Was a sensational celebrity in the time of Alexander. the Great for exposing her breasts in public. In myth, the irresistible Helen of Troy saved her life by suddenly flashing her breasts to distract her murderous husband. In antiquity, Roman tourists visited the temple of Rhodes to gaze at a silver and gold chalice said to have been molded from one of Helen’s perfect breasts. That cup is lost and forgotten, and Phryne’s fame has long since faded from memory.1
The most notorious breasts in all classical antiquity, still raising eyebrows today, are those of Amazons. The warlike women were said to remove one (usually the right) breast in order to draw a bow and hurl javelins. The idea was so startling and graphic that it has a kept a powerful grip on the popular imagination for more than two thousand years. It is the one thing everybody “knows” about Amazons.
Unlike Helen and Phryne, Amazons were barbarians, outside the classical Greek ideal of womanhood.2 Theirs was an aggressive, fierce beauty. Perhaps it is no surprise that an ancient Greek claim—a libel, really—arose about Amazons’ breasts. Where did this physiologically illogical notion come from.? Anyone familiar with archery and spear throwing, as the Greeks certainly were (after all, their own goddess of the hunt, Artemis, was a double-breasted archer), would know better. A stationary archer normally draws the string of a bow back against the cheek, level with the bottom of the nose or side of the mouth, with the body turned to the side. When throwing a javelin, the arm is raised and the action of hurling it occurs nowhere near the chest. Different bow sizes and shapes involved modifications of stance and position.
Most Greek vase paintings and Scythian artifacts show the more compact recurve bows that were used by steppe nomads. These archers hold their smaller bows out in front of the body, and the shorter draw brings the bowstring to just in front of the chest, posing even less threat to breasts (see figs. 12.3, 13.1, 13.7, 16.1). Scythian and Amazon mounted archers in art were depicted holding the bow away from the chest as they twist this way and that. Modern-day archers who shoot replica Scythian bows hold them out from the chest too. Archery on horseback requires an instinctive technique called a “floating anchor,” which means that the archer does not draw the string to a fixed position on the body or face and the string never touches the body. To avoid hitting the upper arm with the bowstring as one shoots ambidextrously, skilled archers learn to relax rather than lock the elbow (chapter 13, Plates 4 and 5). The point is that female archers and javelin throwers are not ordinarily inhibited by their breasts.
World History
