A few examples concerning intermarriage will make this identification clear. According to Herodotos (4.110-17) the Amazons and Scythians were the ancestors of the Sauromatians. The Amazons wore revealing dresses, rode astride, and lived mostly outdoors. According to the foundation myth of the Sarmatians, after the Amazons had killed some Greek men, they met the Scythians. The Amazons initiated proposals of dating and marriage. Their bridegrooms needed to get their parents’ permission and to provide dowries for the marriages. This reversal of roles was not only bizarre, but threatening to Greek views of the appropriate behavior of women and men. Greeks told myths about heroes such as Herakles, Theseus, and Achilles who conquered Amazons, and the subject became common in Athenian visual arts. The Amazons were always vanquished, but not completely assimilated. Though the Amazons learned to speak their husbands’ language, they spoke it imperfectly, and thus created a new dialect. Furthermore no Sauromatian woman could marry until she killed a male enemy (Hdt. 4.117). Thus the union of Amazons and Scythians produced a new mixed society to which both contributed: the Sarmatians.
Gender separatism was also part of the ethnic identity of Kyrene where Greek men had married indigenous women. The women of Kyrene did not eat meat, and maintained a different diet from their husbands’ through subsequent generations (Hdt. 4.186, 3.99). When the Athenians founded Miletos, they killed the Karian men and married the women (Hdt. 1.146; also Pausanias 7.2.6). In revenge for the massacre, the women took an oath to preserve a tradition which they handed down through the female line. They swore that they would never dine with their husbands and never call them by name. Thus, the women’s continual resistance produced a hybrid society, rather than a thoroughly integrated and Hellenized colony. Another tale of women’s resistance involves men and women originally from the same region, but from two different ethnic groups. Pelasgian men exiled in Lemnos captured Attic women and brought them to Lemnos to serve as their concubines (Hdt. 6.138). The women bore children and were bringing them up in the Athenian way. In order to prevent the infusion of Attic customs into their society, the Lemnians killed both mothers and children. Despite the opinion found in some medical treatises and elsewhere in classical literature that the father is the true parent and the mother only the receptacle of his seed, the activities of the Greeks in these stories of
Figure 17.1 ‘‘Achilles kills Penthesileia.’’ Black figure amphora (wine-jar) signed by Exekias as potter and attributed to him as painter. Greek. c. 540-530 bce. © The Trustees of The British Museum, London.
Herodotos demonstrate that intermarriage and producing children was indeed a partnership to which male and female invariably contributed. Herodotos also reports that sometimes women alone were responsible for the establishment of their native cults in foreign lands. For example, women from Egypt founded oracles in Dodona and Libya, and the Danaides imported the Thesmophoria (Hdt. 2.54, 171).
Scholars debate whether intermarriage was the usual practice, or whether Greek women were regularly included from the start of any colonizing venture. Greek sources often ignore women, and certainly some priestesses had to participate in the original settlements, since the cults of goddesses required their ministration (Graham 1980-1). My view still is that the intermarriage of the archaic period as reported by Herodotos was the regular pattern in colonization, and that it continued in the Hellenistic period (Pomeroy 1975: 34-5). Few Greek women traveled to the frontiers in the original foundations, and not very many in subsequent generations. This conclusion is based on the following evidence: Herodotos reports that one adult man was selected by lot from every set of brothers in Thera and sent to colonize Kyrene (4.150-9). He does not mention Theran women, and later discusses the marriages of the settlers with native women. Archaic colonists included Archilochos who evidently was a young unmarried man, an illegitimate soldier of fortune. One of the motivations for Perikles’ citizenship law in 451/0 was that Athenian cleruchs living in Delian League cities were marrying local women, causing the marriage market for Athenian girls to shrink (Pomeroy 1975: 78). Demosthenes’ opponents alleged that his mother Kleoboule was the daughter of an exiled Athenian and a Scythian (Aischines 2.78; 3.172; Deinarchos 1.15, etc.). Hellenistic colonists included veterans of Alexander’s campaigns who settled down with native women. The Delphinion inscriptions recording grants of citizenship to mercenaries in Hellenistic Miletos show that the immigrants had raised few daughters. The skewed sex ratio generally found among the Greeks as a result of female infanticide and neglect of girls created a surplus of Greek men available to settle in colonies and a dearth of young women to send out as brides (Golden 1981). Intermarriage was the obvious solution for many men.
World History
