The Athenian myth of the War with the Amazons appears to flow from an elaborate “what if” scenario (set out in chapter 1), imagining the Amazons as the vanguard of an invading Scythian confederation. Scythian armies really did once sweep across parts of Eurasia, including Thrace and Anatolia, but there is no evidence that Scythians ever really threatened or invaded mainland Greece. A fear of barbarian (Scythian) invaders in the past combined with historical Greek skirmishes with Thracians and nationalistic pride in Athens’s recent triumph over the Persian invaders contributed to the mythic scenario of the Battle for Athens. The myth imagined how, at the height of their power, bent on revenge and conquest, the seemingly invincible Amazon army penetrated the very heart of Athenian territory in the golden era of heroes and heroines. Here in an epic battle the future of Greece would be decided.13
In about 900 BC, Athens had emerged as a unified center of settlements on the Attic peninsula and was periodically threatened by outside invaders, giving rise to the mixture of history and myth describing Theseus as Athens’s founder and later as the victor over the Amazons. Most other Hellenic mythology about Amazons—for example, the tales of Hippolyte and Heracles and Penthesilea at Troy—was preserved in archaic oral lore and depicted in early vase paintings. But this uniquely Athenian story seems to have arisen in the classical era of the fifth century BC as self-conscious mythmaking on the part of the Athenians.
The great war with the Amazons in Athens is one of a series of tales describing Theseus’s accomplishments, many of which parallel and borrow from the earlier accounts of the feats of Heracles. Plutarch rejected as “fable” an older epic called The Rise of the Amazons (sixth century BC), in which it was Heracles, not Theseus, who killed the Amazon invaders of Athens. Besides this lost epic, were there other earlier tales of Amazons in Attica that no longer survive.? The earliest surviving literary description of the Battle for Athens occurs in a play by Aeschylus, 458 BC. Archaeological evidence of Athens’s prehistory, such as massive walls on the Acropolis and rich Mycenaean tombs of 1300-1200 BC, provides hints of how the mythological Amazon invasion was elaborated and linked to antiquities in the fifth century BC. For example, a burial ground from Protogeometric times (1050-900 BC) lay along the road toward what would later become Piraeus, Athens’s port. As noted above, this cemetery was believed to hold the graves of heroic Athenians killed by the Amazons.14
World History
