The Amazons fought Achilles and he wept over the body of the queen he had killed.
This detail, which the post-Homeric epic tradition preserved in the lost poem called the Aethiopis, attributed to Arctinus of Miletus and known to us through the summary in Proclus’s Chrestomathy, is the detail that most completely captures the quality of the Amazon tradition in the ancient Greek imagination. Achilles killed Penthesilea, the Amazon queen who had brought her warriors to Troy to fight on the Trojan side after Achilles had been pulled back from the battle by his grief for Patroclus, and at the moment of her death, when the spear had found its mark and she was falling from her horse, their eyes met, and Achilles loved her. The greatest warrior of the Greek world killed the greatest warrior of the Amazon world, and the killing was simultaneous with the recognition of what he had destroyed.
The tradition that follows this moment in the fragmentary sources is the tradition of Achilles’ grief, which was sufficiently extreme that the Greek hero Thersites mocked him for it, and Achilles killed Thersites for the mockery: the grief for the dead Amazon queen was the grief that could not be mocked without paying the ultimate price. What the Amazon tradition was doing in this episode was doing what it consistently did in the Greek mythological imagination: it was placing the figure of the warrior woman at the edge of the Greek heroic tradition’s understanding of its own values, at the point where the heroic encounter produced a recognition that the tradition was not entirely comfortable with but could not suppress.
Who the Amazons Were in the Ancient Tradition
The Amazon tradition in ancient Greek literature was the tradition of a people who lived at the edge of the known world, at the boundary between the Greek world and the barbarian world that the Greek imagination populated with the peoples whose differences from Greek norms served to define what those norms were by contrast.
The Amazons were located, in most ancient sources, near the Thermodon River on the southern coast of the Black Sea in the region that is now northern Turkey. Their city was called Themiscyra, and the tradition consistently placed it at the geographical boundary where the Greek coastal world ended and the steppe world of the Scythians and the other nomadic peoples of the Eurasian interior began. This geographical placement was the first encoding of the Amazon tradition’s cultural function: the warrior women who lived at the edge of the Greek world were the extreme case of the inversion of Greek gender norms, the women who did what the Greek world consistently defined as male activity, fighting and riding and governing, organized into a society that had no male citizens in the permanent sense that the Greek polis required.
The Amazon tradition’s engagement with the Olympian mythology placed the Amazons in two of the most significant heroic narratives: the ninth labor of Heracles, in which the hero was sent to retrieve the golden belt of Hippolyta, the Amazon queen, and the Amazonomachy, the Amazon attack on Athens that the Athenian tradition placed in the period of Theseus’s reign and that the Athenian artistic tradition commemorated in the sculptural programs of the most important buildings of the fifth century BCE.
The Heracles and Hippolyta tradition is the older of the two in the textual record, and it carries the ambiguity that the Amazon tradition consistently maintained: in some versions, Hippolyta gave Heracles the belt willingly, impressed by the hero or in love with him, and Hera’s intervention produced the conflict by convincing the Amazons that Heracles was abducting their queen. In other versions, Hippolyta refused and the battle followed. The ambiguity is the tradition’s encoding of theally uncomfortable position that the Amazon queen occupied in the heroic narrative: she was a warrior whom the hero needed to defeat, and she was also a figure whose qualities, courage, authority, the possession of the divine gift of the belt, placed her in the category of the admirable rather than simply the hostile.
The Theseus and the Amazons tradition, which the Athenian tradition developed into the Amazonomachy narrative, gave the Amazon attack a specifically Athenian dimension: the Amazons who attacked Athens were the Amazons seeking revenge for Theseus’s abduction of their queen Antiope, and the battle was fought in the geography of Athens itself, on the Areopagus and in the streets of the city. The tradition that the Amazon warriors penetrated to the very heart of Athens and were only repulsed at the cost of enormous effort was the tradition that the Athenian sculptural program commemorated as the defining test of the city’s courage and military capacity.
The Amazonomachy in Athenian Art
The Amazonomachy was one of the three great mythological battles that the Athenian artistic tradition of the fifth century BCE placed on the most significant buildings and objects of the city as the emblems of the city’s values and its place in the Greek world: alongside the Gigantomachy, the battle of the gods and the Giants, and the Centauromachy, the battle of the Lapiths and the Centaurs, the Amazonomachy constituted the pictorial program of civilization’s victory over barbarism that the Parthenon’s sculptural decoration expressed across its multiple surfaces.
The Parthenon’s south metopes showed the Centauromachy in the thirty-two surviving panels of the metope sequence. The west pediment showed Athena and Poseidon’s contest for Athens. The Athena Parthenos, Pheidias’s chryselephantine cult statue in the temple’s interior, carried the Amazonomachy on the outside of Athena’s shield: the combat of the Greeks and the Amazons on the shield of the goddess who patronized Athens was the visual statement about what Athens was fighting for and what it had already defeated.
The Stoa Poikile, the Painted Stoa in the Athenian agora, carried Polygnotus’s and Mikon’s paintings of the battle of Marathon alongside the Amazonomachy and the Iliou Persis, the sack of Troy: the three battles were the three defining military victories in the Athenian imagination, one legendary against the Amazons, one mythological against Troy, and one historical against Persia. The placement of the Amazonomachy alongside Marathon was the explicit statement that the Amazon attack on Athens and the Persian invasion of Greece were the same kind of threat, the barbarian assault on the civilized polis, and that Athens’s victory over both was the same kind of achievement.
The vase-painting tradition that the original article references correctly places the Amazon image from the sixth century BCE onward: the red-figure technique that developed in Athens around 530 BCE gave the vase-painters the capacity to show the Amazons’ individual characterization in the detail of their armor, their weapons, and their poses that the earlier black-figure technique could not fully achieve. The Amazon vases that the National Archaeological Museum in Athens and the Acropolis Museum hold are among the most complete surviving documentation of how the Athenian artistic tradition visualized these figures: consistently depicted as competent warriors with the military equipment of the period, wearing the Phrygian cap and carrying the combination of weapons that the tradition associated with the eastern warrior woman.
The Scythian Archaeological Evidence
The question of the historical basis for the Amazon tradition has been substantially advanced by the archaeological investigation of Scythian burial mounds in the Black Sea region and the Eurasian steppe over the past fifty years, and the evidence that has emerged from this investigation is genuinely significant rather than the folkloric coincidence that the skeptic’s position would suggest.
The Scythians, the nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppe from the Black Sea to the Altai Mountains, were the people that the ancient Greek tradition most consistently placed in geographical proximity to the Amazons, and the geographic correspondence between the Amazon tradition’s placement of Themiscyra and the documented distribution of the Scythian archaeological record in the Black Sea region is the first layer of the correspondence.
The more direct correspondence is the burial evidence: the systematic excavation of Scythian burial mounds, the kurgans, in the region of the Black Sea steppes, particularly in Ukraine and the southern Russian steppe, has produced a consistent pattern of female burials with weapons. Approximately twenty percent of the warrior burials in the Scythian archaeological record from the fifth to the third centuries BCE are the burials of women, with the weapons, the quivers of arrows, the iron swords, and in some cases the bronze armor that identify the grave as a warrior grave. Some of the female skeletons show the bone deformations associated with regular horseback riding in childhood and adolescence, and some show healed weapon wounds that document combat experience.
The Amazon tradition’s claim that the Amazon warriors were primarily archers on horseback corresponds directly to the military practice documented in the Scythian female warrior burials: the composite bow and the horse are the defining military equipment of the steppe warrior culture, and the female burials with bows and with the evidence of riding from childhood are the female participants in the military culture that the steppe required.
The scholarly designation of these burials as evidence for the Amazon tradition was established most systematically by the American archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball, whose excavations of Scythian kurgans in the Ural steppes in the 1990s produced the most extensively documented cases of female warrior burials in the archaeological record. The combination of weapons, ritual objects, and the physical evidence of the skeletons in these burials has been interpreted as evidence for a society in which a category of women, perhaps a priestly-warrior class rather than the entire female population of the steppe community, participated in the military activities that the steppe nomadic life required.
The ancient Greek travelers and traders who encountered the Scythians on the Black Sea coast and through the commercial networks of the steppe were encountering the culture whose female participants in military activity generated the Amazon tradition in the Greek imagination. The Amazons of the mythological tradition were not the Scythian female warriors as they actually were: they were the Scythian female warriors processed through the Greek mythological imagination’s framework of inversion and boundary-marking into the extreme case of the gender norm’s violation that served the Greek tradition’s cultural purposes.
The Brauron Connection
The sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron on the eastern coast of Attica, the site where Athenian girls between five and ten performed the ceremony of the arkteia, the bear ritual, before marriage, carried an Amazon association that the ancient sources preserve in a form that the modern scholarship has found genuinely interesting.
The arkteia at Brauron involved the girls, called arktoi or bears, performing ritual actions that included running, which was the athletic activity most consistently associated with the Amazons in the ancient artistic tradition. The connection between the Artemis cult and the Amazon tradition was the connection between the goddess who governed the wild spaces beyond the polis and who patronized the female ritual transition from the wild to the domesticated, and the warrior women who lived permanently in the wild spaces and never made the transition. The Amazons were the extreme case of what the arkteia’s girls were temporarily enacting before returning to the domestic sphere: the permanent occupation of the wild space outside the polis’s gender norms.
The Brauron sanctuary’s topography, the coastal marsh landscape with the quality of the Attic coast in this location, the archaeological remains of the sanctuary including the stoa where the votive offerings and the garments dedicated to Artemis were stored, and the small museum that holds the sculpture from the sanctuary including the remarkable portraits of the arktoi girls, are together the most direct encounter with the Artemis cult and its relationship to the Amazon tradition that the Attic landscape provides.
The Amazon Queens | Penthesilea, Hippolyta, Antiope
The named Amazon queens of the Greek tradition are the figures through whom the tradition most fully developed the character of the Amazon as a mythological person rather than simply as a type, and the three principal queens, Penthesilea, Hippolyta, and Antiope, represent three different dimensions of the tradition’s engagement with the warrior woman.
Penthesilea is the queen whose story the Aethiopis developed in the episode that the article’s opening describes: she came to Troy as an ally of Priam, fought with exceptional courage, and was killed by Achilles at the moment when the recognition of her value was simultaneous with its destruction. The tradition that Achilles loved her at the moment of her death is the tradition that the ancient artistic tradition found most productive: the cups and vases that show the Achilles and Penthesilea combat consistently give the encounter the visual quality of an embrace as much as of a combat, the two figures whose bodies are in the configuration of the fighter who catches the falling opponent at the moment of death.
Hippolyta is the queen whose belt defined her authority: the golden girdle that Zeus gave her as a mark of her position as the leader of the Amazon warriors was the divine gift that made her the Amazon queen in the sense that the divine attributes of the Olympian gods made them the divine powers they were. The ninth labor of Heracles and the conflict that developed around the belt was the tradition’s engagement with the question of what happened when the heroic world’s ultimate male warrior and the Amazon world’s ultimate female warrior were placed in the same narrative space and required to interact.
Antiope was the Amazon queen whose abduction by Theseus generated the Amazonomachy: the Athenian tradition that placed Theseus’s taking of Antiope as the cause of the Amazon attack on Athens was the tradition that gave the Amazonomachy its personal and political dimension. The Amazon attack was not simply the barbarian assault on the Greek city: it was the Amazon attempt to recover their queen and to punish the abductor. The Athenian victory over the Amazons was therefore simultaneously the military defense of the city and the assertion that Theseus’s possession of Antiope was legitimate rather than criminal.
Why the Amazons Were Necessary
The Amazon tradition served a function in the Greek mythological imagination that no other mythological tradition served in quite the same way: it placed the inversion of the Greek gender norms at the heroic level rather than at the domestic or the comic level, and it required the heroic tradition to engage with that inversion at the level of genuine military encounter rather than simply of social disapproval.
The Amazons were not a cautionary tale about what happened when women refused their proper domestic role: they were a people of genuine martial excellence whose excellence required the Greek tradition’s greatest heroes, Heracles, Achilles, Theseus, to engage with them at the full extent of the heroes’ own capacities. The Amazon queen who required Heracles’ ninth labor to defeat, the Amazon queen whose death made Achilles weep, the Amazon army that penetrated to the Areopagus before being repulsed: these were not easily defeated opponents whose defeat reflected well on the heroes who defeated them by contrast with their weakness. They were formidable opponents whose defeat reflected well on the heroes precisely because the defeat was genuinely difficult.
The Amazonomachy’s consistent placement alongside the Gigantomachy and the Centauromachy in the Athenian pictorial program was the placement that gave the Amazon encounter its fullest ideological dimension: the Gigants were the divine adversaries whose defeat required the Olympians, the Centaurs were the semi-human adversaries whose defeat required the Lapiths’ and the heroes’ combined effort, and the Amazons were the human adversaries whose difference from the Greek norm was the inversion of the gender norms that the polis was organized around. The defeat of all three was the Athenian artistic program’s declaration that the civilized order had been defended against the three categories of challenge to it: the divine, the hybrid, and the gendered-other.
The Amazon who wept at Achilles’ feet and the Amazon whose death made Achilles weep were both necessary to the tradition: the tradition needed the Amazons to be defeated, because their defeat validated the heroic tradition’s values, and it needed the defeat to cost something, because a victory that cost nothing against opponents who offered no genuine resistance was not a heroic victory at all.
At Olympus Estate, Mythic Essays moves through the deeper currents of the Greek tradition. Achilles killed Penthesilea and wept. The Scythian female warrior burials in the Ukrainian steppe are real and the weapons in them are real. The Amazon tradition was the Greek imagination’s way of placing the inversion of its own gender norms at the heroic level and requiring its greatest heroes to take that inversion seriously. They did. The tradition recorded that they did. Penthesilea’s name is in the sources. Her face is on the vases. She fell and he wept and the tradition could not suppress either fact.
