What motivated Penthesilea to fight for Troy? Amazons were certainly enemies of the Greeks. But were the Amazons friends of the Trojans? It is commonly asserted that Amazons and Trojans were old enemies in the past, but for some unknown reason the Amazons changed their minds and became Troy’s allies in the Trojan War.8
But a close reading of the relevant passage in the Iliad suggests— contrary to most ancient and modern scholars’ assumptions—that the Amazons and Trojans might have been allies well before the Trojan War. Many ancient and modern readers have wondered why the Amazons came to the aid of Troy when they had supposedly clashed with Trojans two generations earlier. But this seeming inconsistency arises because of an unexamined assumption about the meaning of a famous episode in book 3 of the Iliad, the conversation between Helen and Priam on the walls of Troy (the “teichoscopy” scene). Old King Priam marvels at the magnitude of King Agamemnon’s army of Greeks and allies massed on the Trojan plain, the largest army he’s ever seen. Priam reminisces about the biggest army he had ever beheld before this day, when he was just a boy. It was when the Trojans and Phrygians and their allies, led by kings Otreus and Mygdon, had gathered at the Sangarius River. Priam remembers, “I was a young helper in the camp on the day when the Amazons came.”9
Since antiquity, this statement has been interpreted to mean that a vast army of Trojans and Phrygians fought against an equally huge host of Amazons. Yet modern commentators agree that it is odd for Priam to bring up the Amazons here when the wording makes it clear that he is not comparing the size of the Greek force outside his walls to the size of the Amazon force he saw as a boy. As one scholar remarks, this “illogical passage” threatens the coherence of the narrative—everything “would become clearer if line 189 were missing.” The solution has been to force the “awkward” inconsistency in the text to mean that Priam once took part in a battle against Amazons but now calls on Amazons for aid.10
But Priam’s words could be taken in another way, one that makes good narrative sense without raising contradictions. The Greek wording of Homer’s text simply reads “on that day when the Amazons came.” The scene Priam recalls from his youth was the arrival of friendly Amazons, “the peers of men,” who were allied with the Trojans and Phrygians against an unnamed enemy in the past. Such an alliance would have been natural: the Phrygians had Thracian origins and the Amazons were associated with Thrace; Priam himself summons both Thracians and Amazons to help defend Troy against the Greeks. The poetic context of Priam’s boyhood memory is his admiration for leaders who command great allied armies of many diverse lands. His point is unambiguous: he is comparing the massed army of many nations at the San-garius in his boyhood to his own massed multinational army at Troy.
Priam’s memory of that long-ago day also serves to foreshadow the day when his own Amazon allies will come, the Thracian-born Penthe-silea and her band of women warriors. The arrival of Priam’s Amazon friends is also prefigured at the outbreak of the Trojan War in the Iliad, when Priam assembles his own great army of allies from many different lands around the grave mound of the Amazon queen Myrine. With these logical and literary considerations in mind, Priam’s reminis-cence—“I was there on the day when the Amazons came”—now can be seen in a new light, harking back to another time in the past when Amazons had been allies of the Trojans.11
On the day that Penthesilea and her cadre of mercenary Amazons arrived, Priam presented her with costly gifts and promised more rewards. So there is no doubt that Penthesilea—like her Greek counterpart Achilles—came to Troy seeking renown and recompense.12
But there was another reason. Penthesilea had accidentally killed a relative, and she came to Troy to be purified of blood-guilt by serving Priam. The mythic detail strongly suggests a long-standing friendship between Amazons and Trojans. In this narrative arc, Penthesilea resembles many mythic Greek heroes who fled into exile from their homelands and served various trusted kings, seeking to sacrifice themselves honorably in battle or to carry out dangerous quests to appease the gods. The hero Bellerophon, for example, fled after killing his brother to do the bidding of King Proteus. The Twelve Labors imposed by King Eurystheus were penance for Heracles’s murder of his own sons. Achilles would later seek purification for killing one of his fellow Greeks.13
Hunting one day with her sister Hippolyte, Penthesilea had hurled her javelin at a stag and killed Hippolyte instead. To escape her despair and the reproach of the other Amazons, she came to Priam to be absolved, vowing to kill Achilles and bring victory to Troy or die trying. Penthesilea’s name combines the Greek words for “grief, misery, suffering, mourning” with “the people or army.” But the exact meaning is ambiguous: grief for whom.? Various mythic details add layers of significance. Penthesilea’s name could allude to her own grief and that of her people. In the myth, Penthesilea and Achilles are presented as a matched pair of handsome, merciless young war heroes. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Achilles’s name also carries an ambiguous connotation of “pain, grief, suffering.” And like Penthesilea, Achilles also experienced personal grief and caused great mourning.14
World History
