In the second century AD, the Greek traveler Pausanias recounted yet another story, narrated in a lost poem by Hegias of Troezen. During the Greek war on Pontus, Antiope betrayed her homeland because she fell in love with Theseus. The tale apparently evolved from a version of the myth favored (and perhaps created by) patriotic Athenians in the fourth century BC. It first appears in a speech by the orator Isocrates in 380 BC, praising Athenian and Panhellenic war victories. Alluding to a story already familiar to his audience, Isocrates portrayed Antiope as a kind of stalker. Antiope “became enamored of Theseus and broke the Amazons’ laws [against marriage] by following him home to Athens and living with him as his consort.” By the time of Pausanias, some four hundred years later, this Athenian story had developed into more of a romance. As Pausanias tells it, Theseus was welcomed as an honored guest in the land of the Amazons. During his long sojourn along the
FiG. 16.3. Antiope in corselet and patterned sleeves and leggings, with two spears and white horse. Red-figure oinochoe (pitcher), Attic Greek, Mannheim Painter, ca. 440 BC. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1906, 06.1021.189, image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY.
Banks of the Thermodon River, Theseus hunted and took part in other pleasurable sports with the warrior women, who treated him as their equal. Antiope fell in love with the handsome hero. With devotion so deep that it eclipsed her love for her sister warriors, she agreed to elope with Theseus back to Athens. In this version, Antiope willingly forfeited her independence by agreeing to become Theseus’s bride.7
Modern interest in the myth of Antiope burst into popular consciousness in the 1920s. The ancient Athenian account of Antiope’s rejection of the Amazons’ “unnatural” autonomy was echoed in a racy comedy that became a hit on Broadway in 1932. Written in 1924, in the era of women’s rising confidence and independence, The Warrior’s Husband satirized male and female role reversal. The play is set in 800 BC in Pontus, during Heracles and Theseus’s quest for Hippolyte’s girdle. The Amazons, who dominate their sissy husbands with iron-fisted authority, are thrown into confusion by the sudden appearance of dashing, muscle-bound Greek men on their shores. The starring role of Antiope was played by the young, athletic Katharine Hepburn. The American audience went wild at Hepburn’s entrance on stage. Dressed in a metallic tunic, a silver helmet, and leather greaves, she leaped down a flight of stairs with a dead stag on her shoulders. Antiope at first resists Theseus’s
FiG. 16.4. Katharine Hepburn, aged twenty-four, as Antiope in The Warrior’s Husband, publicity photo for the Broadway play of 1932.
Advances, passionately declaring her independence. The role of the surefooted, sexy “boy-woman” had a “tremendous influence on my career and so-called personality,” Hepburn recalled in her memoir. In the 1930s and ’40s, the actress cut a dashing figure in her signature trousers, at once shocking and fabulous, which also fueled her Amazonian image.8
Just as in ancient Athens, the idea of liberated women was both exhilarating and disturbing for modern audiences. By the 1920s in Europe and America, the word amazon, like virago (which originally meant “heroic female warrior”) and even “battle-axe,” was used to label selfsufficient, strong women as bad-tempered and domineering. The last act of the Broadway play resorted to saccharine romantic love to sweeten the same sour aftertaste as that left by the official Athenian message delivered by Isocrates and Pausanias more than two thousand years before: the roles of warrior and proper wife are mutually exclusive. Antiope-Hepburn falls in love, and Theseus, her “love conquest,” becomes the former warrior’s dominant husband. In the American play, the Amazons finally realize the “value” of masculine leadership and concede control to the “real” men.
In every version of the story of Antiope, the Amazon ends up as the wife of Theseus, king of Athens. But there is no happily ever after. The killing of Queen Hippolyte by Heracles outrages the Amazons, and An-tiope’s downfall is the Amazons’ worst nightmare. She is no longer a headstrong warrior huntress, whether she was kidnapped, captured, or went of her own free will. Confined to the shuttered existence of other Greek wives, never to ride, hunt, and shoot with her companions, An-tiope in her wedded life stands in stark contrast to the notorious sexual independence of Amazons. Antiope’s domestication is the opposite of the alliances with Scythian men freely chosen by the other Amazon captives, who escaped from the clutches of Heracles and Theseus.
Some strands of the ancient Antiope myth revolve around intrigues in Athens’s royal household. In these twisted domestic plots, Theseus and Antiope have a son and name him Hippolytus (the masculine version of Hippolyte), but Theseus then abandons Antiope to marry his new paramour, Phaedra. Enraged, Antiope swears to kill everyone at Phaedra’s wedding. An oracle had once warned Theseus that he would be compelled to slay his Amazon bride to avert disaster—and that awful prophecy is fulfilled, in this bleak version of Antiope’s fate. Compounding the
FiG. 16.5. Fantasy scene of Antiope, Theseus, and their son, Hippolytus. Impression of neoclassical eighteenth-century cornelian gem, Catalogue des pierres gravees antiques de S. A. le Prince Poniatowski, 1830-33. Photo by Claudia Wagner, Classical Art Research Centre and Beazley Archive, Oxford.
Tragedy, Hippolytus, who has vowed to remain a virgin, is killed for rejecting the advances of his stepmother, Phaedra.9
In the illustrious myth of Athens’s monumental War with the Amazons, however, a different, even more complex destiny lay in store for Antiope. In the great Battle for Athens, would Antiope remain loyal to Theseus and to her adopted homeland.? Will she set aside women’s work and take up weapons again to defend her loved ones and city from a terrible enemy.? But her city is now Athens and her own people, the Amazons, are the enemy. Historical women warriors faced this same dilemma. One example, noted earlier, was Cynna, the Illyrian-Macedonian princess who killed the Illyrian warrior queen Caeria (Chapters 4 And 20; and see Chapter 25 For examples in China). The Greeks (and Romans) could approve of wives and mothers fiercely defending family and home in desperate straits, even though it was thought to go against women’s true “nature.”10 It would be thrilling to see the “tamed” Amazon suddenly recover her long-suppressed warrior soul, even though such a turn of events evoked ambivalence for the Greeks.
Antiope’s dilemma created many levels of suspense for the Greek men and women who listened to storytellers narrate the sequel to the myth of Antiope’s abduction—the War with the Amazons. This great Amazonomachy would test the power of the young city-state and challenge the conflicting loyalties of the former Amazon Antiope. Could Antiope’s martial skills help Athens win the war.? Would the city survive the onslaught of an army of bloodthirsty warrior women.? And what would happen to Antiope.?
Meanwhile, back in Amazon territory, crucial decisions were being made. Provoked by the aggression of Heracles and Theseus, the Amazons vow revenge. Queen Orithyia gathers a great army and forges an alliance with the Scythian nomads of the steppes. Her mission is threefold: to avenge the death of Queen Hippolyte, to recover the Belt of Ares, and to rescue Antiope from Athens.
World History
