Amazons

The Amazons were a nation of warrior women in Greek myth who lived about the river Thermodon in the Pontus region, with their city at Themiscyra. Their queen Hippolyta wore the belt of Ares, and Penthesilea was a daughter of Ares. Heracles, Theseus, Bellerophon and Achilles all fought them, and their invasion of Attica was remembered at Athens as a great victory.

Homeland and the Scythians

Apollodorus places the Amazons about the river Thermodon and calls them a people great in war who cultivated the manly virtues; when they bore children they reared only the girls (Library 2.5.9). Their harbour city was Themiscyra. The Iliad calls them “the peers of men” (3.189, 6.186), and Herodotus says they came from the Thermodon when they broke into Attica (9.27). Apollonius makes them daughters of Ares and the nymph Harmonia, caring only for insolence and the works of Ares, and settled in three tribes along the coast, the Themiscyreians under Hippolyte, the Lycastians and the Chadesians; the Argonauts, warned by Phineus, sailed past without landing (Argonautica 2.985–1000).

The link with the area of modern Ukraine comes from Herodotus (4.110–117), who is not telling a story of the heroic age but a local legend of the Scythians and Sauromatae. In his account, Greeks defeated the Amazons on the Thermodon and sailed off with captives in three ships. The women overpowered the crews, but they could not sail, and the winds carried them to the Cliffs on the Maeetian lake (the Sea of Azov), in the country of the free Scythians. The Scythians, who called them Oiorpata, “killers of men”, at first fought them, then sent young men to live near them, and the two groups joined. Their descendants were the Sauromatae, who spoke Scythian imperfectly, and among whom no maiden married until she had killed a man of the enemy. In myth, therefore, the Amazons belong to the Thermodon; the Scythian homeland is a later association.

Strabo (11.5.1), reporting Metrodorus of Scepsis and Hypsicrates, places Amazons in the northern foothills of the Caucasus, next to the Gargarians. For two months each spring, he says, the two peoples met on the mountain between them to sacrifice and to have children together; the Amazons kept the girls and sent the boys to the Gargarians to be brought up.

The Girdle of Hippolyta

As his ninth labour, Heracles was sent to fetch the belt of Ares, which Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, wore as the token of her rank, because Admete, the daughter of Eurystheus, wanted it. Heracles sailed with a band of companions in a single ship, and after adventures on Paros and in Mysia put in at the harbour of Themiscyra. Hippolyta came to him and promised to give him the belt. Hera, however, took the likeness of an Amazon and went about saying that the strangers were carrying off their queen. The Amazons rode down to the ship in arms; Heracles, suspecting treachery, killed Hippolyta, took the belt and sailed away (Apollodorus, Library 2.5.9). Diodorus (4.16) tells of a pitched battle at Themiscyra in which Heracles killed the champions of the Amazons one by one, Aella, Philippis, Prothoe, Eriboea and the rest, defeated their commander Melanippe, gave the captive Antiope to Theseus and freed Melanippe in return for her girdle.

Theseus and the Attic War

Theseus carried off an Amazon, called Antiope in most accounts (Melanippe or Hippolyta in others). Some said he went with Heracles; Plutarch thinks it more likely that he sailed on his own (Apollodorus, Epitome 1.16; Plutarch, Theseus 26). The Amazons then marched on Athens and camped inside the city, fighting near the Pnyx and the Museum hill. Theseus defeated them in a battle that Plutarch dates to the month Boedromion, and after three months a peace was made (Plutarch, Theseus 27). Theseus’ son by the Amazon was Hippolytus. In Apollodorus (Epitome 1.17) the Amazon appeared in arms at Theseus’ wedding to Phaedra and was killed there; others said Theseus killed her in battle. Diodorus (4.28) has the Amazons march from the Thermodon through Thrace with Scythian allies to avenge Heracles’ campaign and the enslavement of Antiope; Antiope fought at Theseus’ side and died in the battle, and the survivors withdrew with the Scythians to Scythia.

Other Amazon Myths

In the Iliad, Bellerophon, sent against them by the king of Lycia, kills the Amazons as the third of his tasks (6.186). Priam remembers that he once went as an ally to the Phrygians camped on the Sangarius, on the day the Amazons came against them (3.184–190); Homer does not say that Priam led the army.

Penthesilea at Troy

In Apollodorus’ Epitome (5.1), Penthesilea is a daughter of Ares and Otrere. She had accidentally killed Hippolyte and was purified by Priam. She fought on the Trojan side, killed many Greeks, among them Machaon, and was killed by Achilles, who fell in love with her after her death and slew Thersites for jeering at him. The story belongs to the lost epic Aethiopis of Arctinus, whose summary by Proclus calls her “the daughter of Ares and of Thracian race”, buried by the Trojans, and ends with Achilles killing Thersites and sailing to Lesbos to be purified. Quintus of Smyrna devotes the first book of his Fall of Troy to her: she had killed her sister Hippolyte with a spear thrown at a stag, came to Troy with twelve companions to escape the Erinyes of the killing, fought for a single day and fell to Achilles, who mourned over her body (Fall of Troy 1.18–830). In Quintus it is Eurypylus, not Penthesilea, who kills Machaon (6.408–429).

See Also: Hippolyta, Ares, Heracles, Labours of Heracles, Theseus, Hippolytus, Bellerophon, Priam, Trojan War, Achilles