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AMAZONS
In Greek literature and art, the Amazons are a tribe of
women, said to be descended from the god Ares and
living on the geographical margins of the Greek world,
near the river Thermodon or, alternatively, in Libya.
Their primary activity is fighting, and their social organization
reverses patriarchal norms. First mentioned in the
Iliad, they play a part in the legends surrounding
Achilles, Hercules, and Theseus. As a collective enemy
to Athens, they offer in the classical period a foil for
Athenian self-definition. Herodotus and later anthropological
writers develop an account of their customs, and
some writers record contact between the Amazons and
Alexander the Great. Literary and anthropological strands
of Amazon lore survived into the Middle Ages and
beyond. Scholarly debate over the Amazons remains a
testing ground for issues of gender and culture in classical
studies. While scholars have attempted to find a historical
basis for the Amazons, even casting them as reflections of
an original matriarchy, scholarship at the turn of the
twenty-first century tends to agnosticism on the historical
basis of the myth and focus on its cultural deployment asa reflection of the self-definition of patriarchal Greek
culture through a fascination with or repudiation of its
opposite Other.
Amazons are mentioned in the Iliad as women
‘‘equivalent to men,’’ with whom male heroes have military
encounters. In the Iliad these encounters are in the
poem’s past (Priam’s youth, the inset story of Bellerophon),
reflecting already a tendency both to integrate the
Amazons into the lives of various heroes and to posit
them as long ago and far away. The existence of an
Amazon tomb outside Troy is an early literary glimpse
of the attribution to Amazons the origins of tombs and
cities scattered through the Greek world.
The fullest early account of Achilles’ fight with an
Amazon is lost: the Aethiopis, an installment of the post-
Homeric epic cycle (7–6th century BCE), told the story of
Penthesilea, the Amazon queen who came in on the
Trojan side of the Trojan War after the death of
Hector. Achilles defeats Penthesilea and later kills the
Greek Thersites for suggesting that Achilles had been sexually
attracted to her for mocking Achilles. The (probably)
third-century CE Quintus of Smyrna develops this episode
(Posthomerica, Book 1).
The role of theAmazons in the legends of Hercules and
later Theseus reflects the ambivalent status of the female
warrior in the mythic tradition. One of the tasks of Hercules
is to steal the girdle of the queen of the Amazons; this
involves a military encounter (Euripides, Hercules Furens
ln. 408–411 and Heraclidae ln. 217; Apollonius Rhodius,
Argonautica ln. 2.966–969; the legend is better attested in
visual art than in early literature). To the function of
Amazons as male-equivalent opponents for the hero is
added the ambiguity of their femininity, for the stealing of
the girdle, an emblem of the loss of virginity, figures the
violence of Hercules’sAmazon encounter as rape rather than
warfare. In the Theseus legend this is explicit, as Theseus
rapes and carries off the Amazon queen Hippolyta, with a
twofold effect: The Amazons invade Attica to recover their
queen and are defeated by the Athenians; and the Amazon
concubine/wife bears Theseus a son, Hippolytus, whose
rejection of marriage may reflect his Amazon heritage.
(Theseus’s Amazon encounter is told in another lost source, the Theseid; among extant sources, see Plutarch’s Life of
Theseus.) Both the individual combats of Achilles,
Hercules, and Theseus with Amazons and pitched battles
involving Amazons are frequent subjects in Greek art.
Athenian propaganda, both verbal and visual, links the
Amazon invaders of Attica to the Persian invaders ofGreece.
The myth of an all-female society of Amazons generated
anthropological literature that posited a femaledominated
society that must nonetheless have negotiated
a relationship with men to secure its propagation.
Herodotus (4.110–117) recounts an initially hostile
encounter between Amazons and Scythian men that leads
to marriage and the formation of a new people, the
Sauromatians. The Amazons, resisting integration into
patriarchal society, insist on keeping their military customs.
According to the first-century BCE historian
Diodorus Siculus, Amazon society includes men, but
men are subordinated and allotted the ‘‘female’’ tasks of
child care and household management (3.53.1–3).
Another arrangement appears in the work of the geographer
Strabo, who declares that the Amazons live by themselves,
but have set encounters with a people called the
Gargarians for purposes of conception (11.5.1–2). A common
anthropological datum is that Amazons cauterize the
left breast in order to wield the bow and javelin; they are
also sometimes said to kill or mutilate male children. Thus
an exclusively or dominantly female society is defined by
violence visited on both male and female bodies. Yet the
portrait that emerges from the anthropological accounts is
of a constructively functional society, capable of civilized
negotiation from a position of strength.
Several authors (Diodorus Siculus, Justin, Quintus
Curtius Rufus) record Alexander the Great’s encounter
with the Amazon queen Thalestris, who strikes a bargain
whereby she preserves her independence and has an
opportunity to conceive Alexander’s child, though
ancient opinion on the incident remained skeptical (see
the works of Arrian and Plutarch). The negotiation of
childbearing reflects the anthropological interest in the
propagation of Amazon society; it also allows the maleequivalent
Amazons of the mythical tradition a fully
functional sexuality and an encounter with a male hero
that features neither doomed combat nor rape.
In the Middle Ages Amazons continued to provide a
venue for thinking about gender construction and essentialism
within culture. The encyclopedist Isidore of
Seville (560–636) cites two traditional etymologies of
‘‘Amazon.’’ One, derived from ‘‘without breast,’’ emphasizes
the constructed and sacrificial aspects of the
femininity-wounding experiment in the autonomous
femininity that the Amazons represent; the other, derived
from ‘‘living together,’’ stresses instead the communal
completeness of an all-female society. Two literary treatments
of the Amazon from the twelfth century consider
similar dichotomies. Joseph of Exeter in his Troy epic the
Ylias makes Penthesilea’s aristeia (her display of prowess
in a series of combats) and death a showcase for gender in
epic. While allowing her opponent to mock her for
shaming Mars by wielding male weapons, the narrator
shares with the reader anthropological data that accounts
for Penthesilea’s nature while bypassing gender: the cold
climate she comes from, the reader is told, makes her
hardy and warlike. At the moment of her death, however,
the poet borrows from Virgil and Ovid to reassert
Penthesilea’s biologically embodied and culturally coded
femininity. Pierced through the nipple like Virgil’s
Camilla, she gathers her garments around her as she falls
in a gesture borrowed from Ovid’s sacrificed Polyxena.
Another twelfth-century epic, Walter of Chaˆtillon’s
Alexandreis—adapting Quintus Curtius Rufus’s account
of Alexander’s encounter with Thalestris, and playing on
themes of concealment and display, appearance and
reality—transfers the gaze at least temporarily from
Alexander to the Amazon Other, and suggests that the
mutilation to which Amazons subject their bodies marks
a positive cultural reconfiguration of the imposed lack of
femininity.
SEE ALSO Ancient Greece.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bachofen, Johann Jakob. 1948. Das Mutterrecht. Basel: Schwabe.
Blok, Josine H. 1995. The Early Amazons: Modern and Ancient
Perspectives on a Persistent Myth. New York: Brill.
von Bothmer, Dietrich. 1957. Amazons in Greek Art. Oxford,
UK: Clarendon.
duBois, Page. 1982. Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-
History of the Great Chain of Being. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Townsend,D. 1995. ‘‘Sex and the Single Amazon in Twelfth-Century
Latin Epic.’’ University of Toronto Quarterly 64: 255–273.
Tyrrell, William Blake. 1984. Amazons: A Study in Athenian
Mythmaking. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Sylvia A. Parsons
