythical Amazon Realms (Near the Black Sea also
Libya and Ethiopia)
The edge of the oikoumene (inhabited world) is
literally and metaphorically the frontier between
civilization and savagery (W. Tyrell)
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Ethnologies

• Herodotus (mid-late 5th century BCE)
• Amazons and Scythian men meet and do battle
• but then a few pair off for other pursuits,
  resulting in peace and desire for an alliance
• We could not live with your women our customs
  are quite different from theirs . . . But if you
  truly wish to have us as your wives and will
  conduct yourselves with strict justice toward us,
  get your inheritance and come back to us, and let
  us live together by ourselves.

• Amazons can learn Scythian language, not
  vice-versa
• husbands bring dowry
• new society is formed (representing real
  ethnography?)

• Amazons are beautiful, noble warriors
• love (or sex) conquers all note, no hint of
  homosexuality
• women will not get along

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• Diodorus Siculus (1st century CE)
• Amazons live with men in an inversion of normal
  sex-roles
• women are rulers and fighters, men like married
  women in our own society look after home and
  children and obey their wives
• female infants have their right breast seared off
  (to improve bow use other fighting) (a-mazon
  means without a breast but all visual
  examples show them with two.)
• boys legs and arms are mutilated to make them
  unfit for war
• Amazons have a large military empire
• but are finally defeated by Herakles, who
  thought that it would ill accord with his
  resolve to be the benefactor of the whole of
  mankind if he should allow any race to be under
  the rule of women. (quoted by Blundell)

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Heroes and Amazons
Many Greek heroes battle Amazons. In this temple
metope, Herakles prepares to kill an Amazon.
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Achilles and Penthesileia
The Amazons came to Troy to assist the Trojans
(though the Trojan king, Priam, had fought
Amazons in his youth). Penthesileia and Achilles
met in single combat. At the moment he killed
her, their eyes met and he realized too late that
here was the only woman he could ever love. What
ideas of men, women and love underlie this story?
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Herakles vs. the Amazons
Herakles was Greeces most universal hero he
went everywhere, did everything, and was
worshipped and commemorated all over Greece. One
of his famous Twelve Labors was to bring back the
girdle of the Amazon queen Hippolyte (or
Antiope). Although Hippolyte was willing to turn
it over without a fight, something went wrong and
a battle erupted. Heracles fight with the
Amazons is a prominent feature of Greek art.
Herakles conquers an Amazon, from the Athenian
Treasury at Delphi
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Herakles and the Amazons
Herakles prepares to kill a fleeing Amazon, named
Andromache. Note the gestures.
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Theseus and Antiope (or Hippolyta)
Metope from the Treasury of the Athenians at
Delphi, c. 480 BCE
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• Theseus killed Antiope when she attacked the
  wedding party when he married Phaedra
• The Amazons attacked Athens to get Antiope back,
  and she was killed by Theseus in that battle
• She was accidentally killed by an Amazon, Molpadia

Theseus went on an expedition against the Amazons
on the Black Sea, either with Herakles or with
his friend Perithoos. He either captured the
Queen, Antiope -- or she fell in love with him
and betrayed her city to run off with him. The
different versions continue
Theseus conquers an Amazon Athenian Treasury at
Delphi
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Amazons in Athens Almost all stories of Amazons
set them far away, at the borders of
civilization. This Athenian story is one of the
very few that show the Amazons attacking a Greek
country, rather than experiencing raids or
conquests by Greeks, or fighting in far off
locales such as Troy. The Amazons reached the
Areopagus (hill of Ares on the Acropolis) and
Theseus either defeated them or made a treaty
with them.
Antiope was the mother of Hippolytus, who was
devoted to Artemis and rejected sex and love
(appropriate son for an Amazon)! Hippolytus was
cursed by Theseus through Aphrodites
manipulations when Phaedra falsely accused him
of rape.
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Amazons and the City of Athens
The Amazons were considered men for their high
courage, rather than women for their sex for
they seemed to outdo men in their spirit more
than to be at a disadvantage in their form. . .
But after they tried to conquer Athens, having
met with valiant men, they came to possess
spirits suitable to their own nature . . .and by
their disasters rather than their bodies they
were deemed to be women. And so those women, by
their unjust greed for others land, justly lost
their own. Lysias, Funeral Oration, 4th c. BCE

• Theseus was the dominant hero of the city of
  Athens
• His exploits were used to explain the unity of
  the the area around Athens (Attica) under the
  power of Athens
• His exploits were often used in a symbolic way in
  Athenian political discourse
• defeat of Amazons showed Athenian superiority
  over (feminized, foreign-ized) enemies of the
  current day.

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Four Really Scary (and Related) Things (And the
Mythic Battles to Conquer Them)
Chaos usually represented by Giants, fought by
gods
Nature represented by the crazed, uncivilized,
part-animal Centaurs, usually fought by Lapiths
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Barbarians (especially the East), represented by
Persians or Trojans, fought by Greeks
And last but not least Women, represented by
Amazons, fought by Greeks
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Amazonomachy
Many Greek temples and public monuments show
Amazonomachies (Battles with Amazons), sometimes
in conjunction with others of the Four Big
Battles shown above. What do Amazonomachies show
about the Greek view of Amazons?
Temple of Apollo Epikourios - Bassae
Amazonomachy, ca. 425-420 B.C.
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Amazonomachy
Although there are scenes of Greeks in defeat,
there are many more of Amazons getting the worst
of it. Here, one Amazon pleads for mercy while
another defends her. The Amazons are wearing male
street clothes rather than military gear. On
the other hand, men didnt exactly go into battle
nude, either. Heroic artistic convention takes on
a sensuous element.
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Amazonomachy
Here a Greek seizes an Amazon by her hair
shorthand evocation of the glorious defeat of an
enemy city (i.e. dragging off the women into
slavery). Another Amazon defends a fallen comrade.
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Amazonomachy
In this frieze, the Amazons are distinguished by
Phrygian caps, but are otherwise similar to the
ones in the Bassae frieze Again, one Amazon
pleads for mercy as a Greek draws back his sword
to kill her. Pleading for mercy appears more
often in Amazon conflicts than in other kinds. It
was usually seen as a feminine or at least
non-combatant gesture perhaps in defeat the
Amazons revert to expected feminine behavior.
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Here an Amazon seems to be at an advantage, but
the seemingly subdued Greek is preparing to strike
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A Greek pushes an Amazon back his physical force
is vitally portrayed. The Amazons off-balance
position is emphasized by her clothing, which
falls away to reveal her body female and male
nudity still carried very different cultural
meanings.
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Late Hellenistic Roman Amazons
By the 2nd century CE, Greek and Roman writers
were beginning to adopt a more favorable view of
Amazons. Perhaps because of the extensive
multi-culturalism of the time, or because womens
role in public life, both business and civic, was
much more pronounced, the Amazons did not seem
threatening to order and decency. In this modern
world, mythological re-writes (such as Lysias
version of the Athenian defeat of Amazons) did
not draw on a shared politico-religious history
and were not as meaningful. Amazons were
favorably exoticized.
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Plutarchs Life of Theseus (1st c. CE)

• Historian, who considers many different versions
• No real political agenda
• A view of the Theseus episode that sounds very
  different from the classical Athenian version

• On Antiope
• Plutarch dismisses the story that Antiope was a
  war-prize given to Theseus argues that Theseus
  took her prisoner.
• Argues that Theseus had to use deceit the
  Amazons, being naturally lovers of men, did not
  avoid Theseus when he landed on their coasts
  but sent him presents to his ship. Theseus
  invited Antiope aboard and kidnapped her.

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Plutarchs Life of Theseus (1st c. CE)
On board ship, a young man fell in love with
Antiope. She rejected his advances kindly, but
he committed suicide The Amazons came over land
to get Antiope back Plutarch argues that after 4
months and defeats on both sides, a truce was
reached (despite differing accounts) Nor is it
to be wondered at, that in events of such
antiquity, history should be disordered. Plutarch
mentions burial sites of Amazons in Athens,
Megara, and Calchis local traditions
incorporate Amazons into local history
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The Alexander Romance (4th c. CE)
Many historians record that Alexander met with a
troop of Amazons led by Queen Thalestris Arrian
reports that the Medes sent Alexander a troop of
100 women who were known as Amazons Alexander
sent them away, fearing his men would treat them
disrespectfully but said he would come visit them
someday and impregnate their queen. (Arrian says
the more trustworthy sources reject this
story.) The Alexander Romance dates from the
2nd-4th centuries CE and ranges from military
adventures to surreal under sea and outer space
explorations.
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The Alexander Romance (4th c. CE)
We are on the other side of the river Amazon, but
we live on an island. The perimeter of our land
is a river with no starting point, whose circuit
takes a year to travel . . . There is a single
road into our land. We virgins who live here
total 270,000. There is nothing male among us
our men live on the other side of the river and
graze the land. Every year we keep a festival and
make a horse sacrifice to Zeus, Poseidon,
Hephaistos and Ares, which lasts for 30 days. All
of us who wish to end our virginity stay with the
men.
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The Alexander Romance (4th c. CE)
But they send all the female children they bear
across to us when they reach the age of
seven. When an enemy attacks, 120,000 of us ride
out on horseback, while the rest guard the
island, the men drawn up and following us. Anyone
who is wounded in the war receives adoration from
our proud hearts . . . if she dies, her next of
kin receive a large sum of money. So we compete
for reputation. If we defeat the enemy or they
just run away, a terrible disgrace stays with
them for all time. But if they defeat us, they
will be in a situation of having defeated women.
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The Alexander Romance (4th c. CE)
(Alexander writes respectfully asking for tribute
and hostages We will give each person you send
a stater of gold a month as maintenance after a
year, they will return . . . The Amazons
agree.) We give you permission to come and see
our country. (The Amazons send tribute of 100
talents of gold and hostages of 500 women to stay
for a year.) But if any of them loses her
virginity to a foreigner, she shall stay with
you. We accept allegiance to you . . . we have
heard of your exceptional qualities and your
bravery. We are people who dwell beside the
world, but you have come to us as our master.
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The Alexander Romance (4th c. CE)
(Alexander writes to his mother Olympias) The
river Thermodon . . .is a large river that
cannot be crossed and is full of animals. It
flows out onto a flat and fertile land inhabited
by the Amazons, women of exceptional height,
noted for their attractiveness and strength,
wearing bright clothes. They used silver weapons
and axes they did not have iron or bronze. They
were drawn up with intelligence and ingenuity.
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What did the Amazons mean to the women of Greece?
41
Sarcophagus relief of pitched battle, with
Achilles in the center holding the slain
Penthesileia. 3rd century CE