Those historical women warriors’ adventures would make enthralling reading. Their battle with foreign invaders from the West, followed by captivity at sea bound for a faraway city, calls to mind Heracles’s mythic battle with the Amazons of Pontus and Theseus’s abduction of An-tiope. Taken prisoner in 66 BC, these warrior women of the southern Caucasus were placed on ships laden with plunder sailing to Rome. They would have been under guard or incarcerated until Pompey’s triumph, which did not take place until 61 BC. What were their lives like in those years.? Did they languish in chains in a dungeon.? Were they exotic involuntary “guests” in some villa.? Pompey would have ordered that his captive enemy combatants be well treated in order to be impressive in his triumph. What were the women’s thoughts as they were led before the Roman populace in the grand spectacle of victory over the barbarians of the East?
And what was the fate of these Amazons in Rome.? It was a Roman custom to strangle enemy combatants at the end of the triumphal parade. Executing the women warriors would conform to the ancient Greek mythic pattern calling for dead Amazons. But Pompey, demonstrating mercy, did not follow the traditional script of Greek myth or of Roman triumphs. Instead, he “sent all his prisoners back to their homelands at public expense, except for the enemy kings.”18 It seems that these warrior women were treated to a second long sea voyage back to the shores of the Black Sea, where they presumably rejoined their people and resumed their lives, equipped with amazing tales to tell.
Captive Amazons soon became a popular motif on Roman sarcophagi. Two beautiful examples are displayed in the British Museum and the Capitoline Museum. The sides of the marble coffins are decorated with Amazonomachy scenes, and the lids depict rows of dejected, bound Amazons sitting by their weapons and shields. Romans battling Amazons are also depicted on the Mausoleum of the Julii, ca. 30 BC. The magnificent marble sarcophagus of a Roman commander, ca. AD 140, shows Roman soldiers fighting Amazons, with kneeling Amazon prisoners of war at each corner. “No Roman. . . ever fought Amazons,” claims a distinguished historian of ancient art, “but Amazon sarcophagi were commonly placed in Roman tombs.” Scholars assume that all of
FiG. 2I. I. Captive Amazons, sarcophagus. Photo by Adrienne Mayor.
These images were purely allegorical for the Romans, symbolizing their conquests of barbarians—just as “all Greeks knew that those depictions of the battle of Greeks and Amazons were an allusion to the clash between Greeks and Persians.” Such scenes may well have held symbolic meanings, but they were also grounded in ancient Greek knowledge of Scythia and some Roman soldiers’ experiences with occasional female fighters on military campaigns. Pompey and his men and other Roman soldiers discovered firsthand that women fighters existed among the Scythians, Bracari, Thracians, Gauls (Celts), Britons, and other peoples. The reality of barbarian “Amazons” like those displayed by Pompey in Rome, the powerful Queen Boudicca of the British Isles, and the pirate queen Teuta would have given a frisson of immediacy to the artistic depictions of Roman battles with Amazons.19
World History
