The Greeks were seafaring people and took sea voyages for granted, so perhaps it was natural that ancient mythographers would imagine that Amazons might sail. Many incomplete literary accounts contain only oblique references to Amazons at sea, leaving the details to our imagination. Indirect evidence of mythic voyages comes from several Aegean islands that have Amazonian associations. For example, the main town of the Aegean island of Lesbos (known to the Hittites as Lazpa) is Mytilene, an Amazon name. According to a fanciful romance (by Dionysius Leather-Arm; chapter 23), the Amazon queen Myrine conquered several Anatolian cities and Aegean islands, and she named the city of Mytilene on Lesbos after her sister. During this campaign, Myrine was caught up in a storm at Lesbos and carried northward to a desert island where she set up altars to Cybele (see below).3
Cybele was also worshipped on the island of Lemnos. Both Lesbos and Lemnos were said to be allies of King Priam in the legendary Trojan War. Both islands have archaeological ruins linking them to ancient Troy. Lemnos was later settled by raiders or pirates from Thrace, a land often linked with Amazons. In Greek myth, Lemnos was an island of women who had murdered their husbands for taking up with slaves from Thrace. The Lemnian women were not Amazons, but they share some features with the mythic warrior women. They lived on their own, led by Queen Hypsipyle (a similar Amazon name appears on some Greek vases, and her mother was called Myrine). When Jason and the Argonauts landed on Lemnos, the women took up weapons to defend themselves. But Hypsipyle suggested that instead of fighting they should make love (and babies) with the handsome Greek seamen.4
Another Aegean island, Patmos (inhabited since the Bronze Age), was sacred to Artemis, the other goddess associated with Amazons. The southern promontory of Patmos was known as Amazoneum (“Amazon shrine”; see Chapter 17 For other Amazon shrines in Greece). The reason is unknown. But an intriguing inscription (second century AD) discovered on Patmos calls the goddess “Artemis of Scythia" This goddess was also called Artemis Tauropolos (Artemis of Tauris, the Crimea). Herodotus mentioned her in the mid-fifth century BC, reporting that a savage Scythian tribe of the northern Black Sea, the Tauri of Crimea, lived by war and plunder. They sacrificed shipwrecked sailors to this virgin goddess, identified as “Iphigenia.” Iphigenia was known to the Greeks as the daughter of Agamemnon in the Trojan War cycle of myths. The Greek playwright Euripides drew on Herodotus’s account in his tragedy Iphigenia in Tauris (425-412 BC), casting Iphigenia as the priestess of Artemis who sacrificed shipwrecked sailors.
In his play, Iphigenia and her brother Orestes stole the ancient wooden statue of Artemis of Scythia from the Tauri tribe and set it up in Brauron, Greece (where young Greek girls gave up their “Amazonian” souls to Artemis; see the prologue). But the Patmos inscription appears to refer to a different, local version of the myth, in which the Tauri’s wooden statue of Artemis was on Patmos. The inscription tells of a priestess named Vera, born near Ephesus, a place sacred to Amazons. Vera is said to have sailed from Ephesus to Patmos during a storm to care for the statue of Artemis of Scythia on the island. These threads— the worship of “Artemis of Scythia” in Brauron and by the Tauri tribe of Scythia, combined with the tale of a priestess of Artemis at Ephesus sailing to Patmos, and the mysterious Amazon shrine on the island’s sea cliff—are tantalizing hints that a lost story may once have connected Artemis, seagoing Amazons, and Scythia.5
Patmos is not far from the large island of Samos, separated by a narrow channel from Ephesus on the Turkish mainland. Samos was the site of a mythic battle between the Amazons and the god Dionysus.
World History
