N Greek myth, Heracees and other heroes set out on an expedition to win the war belt of the Ama-. zon queen Hippolyte. After their victory the Greek ships sailed away loaded with many captive Amazons (including An-tiope, destined to become Theseus’s wife in Athens). What became of the other Amazon prisoners on the ships? The myth does not tell.
But Herodotus does. Long ago, he relates, a Greek expedition force defeated Amazons at the Thermodon River in Pontus. The Greeks captured as many of the women as they could and sailed off in three ships. The captive Amazons knew they were bound for a life of enslavement and humiliation. Their battle-axes, spears, bows, and arrows, taken as booty, were stowed in the holds of the vessels bearing them away from their ravaged homeland. As the Greek sailors steered toward sunset on the Black Sea, making for the Hellespont and the Aegean, the Amazons secretly got possession of their weapons. Suddenly, the women rose up and lunged at the men. They murdered every Greek and took over the ships.1
But now what? Amazons were horsewomen, not sailors. At sea, on their own “with no knowledge of boats and unable to handle rudder, sails, or oars, the women were at the mercy of wind and wave.” The ships were blown more than five hundred miles north to Kremnoi—the “Cliffs”—a small trading settlement in Maeotia on the Sea of Azov. Since the prevailing winds on the Black Sea in winter are northeasterly, we know it would have been summer when the winds blow from the
Southeast (from Pontus it would take about four days to sail there). The Amazons landed in part of the territory of the Royal Scythians.2
The Amazons managed to get ashore with their weapons. They set off on foot, traveling inland. Before long, they came upon a herd of horses grazing. These were apparently semiwild and domesticated horses, left to pasture on their own and rounded up as needed by the local Scythians. Some of the horses had been trained to respond to a rider’s knee and heel pressure. We can imagine the experienced horsewomen of Pontus cautiously approaching the horses, the patient process of gentling them, and the happy result. The Amazons “seized these mounts and rode off in search of loot.”3
Now the stranded Amazons had fully recovered their accustomed mode of transport—and their freedom. They began pillaging the new territory, resuming their familiar way of life.
The marauding gang on horseback soon caught the attention of the Scythians. The intruders’ clothing and speech were not local. Defending their property from what they assumed were boys too young to have beards, the Scythians charged out and killed a few of the raiders. When they retrieved the bodies, however, they realized that the strangers were young women warriors, Oiorpata (“man-killers,” the Scythian word for Amazons; chapter 14). This startling discovery led the Scythians to change their plans. The elders decided to send out a detachment of young men, as many as they estimated were in the Amazon party. How many.? Herodotus does not say, so we must guess how many prisoners could have been aboard the Greek ships. Perhaps two dozen, fifty.?
The Scythians’ orders were not to kill the Amazons but to try to approach them, make friends, and convince them to join the Scythian clan. The young men were to take their cue from the Amazons’ actions. If the Amazons pursued them, the men would retreat without a fight. When the Amazons stopped chasing them and set up camp, the men would encamp nearby.
The motive was a desire to have children with these robust, capable women warriors and thereby improve their own stock. The lifestyle of the Royal Scythians around the Black Sea coast had become more settled and their women were soft and weak—they no longer rode out to hunt and fight on their own or with the menfolk, as in the olden days on the steppes.4 In their deliberations, the elders saw an opportunity to
Rejuvenate their people and recapture lost vigor by bringing the Amazons into the tribe as wives for their young men. But the plan was more than simple nostalgia for old ways. Passionate voluntary sex, among gods, mythic warriors, and superior mortals, was believed to ensure a good time and magnificent offspring (see chapters 8 And 20).
The young men followed their elders’ instructions. The Amazons, realizing that they meant no harm, stopped chasing the youths away. Each day, the Scythians bivouacked a little closer to the Amazons, almost as though they were stalking wild creatures that they hoped to befriend, much as the women had acquired their horses earlier.
Each group owned nothing but their weapons and horses, and the men and women lived the same sort of life, hunting rabbits and deer and stealing horses from other groups at will. The Scythian men noticed that around midday, the Amazons would stroll out from their camp, alone or in pairs. The young men followed suit. One day, a Scythian youth came upon a single Amazon by herself. Wordlessly, he made advances and she responded. They made love in the grass. Afterward, the Amazon gestured to indicate that he should return the next day to the same spot—and to bring a friend. She made it clear that she would bring a friend too.
The Scythian returned to his camp and regaled the others with what had happened. Next day, he and a comrade came to the same place and found his Amazon and her friend. After the success of this double date, the rest of the young Scythians and Amazons arranged to meet for sexual trysts. Each man and woman formed special ties with their original partners. After the couples had pair-bonded, says Herodotus, the camps were united and the Amazons and Scythians continued to live together as equals and companions, enjoying riding, hunting, and raiding other groups on the steppes.
The men failed to learn the women’s language. But the women quickly picked up the men’s and after some time together they were able to understand each other (Chapter 14). How long did this idyllic companionship last? Several months.? A year.? At any rate, when they were able to communicate with one another, the young men made their proposal. “We have parents and property. Let us give up this way of life and return to live with our people. We promise to keep you as our wives and we will not take up with any other women.”
The Amazons’ response? “Impossible! We cannot live among your women because we have different customs. We live to shoot arrows, throw javelins, and ride horses, and have no knowledge of women’s chores.” They knew that the young men’s families had settled near the trading centers on the Black Sea coast; their wives stayed in wagons doing domestic work. “Your women never leave home to hunt or explore or for any other reason. We would never be able to live like that.” Rejecting the sorry lot of the Royal Scythian wives, the Amazons of Pontus presented a counterproposal. “If you really want to keep our relationship, and if you wish to do what would be fair and just, then go back to your parents and get your share of belongings and return to us. Then, let us go off by ourselves, and live just as we have been doing.” Significantly, the Amazons were not averse to marriage per se. They proposed a different sort of union based on partnership and parity. The young men were persuaded by their lovers’ argument. When they returned with their inherited possessions, the Amazons made another proposal. “We are uneasy about staying in this region. The land is too ravaged from our raids. And we have taken you away from your parents—they might carry out reprisals against us. If you really are resolved to make a new life with us, let us leave this country and head north across the Tanais [Don] River.” Their mates consented to this plan.
The band crossed the Don and rode east for three days. Then they turned north, traveling away from the Sea of Azov for another three days. Here on the steppes the new coalition decided to stay. They became known as the Sarmatians. They spoke a hybrid form of Scythian and raised their girls and boys alike. To this day, remarked Herodotus, Sarmatian women and men wear the same clothing; all ride horses at an early age and master the bow and spear. Sarmatian women practice their old way of life, regularly riding out to hunt and skirmish, sometimes alongside the men and other times on their own. Girls do not marry until they have killed a male enemy.5
What is especially delicious about Herodotus’s account is his sly twist on the concept of “taming.” By having sex with the Amazons, says Herodotus, the Scythians “tamed” Amazons. But he uses an unusual, charged
Word to capture the attention of his ancient listeners. The Greek term ektilosanto is rare and archaic, originally used by Homer and Pindar to mean to make “tractable, tame, docile, or domesticated,” usually applied to animals, especially pets or the lead animal of a flock. Herodotus often deliberately selected rare words in order to call particular attention to a point or message. Here his word choice evokes old poetic traditions, emphasizing the epic aspect of the Sarmatian story. This unique term from archaic epic poetry could be a clue that one of Herodotus’s sources for this love story was actually a written epic, perhaps the Ari-maspea, the famous lost poem about Scythia by the early Greek traveler Aristeas (650 BC). We know that Herodotus had read the Arimaspea because he cites it in other descriptions of Scythia.6
But Herodotus’s use of the word “tame” is also ironic and subversive. As we saw, the Amazons tamed the horses, but do the Scythian men really tame the Amazons.? The Scythian men deliberate, devise plans, and advance proposals, and the Amazons are proactive too. The women invade and raid the Scythians’ property, suggest meeting for sex, learn the men’s language, refuse traditional marriage, urge the men to leave their clan and move to new territory, and raise their children alike. Significantly, the women convince the men that the relationship they propose is “fair and just.”
Herodotus’s Greek audience could not help but notice that these decisions were negotiated among equals, bringing to mind democratic deliberations enjoyed by Athenian males who agree to rule and be ruled in turn. But Greek listeners were also accustomed to zero-sum contests of winners and losers, and in their culture the males dominated females. They tended to assume that if men are strong, then women must be weak, and vice versa.7 In this story, however, the surprise answer to the question of who will be dominated and tamed is no one. In some barbarian societies with certain admirable qualities, Herodotus suggests, egalitarianism and respect can include women. As classics scholar Carolyn Dewald has pointed out, the story demonstrates “complementarity and mutual adjustments between the sexes.” These practical customs of nomad culture persisted among many descendants of the Sarmatians and other steppe peoples into modern times.8
Fewer than a hundred years after Herodotus, in about 380 BC, the philosopher Plato cited the examples of the Amazons and the real
Sarmatian women to justify his belief that in the ideal Republic both women and men should serve as soldiers. The philosopher’s challenge to his fellow Athenians was this: if barbarian women can fight like men, why not Greek women too.? How radical ideas of gender equality might play out in Greek society was also being explored in the theater, for example in Aristophanes’s plays Lysistrata (411 BC) and The Assembly Women (392 BC).9
Herodotus’s purpose, clearly stated in the first sentence of his Histories, was to record the “astonishing achievements of both our own [Greek] people and those of other peoples.” Some criticized Herodotus as a “barbarian-lover” for focusing on the histories of non-Greek cultures instead of glorious Greek deeds. Herodotus preserved traditions circulating among the Greek colonists, Greek-Scythians, and Scythians in Olbia, Borysthenes, Tyras, and other colonies and outposts that he visited in the fifth century BC; his information about more distant tribes came from his reading and through local contacts, traders, and chains of translators. The narratives were filtered through Greek perspectives, but modern archaeology confirms that Herodotus gathered a lot of genuine information about Scythians.10
The Sarmatian story was not a Greek myth. It was a Scythian “history,” a foundation legend that Herodotus thought would be novel and interesting to transmit to his Greek audience, in keeping with his stated goals above. Yet many classical scholars interpret the Sarmatian legend as a coded account of Greek rites of passage for boys and girls before they entered into traditional Greek marriage, in which males “tame” females through sex. According to William Blake Tyrrell and Frieda Brown, for example, the Amazons of Pontus really represented Greek girls who refuse to become ideal Greek wives and mothers, and the Scythians symbolized both “Greek boys” on the cusp of manhood and “Greek women? In this view, the Sarmatians of Herodotus’s story have no historical basis but simply hold up a distorting mirror to Greek culture.11
Such reasoning might make sense if Herodotus had made up the tale or if he were recounting a fantastic fiction created by the Greeks about imaginary people and places. But ancient Greek historians, including Herodotus, identified Amazons as real people of Scythia. “Lured on by pastures,” wrote Pomponius Mela, the Sarmatians “live in
Camps and carry all their possessions and wealth with them. Archery, horseback riding, and hunting are a girl’s pursuits.” As Herodotus, Mela, and many other writers knew, conquests and defeats within the vast Scythian territories often resulted in the relocation of many different tribes to new lands. The Sarmatians, according to Diodorus’s sources, were formed by people transplanted from south of the Black Sea to the northern Black Sea along the Don River.12 Modern ethnography and recent archaeology provide substantial evidence to indicate that Herodotus and his Black Sea informants were talking about actual nomads who had migrated north to what is now Ukraine and the northern Caucasus, and that the women were freer than Greek women, participating in activities reserved, in Hellenic cultures, for men.
Nomadic groups of various sizes and makeup continually arose, migrated, fought, merged, allied, expanded and diminished, dispersed, and disappeared or were absorbed into other groups in antiquity. The Sarmatians, a loosely related group of tribes, emerged as a force on the steppes between the Don and the Urals around the time that the Greeks were beginning to travel and trade in the northern Black Sea area. Sarmatians spoke an Iranian dialect, related to Saka-Scythic, which evolved into Ossetian, still spoken by people in the north Caucasus. The oral tradition explaining an alliance of a dislocated band of women warriors and Scythian men that Herodotus recorded in about 450 BC could have arisen a century or two earlier, when the Sarmatians first coalesced on the northern steppes. One of Herodotus’s known ancient sources, Aristeas, was traveling across this region during that time. Aristeas was the first Greek writer to identify the Amazons with the Sarmatians, so Herodotus’s account may well have derived from Aristeas’s Arimaspea, as suggested above. Some twenty-five hundred years after Herodotus visited the Black Sea and reported the Sarmatian origin story, European travelers in the north Caucasus, once part of ancient Sarmatia, heard Circassian bards recite traditional folklore with striking similarities to Herodotus’s story (Chapter 22).
There was nothing inherently impossible about two roaming bands, local males and women from afar, who agreed to unite to form a new group. What else was plausible, perceptive, accurate, or imagined in the incredibly detailed classical descriptions of Amazon and Scythian life.?
The next section sorts out the colorful, intricate, tangled threads of fact and fiction about Amazons, beginning with the reality of Saka-Scythian-Sarmatian women, bowlegged from riding since childhood and scarred by battle, buried with their weapons and horses in the vast landscape of Scythia.
World History
