Amazonomachy

      There was a piece in the news this week about ancient Greek vase-paintings of Scythians. To sum it up quickly, there are a dozen Greek vase paintings with words on them that have historically been considered nonsense phrases in Greek; because these vase paintings feature characters in Scythian costume (such as Amazons), a museum curator finally made the connection that the so-called nonsense words might actually be words in ancient languages of the Caucasus, and an authority in languages of the Caucasus was called in to read the words, which turned out to be real ancient Caucasian words, such as nicknames for the Amazons. This discovery raises a whole pile of questions in my mind--who were the Greek painters consulting to get authentic foreign names for these characters? what was the purpose of writing Caucasian words in Greek script on a painting for a Greek or otherwise non-Caucasian audience?--but for today I want to focus on those Amazons.

      Amazons, you probably already know, are members of a mythical all-female warrior society. For purposes of reproduction, they empress men from neighboring societies into sex; female children are raised as warriors, and male children, depending on whose version you read, are either abandoned, cast off to neighboring societies, or raised as slaves. While evidence has been found for female warrior graves in the Scythian area, the Greeks were never able to substantiate the existence of an all-female warrior society; the Amazons in Greek lore were used as a cautionary example of the horrifying possibilities of life outside the civilized (i.e. Greek) world.

      The novelty of a female-dominated society makes them a favorite subject in Greek myth, but they’re usually not depicted as terribly foreign. They certainly don’t conform to standards of Greek female behavior, but their depiction, in terms of dress and behavior (particularly in early texts and art) runs closer to Greek warriors (i.e. men) than any identifiable foreign group. Mythological texts preserve the names of at least three particularly famous Amazons, all of whom have obviously Greek names: Penthesilia, Hippolyte, and Antiope. It reminds me of the way language is handled in the Iliad: even though the Trojans are ethnically distinct from the Greeks, the Trojans usually have Greek names, and they all speak Greek, both when they talk to the Greeks and to each other. There’s a narrative understanding that the Trojans are foreign, even though in practical terms they behave exactly like the Greeks. The Amazons, after the Persian War, are generally painted in Attic vase-paintings wearing Scythian leggings instead of Greek-style armor, as a nod to their surface otherness. But even though they live in a topsy-turvy female-run society, they still tend to be able to integrate into Greek society: Theseus brings home an Amazon concubine, and Penthesilia falls in love with Achilles.

      But where do the Amazons come from? Well, it’s hard to say. The Greeks were sure they were out there somewhere, but they had trouble finding them. As Greek history advances, and the Greeks get more and more reliable information about more and more distant places, the Amazons tend to move off into the distance since they can’t be substantiated within the known world. Although legend has it that certain cities (and that wonder of the world, the temple of Artemis at Ephesus) were founded by Amazons, evidently the Amazons didn’t stick around to run the places; certainly the cities labeled with this distinction are part of the ordinary male-run world.

      But even though they were hard to pinpoint in reality, the menace of Amazon warriors lurked all the same. One of the great stories from Athenian myth, depicted on the metopes of the Parthenon, was the Amazonomachy. Here the Amazons actually invaded Athens, setting up camp on the Areopagus (actually between the Agora and the Acropolis!) and terrorizing the Athenians on their home soil. The mythological pretext for this invasion is to regain the concubine Theseus brought home. As it turns out, Theseus handily defeats the foreign menace and drives them out of Greece (yaaay patriarchy!). What puzzles me is whether there’s a historical pretext for this invasion--no source I’ve read has identified a plausible invasion of Athens by non-Greeks that could be written up as a conflict with Amazons. The unsubstantiated nature of the myth suggests to me that the Athenians had an irrational fear of invasion, particularly a humiliating invasion by inferior women, and composed some self-aggrandizing mythology to illustrate how glorious they were. But I suppose I’m wandering too far into speculation. The Amazons, in any case, were described as a foreign menace with alien customs, and their incursion into the heart of Greece is a convenient way for Greeks to talk not only about the danger of a foreign invasion, but the natural Greek valor that they could use to defeat it. It makes a convenient analogy for the Battle of Marathon, and led to piles and piles of Greek vases with pictures of Amazons dressed as Persian archers, a true nightmare for the Athenian patriarchy.