The Athenians’ hard-won triumph over the army of barbarian women was presented as a key episode in the city’s legendary origins and its selfimage. After the Greeks defeated the Persians (490-478 BC), the Athenian story of the Battle for Athens could hark back to a much earlier time when the city had repulsed another terrifying foreign invader from the East. Beginning in the fifth century BC, the Mother of all Amazo-nomachies was extolled in colorful murals by renowned artists, modeled in monumental sculptures on the Acropolis and other buildings, and featured on Athena’s massive shield, part of her stupendous gold and ivory statue inside the Parthenon. Phidias completed that colossal Athena sculpture in 438 BC. On her shield (about twelve feet high, lost except for fragmentary ancient copies) was a grand relief of about thirty struggling figures, Amazons versus Greeks, against the backdrop of Athens’s city walls on a rocky slope. In the chaos of the battle on the shield, the male and female combatants appear evenly matched, the outcome hangs in suspense, and a further impression of symmetry is evoked by the corpses of a Greek and an Amazon at the base.19
Vivid images of Greeks pitted against Amazons survive on hundreds of vase paintings from the seventh century BC on. Whenever Heracles is included, the setting is recognized as his conflict with the Amazons of Pontus; other Amazonomachies clearly involve Achilles and Penthe-silea at Troy. Around 450 BC, for little-understood reasons, the number of Amazon scenes on vases more than doubled. There are no certain illustrations of the Battle for Athens before about 460 BC, suggesting that the myth as we have it may have evolved in the fifth century. Some scenes on vases can be identified as the Athenian battle thanks to inscriptions, others because some of the vignettes and warriors’ poses and the rocky terrain appear to be copied from Athena’s great shield and other famous civic murals and public statues of 460-438 BC, details of which are known from ancient descriptions and copies. Theseus is named in thirteen such scenes. More than sixty different Amazon names are given on these vases, and Antiope is named four times.20
Many classical scholars believe that images of Amazons in art, especially in the fifth century BC, were not intended to represent women warriors of legend or reality but were symbolic stand-ins for Persians. In this view, Amazonomachies were really veiled “Persianomachies,” a way of demeaning Persians as “feminized men.” The claim that Amazons were covert symbols for Persians is a very old notion, going back to the nineteenth century. It is “arguable but impossible to prove” that the Battle for Athens myth and related art alluded directly to the Persian Wars. Several paradoxical aspects seem to detract from the merits of the oft-repeated assumption that Amazons in art were a symbolic way of denigrating Persians.21
After the Persian Wars, the Persians were by no means an “unspoken” topic in Greece, a group that had to be slyly represented by encoded imagery in art. Greek artists clearly depicted Persians as Persians in post-Persian War paintings and artworks; some are shown being defeated or humiliated by Greeks.22 An emblematic reading in art is also at odds with contemporary Greek historians’ accounts of warlike female barbarians of Scythia, often called Amazons. Greek authors were capable of using symbols and drawing attention to symbolic meanings in artworks, yet no writers ever conflated Amazons with Persians. Plentiful literary evidence suggests that the Greeks perceived the Amazons as offshoots of a real people, namely, Scythians; both groups were consistently distinguished from the Persians. Saka-Scythians were historical enemies of the Persians; the Persians tried and failed to defeat them: facts well known to the Greeks. Why have members of a nomad culture that had resisted the Persians stand in for Persians.?23
Herodotus mentioned that the Greeks had once defeated Amazons in Pontus, and he also chronicled in great detail the rise of the Persian Empire and the Persians’ dramatic downfall in Greece. Since he was writing at the height of the popularity of Battle for Athens artwork in the mid-fifth century, one might expect Herodotus to draw a parallel if one existed in his day. But his sole allusion to the Athenian myth of the Battle for Athens occurs in a speech attributed to an Athenian envoy, listing Athens’s major victories over three separate entities, the Amazons, the Trojans, and the Persians. “We did well against the Amazons from Pontus who invaded Attica a long time ago,” and “we were inferior to none at Troy,” but “those were deeds performed long ago. . . . More remarkable was our triumph over the forty-six nations in the Persian Army.” Writing four centuries after Herodotus, Strabo (a native of Pontus) did not deny the existence of Amazons in remote antiquity, but he was skeptical about recent “marvelous” tales about Amazons “sending an expedition as far as Attica.” Strabo never associated Amazons with Persians, even in his descriptions of Persian attire and weapons.24
Can similarities between Amazon and Persian “Eastern” clothing in vase paintings support the notion that Amazons were intended to symbolize Persians? The attire of male Scythians resembles that worn by Amazons and Persians in Greek art, yet no one argues that Scythian males stood for Persians. In fact, Scythians, Thracians, Amazons, and Persians shared elements of a recognizable ensemble (patterned tunics, trousers, hats, armor, and weapons) typical of mounted foreign archers; Greek vase painters delighted in mixing up the sheer variety of these exotic styles. Artists began to portray Amazons in more realistic clothing and arms once they became knowledgeable about the weapons and dress of northern and eastern steppe cultures (Chapter 12). After the
Persian Wars, some vase painters began to include elements of Persian dress too, as “new decorative possibilities” to supplement the already eclectic Amazon-Scythian repertoire. If Amazons were read as Persians in disguise, who were the Amazons in art before the Persian threat? Before the Greeks had become familiar with foreign warriors’ garments and weapons, Greek artists had dressed and armed Amazons as Greek hoplites, yet it would be odd to argue that in that time the Amazons somehow “stood in” for Greeks because of their attire. In fact, Greek hoplite attire for Amazons did not entirely disappear in Amazonomach-ies after the Persian Wars. Even in some battle scenes obviously set in Athens, a few Amazons were depicted in Greek hoplite gear and wearing Attic helmets, and at least one of the Amazons is blonde—obvious attributes that would seem to undermine their symbolic value as “Persians.” Moreover, some vases show Amazons wounding or killing Greeks, activities denied to Persians in Greek art. Many of the Amazons fighting Athenians on fifth-century BC vase paintings are inscribed with good Greek names—yet another factor that jars the illusion that the Amazons were meant to stand for Persians.25
If all Amazonomachies after 480 BC were triumphal propaganda representing the annihilation of the Persian threat, it is notable that so many artistic compositions continued to show suspenseful contests with slight, if any, indication of victory. Finally, if Amazonomachies were generally accepted as symbolic of violent and successful Greek resistance to Persia, then it is striking that scenes widely understood to celebrate the defeat of the Persians would have been selected, along with other episodes from Greek myth as well as historical and nonGreek scenes, to adorn monuments in Persian-controlled cities of western Asia Minor, such as the hero shrine at Gjolbaschi-Trysa, Lycia (ca. 370 BC), and the great Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, Caria (353 BC).26
It seems that Amazonomachies and Amazons could evoke many layers of meanings for ancient observers. As one scholar remarks, “Far from simply reinforcing the. . . cliche of the craven barbarian and the heroic Greek victor,” Amazons “help question and problematize it.” The Athenian Amazonomachy was a “mythic prototype for certain historical events long before” the Persian Wars, influenced by earlier Scythian conquests in Thrace. Myths and history were fluid, comments another scholar, and their flexibility allowed them to be “modified and elaborated to reflect recent events.” In the unique case of the myth of the Battle for Athens, which apparently emerged as national propaganda around the time of the Persian Wars, the Amazons who invaded Attica were understood not as Persians but as a first wave of aggressive barbarians from the East, as another real people, hostile to the young Athens in its mythic origins. Thus the “Scythian army led by Amazons” bearing down on Greece was presented as an ancient precursor of the Persian Empire. In that sense, then, the Battle with the Amazons could be seen as a retroactive “mythic counterpart” or fictional “analogue of the Persian invasion.” The myth allowed the Athenians to self-consciously ret-roject themselves and their hometown hero Theseus into a glorious defense of Greece from another powerful foreign enemy at the very beginning of their city’s history, “when Greece was still insignificant.”27
World History
