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THE MOTIVATION BEHIND the heroisation of Theseus may not be a remnant from lost epics. It may simply represent machinations of politicians exploiting the Amazon myth to capitalise on a symbol: Theseus.
The politician Cleisthenes and his family the Alcmeonids adopted the cult of the hero Theseus from his native Troezen when they were seeking an increase in their political station. They supported democratic reforms after they ended tyranny in 510 B.C. and expelled Hippias, son of Peisistratus. The Alcmeonids probably styled Theseus as the founder of Athenian democracy through his supposed abdication of his mythological throne for his people. Nilsson warns that myths "were potent tools in the hands of the clever politician" and their exploitation was not confined to the Alcmeonids. The Stoa Poikile both publicised the myth of Theseus and glorified the house of Miltiades. The Stoa Poikile not only illustrated past victories, but it also glorified the recent Athenian accomplishments through reference to the mythical glories of the past. The victory of Marathon was crucial in Athenian ideology. This victory came to serve as a prototype of Athenian prowess. In the art of the Stoa, the Amazons were styled as Persians through many parallels.
The weapons the Amazons used, in the earlier stages of the myth, were neutral. However, with the assimilation of the Amazons with the Persians, their weapons became representative of an uncivilised nature. Their standard weapons- horses and bows- both held negative connotations for the Greeks. Horses symbolized aristocratic wealth, as horses were expensive to maintain. The bow, while not unacceptable for Homeric heroes, afterwards was considered the weapon of a coward. The combatants need not fight face to face, but could kill from a safe distance. The bow could be utilised while the Amazons were retreating on horseback in what came to be known as Parthian style. The Amazons are often represented in art shooting the bow over their shoulders while on horseback. While the bow was not the Persians’ weapon of choice, in the Greeks’ eyes it was their most threatening weapon, and thus forced upon the Amazons through assimilation of the two barbarian races, one mythical and the other real. A prior tradition held that the Amazons were skilled with the bow, and so the Greeks associated this weapon of their real-life adversaries with their mythological enemies, the embodiment of all barbarians and everything which stood for anarchy: the Amazons. To decipher the code of what the Amazons’ weapons symbolised for the Greeks is relatively easy: “Amazon weapons are a reversal of Greek arms.”' Both the Amazons and the Persians shared their origins as eastern barbarians.
Political manipulation is a postulated explanation for the rather sudden prominence of the Theseus tradition. The Amazons’ habits from the fringe of the known world paralleled the recently conquered Persian barbarians. Similarly, Theseus’ victory over the Amazons at Athens was paralleled by Athens’ victory over the Persians at Marathon. Therefore, by representing Theseus’ triumphs over the Amazons in literature and works of art such as the Stoa Poikile, the Athenians were actually calling to mind, through parallels, the more recent victory over barbarians at Marathon.
The festival of the Theseia in the early fifth century was expanded to celebrate not only Theseus' defeat of the minotaur but also his defeat of the Amazons at Athens. In 480 BC, ten years after Marathon, Cimon, whose father Miltiades had been a general at Marathon, went to Skyros in fulfilment of an oracle and retrieved what were believed to be the bones of Theseus. They were installed in the Theseum at Athens, built about the 470s or early 460s. This building was decorated by Micon and Polygnotus with an Amazonomachy amongst other scenes.
Pericles, the successor of Cimon, began construction of the Parthenon in 447 BC. The metopes displayed combat with the usual enemies, including a Centauromachy, a Gigantomachy and an Amazonomachy. Phidias inscribed the Gigantomachy and the Amazonomachy on the shield of the cult statue of Athena as well. Besides using the defeat of the Amazon invasion as a motif in aggrandising Athens in the classical period, the Amazon motif was also employed as part of the rhetoric of the city.
The Athenians, in eulogising their battle dead in Athens or in making other rhetorical speeches in the 5th century often made reference to the Amazon myth. The tale of the repulsed Amazonian invasion of Attica is extremely popular as a yardstick of Athenian supremacy and as proof of their bravery. At the battle of Plataea Herodotus reports that the Athenians, in defending their claim to lead the Greek army, mentions their defeat of the Amazons at Athens. Isocrates and Lysias also spoke of the exploits against the Amazons in their speeches.
The architectural and artistic evidence from the 5th century confirms the popularity and the exploitation of the Theseus version of the Amazon myth to parallel recent Athenian historical triumphs. These examples demonstrate the effect the Athenian habitus had on social conception. The threat of the Persians overcome was manifested in these mediums by reference to the heroic defeat of the Amazons. These buildings, by their very existence, would serve to reinforce the social outlook of Athenian supremacy. These examples show structuration in society in action. Their history effected their art, which in turn effected the social expectations in status society and its conceptions of the Amazons.
The outline of most traditions of the myth of the Amazons was established quite early, but without the details and variations that surface in later times. The Amazons’ barbarian nature and virginity were not stressed nor developed until the later in the history of the myth. Amazon penchant for violence, which was hinted at in the early versions, became rife through later versions. After the period under study many details were added to the outlines sketched in the 5th and 4th centuries. Apollodorus (180-120 or 110 B.C.) is the first later author of the myth to furnish such details, adding to the outlines compiled by the earlier sources in his Library. This work is the only ancient source which mentions all five traditions of the Amazon myth. The bulk of the development of the Amazon myth occurred not in a pre-civilised society, but in one with fully developed and entrenched cultural values. The myth was moulded by the habitus of fully developed status society of Athens, having experienced the threat from the Eastern barbarian Persians, to explain and reinforce their values and cultural ideals.
Aeschylus in Prometheus Bound 719-728 provides some details about the Amazons’ homelands when lo is addressed. Until his work, the most descriptive comments about the Amazons were Pindar’s epithets, “the archered host of women” and “strong in their brazen bows.” Euripides recorded that the Amazons rode war-horses into battle, and that their homeland was fixed on the shores of Lake Maeotis in the area of the Black Sea. Aeschylus and Euripides, as Pindar, may have relied on an oral tradition for their details or perhaps the Trojan Cycle and legends associated with it. It seems that the Amazons had been traditionally placed at Themiscyra on the River Thermodon in Asia Minor.7i This homeland is supported by fifth century writers. In his summary of the Aithiopis. Proclus states that Penthesilea and the Amazons were a Thracian race, children of Ares (Chrest. 2). This suggests that Arctinos’ information for the Thracian origin must have derived from an ancient and separate tradition.
Dowden observes that another Amazonian homeland was added to the myth, probably at the instigation of the epic poet Aristeas, at some point prior to the second half of the fifth century. This change was related to the Scythian Sauromatai. Amazons are depicted on black figure work as Greek hoplites from around 570-540 BC. Around 550 BC, however, and more commonly later, they began to be represented in Thracian and Scythian accoutrements. Once mounted Thracians appear in black figure, around ca 530-535 BC, the Amazons become represented as Thracian. Herodotus gives a full account of the race of the Sauromatai in Book 4. 110-118. He combines the Aristean version of their homeland with the Homeric Themiscyrian location by claiming that they were taken by ship from Themiscyra after the Greeks routed the city. The Amazons killed their Greek captors (4.110) and the ships landed in Scythia by Lake Maiotis. The Scythians thought that the Amazons were men and engaged them in battle (4.111). After seeing the dead bodies they realised the true nature of the Amazons and decided, like a Greek would, that it was not acceptable to fight women in battle. Therefore, the Scythians sent their youths to the Amazons. These youths did not engage them in battle but imitated their actions (4.113) and eventually ‘married’ the Amazons. A new race, the Sauromatai, was formed. This tale reinforces the notion that with women men make children, not war.
Rather than a straight opposition between the Greeks and “Other”, in Herodotus there is another element, the Scythians. This added element makes inversion more obscure but it exists nonetheless. This origin explains the independence of the Sauromatai women who, according to Herodotus, were the descendants of the Amazons. After the ‘marriage’ between the Amazons and the Scythian youths, the youths leave their homes and city to accompany the Amazons. This is an obvious inversion of the normal marriage pattern where the female would leave her oikos and follow the male. According to Herodotus 4.117, before the Sauromatai can marry they must kill; that is, they must shed the blood of an enemy, i.e. a man. Herodotus relates that some Sauromatai grow old and die unmarried because they did not have the opportunity to kill in battle. The Sauromatai myth combines both marriage and war elements in the presence of the blood appropriately shed by the sexes. Women must shed their own blood in Athens before they can be properly contained in status society. Mythical Amazon women must also shed blood, not their own but the blood of a man, before they can propagate their liminal society. The shedding of the blood in the Amazon tale is the inverse of what it is in Athenian status society.
It has been mentioned that there are two traditions of the Amazonian homeland: Scythia and Themiscyra, on the Thermodon River. In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound 721-727 (produced about 465 B.C.), Prometheus tells lo where she must journey next. Elsewhere the chorus is mourning for Prometheus’ fate and they sing about the Amazons, Aeschylus Prometheus Bound 415-419. The Herodotean version may account for Euripides HF 408-410 relating the Amazons as living around Lake Maiotis. In Airs, Waters, Places 17 Hippocrates writes about the Sauromatai living around Lake Maiotis and discusses how the huntress women cauterise their right breasts.
These different homelands of the Amazons were considered the “other” in Greek conception. The Amazons lived “on the bounds of the inhabited world” signifying a world that was outside civilisation. It was of no consequence just where the Amazon barbarians were situated, it was significant and clear enough that their homeland was not Greece. The edge of the world was the frontier, physically and metaphorically, between civilisation and barbarism. The more remote a race was, the more uncivilised it was, as indicated by increasingly more promiscuous sexual behaviour or by the shift from eating grain to eating animal flesh. It was a habit of the Greeks to assign the inverse of Greek values to people living on the borders of the known world. Therefore the Amazons were mysterious and foreign by association.
The Greeks defeated the Persians who would have enslaved them, just as they had mythically defeated the mythical Amazons. After the Persian War in 478 B.C., when their victory were still fresh in the Greeks’ minds, the Amazon myth as part of their heroic past began to be developed in order to justify their present pretensions abroad. This development seems to correspond with the Greeks’ growing superiority complex towards the Persians and all foreigners and other barbarians. Most descriptions of the Amazons and their customs by later authors of the myth represent the antithesis of Greek customs and ideals. The use of the myth to support Athenian imperialistic pretensions is only relevant insofar as it illustrates how myths and tales were used to reinforce and foster social outlooks of the status structured society which relates such myths with reference to its habitus which was affected by history. Similarly, the Amazon myths were used to illustrate not only the difficulty of the role of women in Athenian society, but also the inherent correctness of the social role of women in Athenian society.
For the Athenians, myths provided exemplars of behavior arranged so as to reinforce, either by parallel or by opposition, the standard social order. War was for men for the purpose of the survival of society. Marriage was for women and for the purpose of having children for the survival of society. The inversion of this rule understood on the practical conscious level of all knowledgeable agent in the social milieu of classical Athens was embodied in the myths of the Amazons. These women not only reject marriage but also take up warfare. As far as the Athenians knew, in most of the civilisations they were acquainted with, men were the dominant sex. The Athenians, who often seemed comfortable with definition by opposites, believed that male/female relationships must be opposite amongst barbarians. That is, opposite to what the relationships were in their society. For the Greeks, then, stories of Amazons living in societies where the women controlled everything would be completely opposite to their ideal, it would be non-normative. As was seen with the myth of the virgin sacrifice, sometimes the nonnormative can reinforce, by transgression, the norm.
Tradition held that once upon a time, complete promiscuity ruled in Athens. Cecrops the King was the first to introduce patriarchal marriage and cohabitation of the sexes to his people. Thereafter, civilisation depended upon the exchange of women within the confines of marriage, specifically for the procreation of males. Women had to be protected, “like culture itself” from the barbaric world outside the confines of home and marriage. Women, therefore, were a vulnerable necessity for men. They could bring shame upon the men that had claim to them as husbands or fathers. Women had the ability to cheat men out of what the men considered theirs: offspring. Through patriarchal marriage, the men confined women’s sexual and reproductive powers to one man, so that there could be no doubt about the paternal lineage of the offspring, “thereby protecting society and the family from the pollution of bastardy.”
The Amazon, who had complete control of her own reproductivity and shunned marriage, reversed the Greek gender roles; Amazon women were the warriors. The dual nature of the Amazon, a female with reproductive powers and a warrior with the strength of a male symbolised how the Amazons belonged to neither group. In the main traditions of the Amazon myth discussed above, each symbolises the triumph of civilisation, through the male hero, over barbarism of the Amazons’ liminal existence. Heracles defeated the Amazons’ male side when he took the Amazonian girdle through force. Theseus first raped an Amazon, conquering the Amazon’s female side, and then defeated the Amazons in battle, thus conquering the Amazons’ masculine side as well. Achilles defeated Penthesileia’s male side by killing her in battle, thereby symbolically subduing her female nature as well. All the male heroes whose exploits are narrated by the Greeks defeat and subjugate the warrior-women, overcoming their savage nature by rape, death or marriage. Once again, women must accomplish the transition from virgin, which encompassed the expression of wild nature, to culture through marriage. In the case of the Amazons, this transition is forced upon them, quite literally, by men.
The connection of Artemis with the Amazons is not explicit until the Hellenistic period. It is interesting to note, however, that there are ideological similarities between the warriors and the goddess. In classical interpretations, the Amazon is an image of the superlative female created by men to flatter themselves; she was simultaneously desirable, but also tainted by the oddity of her position, making the Amazon a suitable adversary for the most masculine heroes.
The Amazons’ association with Thrace is fitting since tradition linked Thrace with Ares and Artemis. In Thrace, Artemis was worshipped as a potnia theron type, and some of the aspects of the Amazons, like the blood sacrifices, were also associated with Thracian Artemis’ cult. Among the Greeks fighting was considered a man’s prerogative. As fighting females, the Amazons are considered ‘Others’ by the Athenians. As unmarried women they were naturally associated with Artemis.
After Achilles kills Penthesilea, he notices her female side when all that is left is a dead female body on the battlefield. There is nothing noble or heroic about having killed a female, warrior or not. This fact that an Amazon is a valuable and honourable opponent only when alive and unvanquished is rather like the liminal hinterland in which a virgin exists. Amazons, as αντιάνειρα, are in a liminal state (as warriors equal to men) within being liminal (as unmarried women) in Athenian perception. As “fighting a real female would be an unbearable affront to the masculine warrior ethos, in this way the Amazons presented yet another paradox for the male heroes who were to fight and kill them: be damned if you do not, and be damned if you do.” This ambiguity is explored and emphasised, especially with the Amazons’ relationship with Artemis.
As early as the end of the 6th century, the Amazons began to be connected with Artemis through another avenue, that is, their virginity. Artemis controls the transitions of a woman from a parthenos to a gyne. ‘Though this power over life in the female body, Artemis is the goddess who divides the sexes.” Her connection with the Amazons at Ephesos, while not an Attic tradition but an Ephesian one, highlights their liminality as women without men, yet equal to men in battle. In the extant literary tradition, the virginity of the Amazons is not mentioned until the Hellenistic period. For the Amazons, the only escape from the sphere of Artemis is death. Amazons may be deflowered in rape, fail pregnant and have a child, yet without marriage they remain social virgins.
The Amazons, then, violate the Greek view of culture by usurping their reproductive rights for themselves and refusing to enter into one of the founding acts of culture, the exchange of women in the form of marriage. Furthermore, they also violate one of the most fundamentally understood truths about women, that women must shed their own blood. They must certainly never shed the blood of men. We have seen that women bleed in a series of events, starting with the menarche and ending with the lochia. Amazons, however, not only use these bleedings to their own advantage, they also behave in an anti-female way by killing men, and therefore causing men to bleed.
In a similar fashion, the myth of the Danaids who murder their husbands on their wedding night is such an anathema. On the night when the women are meant to bleed normatively in defloration in intercourse, they pervert the normative order and shed the blood of the very men who were about to deflower them and cause them to bleed. The Danaids are similar to the Amazons in that they refuse, violently, to conform to the ideal of the married woman by bleeding to breed. Horrifically, they shed the blood of the men who were meant to cause them to bleed.
The Amazons, too, can be seen to symbolise the barbarian Persians, who in one respect were characterised as overly feminine and thus analogous to the society of Amazons. The concept of the barbarian as “other,” the Amazon as “other,” the Greek female as “other,” is integral in Athenian culture. However, this concept is contradictory as well, since the female reproductive aspects of this “other” was necessary for the continuation of the culture. The Amazon myth, in its various traditions and variations, was constantly relieving the tensions over the problem of women and marriage, a transition Artemis was meant to oversee and end, one way or another: either via marriage or death.
The myth of the Amazons was constructed from the Athenian habitus, shaped and conditioned by the historical events which informed it. The Athenians seemed to have defined themselves in contrast to the Amazons. Where the civilised Greeks had a patriarchy, the Amazons had a matriarchy. Marriage was a structural necessity in Greek society but the Amazons shunned marriage, male children and any permanent links with men. Even the Amazonian homelands and weapons were a comment upon their differentness from the Greeks. The Amazonian lifestyle and society, according to Stewart, was “the inverse of the polis, the ‘Greek men’s club’ and the Athenians used it as a tool for conceptualising, explaining and confirming their city’s actions, institutions and values by postulating their opposites and showing them to be unacceptable.”
The evolution of the myth and the way the individual versions became popular, each emphasising a different main hero against the Amazons, shows the difference in the times in which each version was current. Three of the greatest heroes of classical mythology were sent to conquer the Amazons, who represented the complete antithesis to everything Greek and civilised. As it developed in later times, none of these heroes could defeat the Amazons of their own accord; Bellerophon needed the aid of Pegasus, Heracles employed the magical lion’s hide, Theseus used the power of love to his advantage, and even Achilles had the protection imparted upon him by his mother when she dipped him into the River Styx at birth, without which, Penthesilea might have defeated him. The need of these men for external aid in defeating the Amazons signifies that they were formidable foes for men, and more importantly, that they could be overcome by using “resourcefulness rather than crude strength.” The extra effort required by the most masculine of heroes to subdue the Amazons only serves to emphasise how these women, although women, were a truly dangerous foe and worthy adversaries of these mighty male heroes.
In the ancient world, the Amazons were considered alien, foreign and barbaric. Warrior women living on their own terms without men, the Amazons provided for themselves in a liminal society where there were no boundaries confining their behaviour. By inverting the gender-roles of Athenian status society, the Amazons were a source of much curiosity and cause for speculation. As duBois states, “the Amazon myth was used in part to sustain ideas of sexual difference, by representing a deformed alternative to the ideal of the polis.” All these versions of the myth served to re-emphasise the normative social structures in the society, Athens through which such myths were perpetuated, recreated and changed with reference to the group habitus of Athens which was constantly being affected by historical developments and events.
Women’s lives were socially and biologically conceived with the help of as a series of rites of passage through which women would move in order to fit into the male-structured status society. Women, too, as knowledgeable agents in society, contributed to such structures which indicated their need for transitions. The actions or practices of both women and men, conditioned by their habitus, created social structures and expectations which in turn recontributed to the formation of the habitus.
Myths and rituals, such as tragedy, in which stories are told, reshaped and retold, reflect status society’s attitudes towards the social and biological conception of the rites of passage of women in real life. Dramatic myth represented on stage was wide-reaching and had an immediate impact on society and its structures, such as institutions in life like marriage and rituals which served to distinguish girls as marriageable. These stories, for instances those of virgin sacrifice and Amazons, presented alternatives to what structures were extant, as shown in medical texts, in status society. Furthermore, the stories are resolved as displaying such alternatives as defeated, thereby specifically commenting on the necessity of such status structures and their preservation.
Society is recursively structured with reference to the habitus which conditioned individuals to expect certain elements in society. These myths of liminal women do not describe merely a story, but actively commented upon the functioning of society, especially with reference to the place of women In society. These tales, which developed organically, were shaped by agents and society’s experiences, bound up in the habitus.
In the case of myths of the virgin sacrifice, by killing the potentially troublesome, but necessary, undetermined sexual storehouse of the society, society could enforce normative values by holding the virgin up as an example of one who did not conform (after all, she died unmarried, her telos unfulfilled, robbing the community of the power of her reproduction). This myth expressed the cultural need of a polls for virgins to marry and produce progeny. The myths of warrior women living outside the normative social structure established for women, the Amazons, also reinforce this cultural need. Artemis is a key part of the knowledgeable creation of normative values, especially where women are concerned. These values are challenged both by men and women.
Chapter 5
