According to ancient Greek writers, traces of the Amazons’ warpath and their occupation of Athens—such as the hill where the women were said to have encamped and the graves of the war dead on both sides—were treated with respect and pride by Athenians and other Greeks. On the day before the Theseia (the Athenian festival of Theseus formally established in 475 BC), the Athenians made sacrifices to honor the bravery of the Amazons. This Amazon cult also served to stir the patriotic emotions surrounding the Athenian success against such imposing foes.
Athenian orators boasted about the magnificent defeat of the Amazons in speeches to allies and citizen assemblies. Isocrates praised the victory as a coup for the forces of civilization. In a passage demonstrating that he and his audience considered the Amazons to be allies of the Scythians, distinct from contemporary Persians, Isocrates singled out the “three most aggressive races with hostile designs on Athens”: the Persians, the Thracians, and “the Scythians led by the Amazons.” Isocrates declared that Athenians had won decisive wars against all three of these enemies. In the past, the Amazons “thought they would gain mastery over all Greece by taking our city. They did not succeed. . . they were destroyed. . . just as if they had waged war against all mankind.”
The orator Lysias repeatedly referred to Athens’s victory in his speeches; he declared that the Amazons “ruled many lands and enslaved their neighbors” and then marched against Athens seeking glory. Instead, “They perished and made the memory of our city imperishable because of our bravery. Because of their disaster here, the Amazons rendered their own country nameless.” But, of course, because they dared to challenge not only Athens and but also the Greeks at Troy, the “glory of the Amazons” (Pausanias’s words, more than five hundred years later) was never forgotten.28
When Pausanias visited Megara, west of Athens, in the second century AD, his guides showed him the Amazon cemetery on the road to Rhous (north of Megara, where a stream came down from the mountains). The Megarians told Pausanias that most of the Amazons had died fighting in Athens, but their leader (Orithyia, but here called Hip-polyte), Antiope’s sister, escaped with a few others to Rhous. In despair about the failure of their expedition and hopeless about ever returning home safely to Themiscyra, she died of grief and was buried by her companions. Pausanias noted that her memorial was shaped like a crescent Amazon shield. Pausanias also visited a shrine of Ares at Kelende-ris, near Troezen, Theseus’s birthplace and yet another region where it was said that Amazons had died after their defeat in Athens. To the north, in central Thessaly, graves of Amazons who had perished on the retreat were still pointed out in Plutarch’s day near Scotussa and the Dogs’ Head Hills (Cynoscephalae, near modern Volos); these places marked their advance and retreat across Thrace.29
More Amazon graves were shown in Boeotia at Chaeronea, Plutarch’s hometown, along the banks of a little stream. In antiquity, the stream may have been nicknamed Thermodon (like the river in the Amazonian homeland), but Plutarch knew it as Haemon (“Bloody”). This was the site of a catastrophic event in Greek history, when Philip of Mace-don defeated the Greeks at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC. Before that battle, the Greek army had encamped along this stream. Some soldiers digging a trench around their tent happened to unearth a small stone carving of a figure carrying a wounded Amazon. This incident was reported by the Macedonian War historian Duris (fourth century BC, now lost). Plutarch, who may have viewed the little carved figure in Chaeronea, stated that it was inscribed with the word “Thermodon.” He took the inscription to mean that the figure holding the dying Amazon was the god or personification of the Thermodon River in the Amazons’ homeland.30
What is the meaning of this curious discovery? While it might be poignant to picture an Amazon placing this object in the grave of her fallen comrade on the retreat after their defeat, that is impossible: the War with the Amazons was a myth created by Greeks, the inscription was in Greek, and “Thermodon” was the Greeks’ name for the river in Pontus, not the native name. The facts—a small stone carving of a wounded Amazon excavated in the vicinity of archaic tombs identified as those of Amazons—bring to mind the cult of wounded Amazons at Chalcis, above. In antiquity, extremely ancient Mycenaean tombs were commonly revered as those of heroes, heroines, and other figures from mythology. A similar process might account for graves recognized as extremely old and identified as those of Amazons in Athens, Thessaly, Troezen, Megara, and Chalcis, as well as the grave mounds in Anatolia associated with Amazons since Homeric times. The little stone figure of a wounded Amazon in the bosom of the River Thermodon was most likely an ancient Greek dedication or offering to a Boeotian Amazo-neum at Chaeronea, similar to the Amazon heroine cults in Athens and Chalcis.
The most unexpected Amazon memorials described by Pausanias were sanctuaries at Pyrrhichos, Laconia, in the southern tip of Greece. There he viewed two very old xoana, crudely shaped wooden statues. These idols were called “Peaceful” Artemis and “Amazonian” Apollo. The ancient statues were said to have been dedicated by the “women from the Thermodon”—by the Amazons themselves—to mark the point where they had finally halted their invasion of Greece. Notably, Pyrrhichos means “rustic war dance.” The Amazons were said to have danced the pyrrhic war dance around a bretas (small wooden idol) of Artemis at Ephesus (chapter 9).
Pausanias’s account is mysterious on many levels. No other sources speak of an Amazon army penetrating this far south in Greece. This is the only ancient reference to “Apollo Amazonius” and “Peaceful Artemis.” Moreover, Apollo was rarely worshipped in Greece in tandem with his twin sister Artemis, the Amazonian huntress goddess. Some scholars speculate that this idol was not the Olympian Apollo, but some non-Greek, Asiatic god, worshipped by the very early people of southern Greece, long before Greek colonization. Wooden statues indicate that this cult was indeed extremely ancient. Very few rustic xoana have survived, except as copies in stone, although a wooden xoanon of Artemis was discovered at Brauron.31 Pausanias does not say how the idols were identified—did local people tell him the names and the old story behind them.? Is it possible that they were inscribed, like the small stone carving of a wounded Amazon in the arms of “Thermodon” found at Chaeronea?
The quarrel between the Amazons and the Scythians, mentioned above, was not a complete breakdown in their military alliance. “Despite the dispute,” Justin reported, the retreating Amazons “found shelter in the encampment of their allies. With the help of the Scythians they returned to their land without being attacked by other tribes.” Diodorus agreed that the Scythians gave the ragtag Amazon survivors refuge after their defeat. The Amazon veterans had given up their “ancestral soil” in Pontus, explains Diodorus, because it had been overrun by neighboring tribes. Instead, the Amazons “returned with the Scythians into Scythia and made their homes among those people.”32
But there were a few renegades. Small, scattered groups of wandering Amazons kept to their warlike ways, seeking adventure and glory. One such band was led by a legendary warrior queen whose name would strike terror into the hearts of the Greeks besieging Troy: Penthe-silea, “She Who Brings Grief.”
World History
