In his biography of Theseus, the historian Plutarch (first century AD) discussed conflicting stories about Antiope, told by more than a half dozen classical Greek authors whose works have not survived. Some said that Theseus was with Heracles in the battle for Hippolyte’s belt, and that Theseus carried Antiope away as his prize for valor. But Plutarch, whose stated goal was to tease out scraps of what he deemed “credible history” embedded in the old legends about Theseus, thought other versions were more convincing, that Theseus must have commanded his own expedition to the Amazon heartland on the Thermo-don River.1
In Plutarch’s telling, Theseus’s quest began peacefully, just like the myth of Heracles and Hippolyte. The Amazons, “who were well disposed toward men,” send a welcoming party to meet the strangers on their shore. In the version by a historian named Bion, Antiope is the leader of the Amazons and she presents gifts to Theseus. He slyly invites her onto his ship. Antiope willingly comes on board. Is she attracted to the handsome stranger.? Or is she naive, off guard.? Suddenly Theseus raises anchor and sails off, to the outrage of the rest of the Amazons onshore. Abduction and rape would be in character for Theseus, who was a serial sexual predator. Indeed, Plutarch recounts several “dishonorable and indecent” episodes in Theseus’s life. In various myths, Theseus ravished and abandoned other women, including underage maidens. Long before Theseus abducted the Amazon Antiope, for example, he had abducted Helen of Troy when she was just a girl of ten.2
Plutarch clearly disapproved of such acts. But, writing about four hundred years before Plutarch, Herodotus had expressed a different view. He listed a series of abductions of foreign women by, for example, the Phoenicians, Greeks, and Trojans. “In my opinion,” remarked Herodotus, “abducting young women is wrong, but it is stupid to make a fuss about it after the event. It is obvious that no young woman allows herself to be abducted if she does not wish to be.” Was Herodotus perhaps thinking of marriage customs among nomadic raiding cultures, in which “abductions” of women were the norm, but usually agreed upon by the interested parties in advance? At any rate, these differing views expressed by Herodotus and Plutarch might help account for the conflicting versions in art and literature about the nature of Theseus and Antiope’s relationship.3
For the Greeks, the Amazons’ unyielding aversion to traditional patriarchal marriage was one of their defining attributes, a corollary of their parity with men. The Antiope stories could be seen as variations on the theme “What if a Greek were to marry an Amazon.?” Just as scores of tales entertained different angles on the nature of the very brief encounter of Hippolyte and Heracles (Chapter 15), so too the unique coupling of a Greek hero and an Amazon spun off many threads in literature and art. The profusion of alternative tales about Antiope reveals the Greeks’ fascination with Antiope’s plight and the choices she faced. Moreover, the existence of multiple story lines is a hallmark of heroic stature. Competing narratives about Antiope, Hippolyte, Pen-thesilea, and the Amazons are strong evidence that interest in these heroines was on par with that in Heracles, Theseus, Achilles, Odysseus, and other male heroes whose mythic adventures spawned so many different stories.
Ancient sculptors and painters preferred violent scenes depicting Antiope’s defeat and capture by Theseus. The Athenian Treasury at Delphi, built in 510-490 BC and decorated with Theseus’s exploits, shows the hero overcoming Antiope. Another marble statue of Theseus seizing Antiope graced the Temple of Apollo in Eretria, Greece (500 BC). A dramatic scene on the lid of a fine Etruscan bronze urn (480 BC) shows four mounted Amazon archers surrounding a bearded man forcefully carrying off a woman—perhaps the couple represents Theseus and Antiope (Fig. 16.1). Like all heroic figures in archaic sculptures, Antiope and Theseus wear calm, austere smiles at odds with the traumatic situation, and early vase paintings also feature emotionless facial expressions. But at least two fine red-figure vases (490 BC) clearly portray a violent abduction, with Theseus roughly carrying a struggling, desperate Antiope off to his ship (Fig. 16.2).4
World History
