The notion that Amazons were hostile toward men was controversial even in antiquity. The confusion begins with their name. Linguistic evidence suggests that the earliest Greek form of the non-Greek name Amazon designated an ethnic group distinguished by a high level of equality between men and women. Rumors of such parity would have startled the Greeks, who lived according to strictly divided male and female roles. Long before the word “Scythian” or specific tribal names appeared in Greek literature, “Amazons” may have been a name for a people notorious for strong, free women.6
The earliest reference to the Amazons in Greek literature appears in Homer’s Iliad in the formulaic phrase Amazones antianeirai. Modern scholars are unanimous that the plural noun Amazones was not originally a Greek word. But it is unclear which language it was borrowed from and what its original meaning was. What is known for certain is that Amazon does not have anything to do with breasts (Chapter 5 For probable origins of the name).
There is something remarkable about Homer’s earliest use of Amazones in the Iliad. The form of the name falls into the linguistic category of ethnic designations in epic poetry (another Homeric example is Myr-midones, the warriors led by Achilles at Troy). This important clue tells us that Amazones was originally a Hellenized name for “a plurality, a people,” as in Hellenes for Greeks and Trooes for the Trojans. The Greeks used distinctive feminine endings (typically - ai) for associations made up exclusively of women, such as Nymphai (Nymphs) or Trooiai for Trojan women. But Amazones does not have the feminine ending that one would expect if the group consisted only of women. Therefore, the name Amazones would originally have been “understood as. . . a people consisting of men and women.” As classicist Josine Blok points out in her discussion of this puzzle, without the addition of the feminine epithet antianeirai “there is no way of telling that this was a people of female warriors.”7 The inescapable conclusion is that Amazones was not a name for a women-only entity, as many have assumed. Instead Ama-zones once indicated an entire ethnic group.
So the earliest literary references to Amazons identified them as a nation or people, followed by antianeirai, a descriptive tag along the lines of “the Saka, Pointed Hat Wearers,” or “the Budini, Eaters of Lice.” Indeed, many ancient Greek writers do treat Amazons as a tribe of men and women. They credit the tribe with innovations such as ironworking and domestication of horses. Some early vase paintings show men fighting alongside Amazons.8
But what about the meaning of the epithet attached to Amazones? That word is slippery and complex. Antianeirai is often translated in modern times as “opposites of men,” “against men,” “opposing men,” “antagonistic to men,” or “man-hating.” In fact, however, in ancient Greek epic diction the prefix anti - did not ordinarily suggest opposition or antagonism as the English prefix “anti-” does today. Instead antimeant “equivalent” or “matching.” Accordingly, antianeirai is best translated as “equals of men.”
Such ethnonyms, names of tribes, are typically masculine, with the understanding that the female members are included in the collective name (as in “man” for all humans or “les Indiens d’Amerique” for an entire ethnic group). But the curious formation aneirai is a unique feminine plural compound that included the Greek masculine noun “man,” aner. A parallel formation occurs in the Amazon name Deianeira, “Man-Destroyer,” in which aner is the object of the verb stem dei (destroy) with the suffix - ia. If there had been a group of women named thus, the plural would be the Deianeirai.9
Amazones antianeirai is “unmistakably an ethnic designation,” yet the epithet is feminine, a reversal of expectations that puzzles schol-ars.10 The odd semantic effect of “men,” in the sense of a whole people or nation, combined with a feminine description brings to mind the popular tendency among English speakers to refer to cats as “she” and dogs as “he,” even though it is understood that tomcats and bitches are also members of the respective species.
The adaptation of the original, unknown barbarian name to the Greek epic formula for a whole people produced “a proper noun riddled with ambiguity.” Some scholars interpret this peculiarity as evidence that Homer’s Amazones antianeirai must have been a purely mythic construction created by the Greeks for a fictional “race” of women warriors. The assumption is that the idea of women behaving like men was so difficult to grasp, so “confusing and menacing” and disruptive for Greeks, that the name was “only conceivable in the imaginary world of myth.” But should we underestimate the ancient Greeks’ ability to conceive of and name a real people whose gender relations were different from their own.? In fact, it was common for the Greeks to describe and name foreigners by reference to their exotic, disturbing customs, such as lice eating, head-hunting, polyandry (multiple husbands), and cannibalism.11
The linguistic evidence points to a reasonable explanation for the unusual semantics of the name “Amazons, equals of men.” The fact that the earliest nomenclature for Amazons took the form of a name for an ethnic group is highly significant. Real ethnic groups, of course, are made up of men, women, and children, and in early antiquity the word Amazones would have been “understood as a group of people consisting of men and women,” as Blok points out. Homer and other archaic writers could have used the phrase Amazones andres, “the Amazon people,” but their choice of Amazones antianeirai clearly highlighted this group’s most outstanding quality. Because aner/andres could also mean “man/ men” in the sense of a whole people, a tribe, or a nation, the phrase also carries the connotation of “equal humans.” The Greeks first identified the Amazons ethnographically, as a nation of men and women distinguished by something outstanding in their gender relations. Later, any ambivalence or anxiety that knowledge of this alternative gender-neutral culture evoked among Greeks was played out in their mythic narratives about martial women.
Here is a plausible sequence: Archaic Greeks had heard about peoples ranging over the Black Sea-steppes region, a warrior society that exhibited a remarkable degree of sexual equality. Their non-Greek name, sounding something like “amazon,” was adapted to the epic form of ethnonyms, thus Amazones. The descriptive epithet antianeirai was added to call out the most notable feature of this group: gender equality. The epithet was feminine to emphasize the extraordinary status of women among this particular people, relative to the status of women in Greek culture. Unlike most other ethnic groups familiar to the Greeks, in which the men were the most significant members, among Amazones it was the women who stood out. Amazones antianeirai could originally have meant something like “Amazons, the tribe whose women are equals,” or simply “Amazons, the equals.” A race of warlike men and women piqued the curiosity of the Greeks and led to stories about heroic women of faraway lands who were worthy opponents of male warriors.
Gradually, as more travel and information allowed the Greeks to differentiate among the numerous individual ethnolinguistic tribes of Scythia, the old concept of “Amazons” as a collective name to designate an exotic “race” of equal sexes evolved to refer to a related but novel idea: a long-ago tribe of warlike women who fought men, dominated men, or lived entirely without men. The meaning of anti - in the epithet began to shift from “equals of” to “opponents of” to suggest hostility to males, and the atypical feminine form of what was once a proper name for an entire people now encouraged visions of a mythic gynocracy.12
The earliest name for Amazons preserved in literature is strong evidence that it first entered Greek culture as a term for hazily understood “Scythian” peoples; then over time Amazons became a mythic construct, while still retaining and accumulating kernels of truth. The linguistic evidence gives us a practical approach to understanding Amazons as members of real nomad tribes. This perspective, in turn, helps us make sense of many other striking and ambiguous features of the mythic and later historical accounts of Amazons.
World History
