A millennium of detailed descriptions of Amazons presented as history began with Herodotus (fifth century BC) and continued through the late antique authors Orosius and Jordanes (fifth-sixth centuries AD). Between the lifetimes of these men, many other Greek and Roman historians also chronicled the origins, rise, and fall of the legendary Amazon “empire.” Each of these writers had access to texts and unwritten traditions that no longer exist today. Their accounts commingle fact and fancy, legend and history, but all identify the women called Amazons as Scythians.
Herodotus, the inquisitive Greek historian from Halicarnassus (Caria, part of the Persian Empire), preserved a treasury of information about the many tribes of Near and Far Scythia, based on personal observations, local histories and legends, and interviews. Admiration for resourceful, self-reliant Amazons is evident in Herodotus’s “historical” account of the origin of the Sarmatians. That story (recounted in the next chapter) tells how a gang of Amazons from Pontus joined a band of young Scythian men from the northern Black Sea and relocated to form a new ethnolinguistic group, a realistic option in the nomadic context of flexibility, alliances, and constant movement around the Black Sea and steppes.16
About a century after Herodotus, in 380 BC, the Athenian orator Isocrates named the three most dangerous enemies of Athens: the Thracians, “the Scythians led by the Amazons,” and the Persians. Isocrates was harking back to glorious victories when “Hellas was still insignificant.” He reminded his audience that the first Athenians had repelled an “invasion of the Scythians, led by the Amazons.” Isocrates was alluding to the mythic Battle for Athens, which the Athenians treated as a historical event (Chapter 17). After their defeat, Isocrates recalls, the army of women did not return to Pontus but went to live with their Scythian allies in the north.17
The Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily (65-50 BC) also wrote about Amazons, associating them with Saka-Scythian women who were as brave and aggressive in battle as the men. He pointed to the historical example of Zarina, who led a Saka-Parthian coalition to victories against tribes who wanted to enslave them (her story appears in chapter 23). 18
For his research on Amazon history, Diodorus consulted works by Ctesias (a Greek physician who settled in Persia around 400 BC) and Megasthe-nes (a Greek ethnographer who traveled to India ca. 350-290 BC). According to Diodorus’s sources, after a series of “revolutions” in Scythia, the Scythians were often ruled by strong women “endowed with exceptional valor”; they “train for war just like the men and in acts of manly courage they are in no way inferior to the men.” Many of these women accomplished “many great deeds, not just in Scythia, but in the lands bordering Scythia.”
At some point in the past, Pontus became home to a Scythian group governed by women who rode to war beside their men. One woman (Diodorus does not give her name) possessed extraordinary authority, superb intelligence, physical strength, and battle prowess. This brilliant leader trained a handpicked force of fighting women and began subduing neighboring lands. She founded Themiscyra at the mouth of the Thermodon in Pontus. Filled with pride “as the tide of her fortunes” rose, she began calling herself “Daughter of Ares,” the war god. Under this “kindly ruler beloved by her subjects, young girls were taught to hunt and they drilled daily in the arts of war.” She continued to lead her special army on wars of further conquest, advancing as far north as the Don River.
So far there is nothing incredible in Diodorus’s account of a group of Scythians led by a successful female commander at some point in the distant past. But in the following passage we can glimpse mythography in process, as the plausible is transformed into something more sensational. Ordinary Scythian society is twisted into an ominous “rule of hubristic women” scenario, a reversal of what was normal in the Mediterranean world, bound to titillate Diodorus’s audience. This powerful “queen,” declares Diodorus, enacted new laws that created a true gynoc-racy in Pontus, in which the women would always be sovereign and trained for warfare. She assigned men to domestic tasks, spinning wool and caring for children. She ordered that baby boys’ legs were to be maimed and girls would have one breast seared. From then on, Diodorus tells us, this Scythian tribe ruled exclusively by women was known as the Amazons and their queens were called “Daughters of Ares.”
This first great Amazon queen died heroically in battle. Her daughter (also unnamed) surpassed her mother’s great accomplishments, relates
Diodorus, conquering lands around the Black Sea from the Don to Thrace, and she even made forays south into Syria. For many generations, these queens’ descendants continued to advance the Amazon nation in power and fame. Their decline began when the Greek hero Heracles killed their queen, Hippolyte. Then Theseus abducted Antiope and made her his wife in Athens. In retaliation, the Amazons, aided by other Scythians, invaded Greece and besieged the Acropolis. But meanwhile, the native Anatolians they had conquered saw a chance to exploit the Amazons’ absence. They united to make war against the few Amazons guarding Pontus. These wars were so successful, says Diodorus, that the great race of Amazons of Pontus was essentially erased from history. Soon the Amazons were so diminished that only a few scattered bands remained. One of these small vestigial bands, led by Penthesilea, helped to defend Troy in the legendary Trojan War.
People “in my day wrongly consider the ancient stories about the Amazons to be fictitious tales,” declares Diodorus. He explains why. After the Amazons lost the great Battle for Athens, the surviving Amazons gave up the idea of returning to Pontus, because it was ravaged by wars while they were away. Echoing Isocrates, above, Diodorus says the defeated Amazons accompanied their allies “the Scythians, into Scythia.” Thus the great Amazon empire vanished—absorbed back into the steppes of Scythia.19
Strabo, a well-traveled native of Pontus, also speaks of the Amazons as an ethnic group consisting of both men and women. These people had once lived on the coast of Pontus, “the plain of the Amazons,” but were driven out. Strabo reports that some say they still live in the mountains of Caucasian Albania (eastern Georgia and Azerbaijan), while others place them in the northern foothills of the Caucasus. According to Strabo, the Amazon tribe was seminomadic and not all female. “When they were at home, they planted crops. . . and raised and trained horses, but the bravest among them spent most of their time away, hunting on horseback and making war.” Strabo’s account is another realistic description of a typical pastoral, seminomadic lifestyle, in which men and women could choose to hunt and campaign together or in segregated groups.20
Scythians and Amazons received special attention in a work of the first century BC by Pompeius Trogus, a historian of Celtic roots with encyclopedic knowledge. His lost history was summarized and elabo-
Rated by Justin, who probably lived in the second century AD. The Scythians are described as battle-hardened warriors who prized independence and repelled all would-be conquerors. Trogus and Justin are clear that Amazons were Scythian women, capable of making war when they chose to. Scythian men and women were equals in heroic exploits, remarks Justin, making it “difficult to decide which of the two sexes had the more distinguished history.” Scythian men founded the Baktrian and Parthian empires, he reports, while Scythian women founded the Amazonian empire.21
Once when the Scythian men were away for fifteen years making war in Asia, the women sent their husbands a message: If you don’t return home we will have sex with the neighboring tribe and the resulting children will carry on the Scythian race. This story appears to refer to the seventh-s ixth centuries BC during the Scythians’ conquests across western Asia, when there would have been long spans of years when most of the men were away. This theme of Scythian women taking up with other men of their own choosing recurs in many nomadic and Amazon traditions. Herodotus, for example, relates that while the Scythians from the Don region were away for nearly thirty years campaigning against the Cimmerians and Medes, their women “consorted with the male slaves.” The women and their new consorts not only raised a whole generation of children to adulthood, but together they created an army to oppose the male warriors when they came home.22
In Justin’s account, the men returned home after receiving their women’s message. But in his detailed story of the origin of the Amazons of Pontus we hear about yet another group of resourceful Scythian women whose men had been killed in battle. On the northern Black Sea, wrote Justin, two young Scythians named Plynus and Skolopitus were forced out of their homeland by a faction. They assembled a large band of young men and traveled south over the Caucasus Mountains and occupied Pontus. “From their new base in Pontus, they plundered the nearby lands for a long time.” At last, the native peoples rose up. They ambushed and slaughtered most of the Scythian men. “The Scythians’ wives now perceived that they were widows as well as outsiders. They took up arms and defended their territory. And then the women went on the attack. They refused to marry, calling it slavery.” These women, says Justin, “embarked on an enterprise unparalleled in all history,”
Creating and defending a state without men. They even killed the husbands who had survived by remaining at home, so that no woman would seem more fortunate than those who had lost their men. Next they avenged their husbands’ deaths by destroying the guilty local tribes. In the peace that followed, they had sex with neighboring peoples so that their bloodline would not die out. The Amazons of Pontus killed baby boys and raised the girls to ride horses, kill game, and train for combat “instead of keeping them in idleness or working with wool” like Greek wives.23
An earlier fragmentary version of this Amazon origin tale comes from the geographer Skymnos of Chios (ca. 185 BC). In his account, a group of Maeotians led by two young men named Ilinus and Skolopi-tus journeyed from the Sea of Azov over the Caucasus and settled in Pontus. After the men were killed by an uprising of the natives, the women took up arms and became successful warriors in their own right. The warrior women were later conquered by the Greeks and dispersed back to the north. These “Amazons and their husbands” migrated back to the land west of the Don and continued to be known as Maeotians. Skymnos clearly identifies Amazons as women of Scythian origins.24 (See chapter 22 for a historical warrior queen of the Maeo-tians, Tirgatao.)
The geographer Pomponius Mela, writing in about AD 43, located Amazons on the steppes around the Don, the Sea of Azov, and the Caspian Sea, and also in the vast expanse eastward toward the land of the Seres (“Silk People,” China). In Pontus, on the Thermodon plain, a place called “Amazonius” had long ago been an encampment of Amazons when they dominated Anatolia. They had worshipped Artemis at Ephesus and named the town of Cyme on the Aegean coast after the Amazon leader who drove out the native inhabitants (Cyme issued coins showing an Amazon and a prancing horse). The steppes, he wrote, are rich in pastures and they are occupied by the Amazons. The Maeotians around the Sea of Azov are called Gynaecocratumenoe (“Ruled by Women”). The men are archers on foot, while the women ride on horseback and lasso enemies with lariats. There is no predictable age for women to marry, noted Pomponius Mela, because the women remain single until they prove themselves in battle.25
Pliny the Elder, the Roman natural historian writing in about AD 70, uses words and names similar to those used by Skymnos and Pompo-nius Mela. Pliny calls the Sarmatians Gynaecocratumenoe (“Ruled by Women”) and also refers to the “Amazons and their husbands.” A century later, during the Roman defeat of the Goths in Thrace (AD 270275), the Romans referred to the captive Gothic women as “Amazons.”26 Orosius, a learned and well-traveled Christian historian of the early fifth century AD, consulted numerous classical sources, such as Livy, Tacitus, Diodorus, and Justin, as well as Trogus and other texts that no longer survive, including traditional foundation tales of cities that claimed Amazons in their past. In his History Against the Pagans, Orosius tells how the Amazons came to rule in long-ago Pontus. Orosius’s history recaps Diodorus’s account, above, but supplies proper names and details from Justin’s account. Orosius also inserts his own views.27
One of Orosius’s important sources was Justin, who reported that the ancient Amazons of Pontus were ruled by a pair of queens named Martesia (Marpesia, “Snatcher or Seizer”) and Lampeto (Lampedo, “Burning Torch”). Justin says the corulers divided their all-women forces and took turns leading conquering armies and defending Pontus (Orosius says they drew lots). According to Orosius, Lampedo led the invading Amazon army to subdue most of Thrace and captured some cities of Anatolia, founding Ephesus and other towns. Her victorious army, “laden with rich booty, returned to Pontus. But she found that the other half of the forces that had remained with Queen Marpesia to protect their empire had been cut to pieces in a battle.”
Marpesia’s daughter, Sinope, succeeded her mother, giving her name to Sinope in Pontus. As a “crowning achievement to her matchless reputation for courage,” says Orosius, Sinope remained a virgin to the end of her life.” So great was the “admiration and fear spread by her fame” that when Heracles was ordered to bring the weapons of the Amazon queen to his master, he was “certain that he would face inevitable peril.” Orosius expected his Christian audience to be shocked and outraged by the “shame and human error” of powerful women of antiquity willfully dominating men, choosing foreign lovers, killing baby boys, building cities, and marching out to conquer. Unlike Justin, who plainly admired the “unparalleled enterprise” of the women, Orosius is the first ancient writer
To explicitly express disapproval of the “unnatural” state of independent Scythian women who behaved as the equals of men. Yet even Orosius cannot suppress his admiration for the Amazons of yore. In a surprising conclusion, Orosius praises the sublime courage of the four greatest Amazon queens, Hippolyte, Melanippe, Antiope, and Penthesilea.
Notably, in 2006, archaeologists discovered magnificent life-size portraits of the famous quartet of Amazon queens, Hippolyte, Antiope, Melanippe, and Penthesilea, in a mosaic floor of the ruins of a villa under a parking lot in ancient Edessa (Sanliurfa, Turkey) (Plate 1). The action-packed scenes are unusual because they show the queens hunting lions and leopards instead of making war. The spectacular mosaics at the Villa of the Amazons were made in the fifth or sixth century AD, in the period when Orosius was writing his history of the pagans.28 The power of ancient Amazon stories to thrill had not faded after four centuries of Christianity.
Another author of later antiquity, an Alan-Goth from the northern Caucasus named Jordanes, wrote a fascinating history of the Goths— laced with heaping doses of fiction—in AD 551. Jordanes, who had access to ancient Gothic and Alan traditions, portrayed the Goths, who migrated from Europe to the steppes, as the heirs of the Scythians “whom ancient tradition asserts to have been the husbands of the Amazons [my italics].” Here is yet another succinct expression of the ancient understanding of Amazons as Scythian women. Jordanes says that the Amazons once dwelled around the Sea of Azov, from the Borysthenes to the Don—and he claims the Amazon queens Marpesia and Lampeto as the ancient “ancestors” of the Goths.
In Jordanes’s Gothocentric version of the old legends told by Justin and Orosius, long ago while the Goth men were away on an expedition, an enemy tribe attempted to carry off the Goth women. But “they made a brave resistance, as they had been taught to do by their husbands.” After routing the attackers, the Goth women “were inspired with great daring.” They took up arms and chose as their leaders the two boldest women, Marpesia and Lampeto. In this Gothic rendition, it was Marp-esia who led an army of conquest while Lampeto stayed to guard their native land.
On her campaigns Marpesia and her Amazon army encamped for a long time at the eastern tip of the Caucasus range where it meets the
Caspian Sea (ancient Caucasian Albania, now Dagestan), one of the major nomad migration routes described earlier. This place, says Jor-danes, was thereafter called the “Rock of Marpesia.” This legend was already known in the first century BC to Virgil, who calls it the “Marpe-sian Cliff?’ Jordanes lists the glorious conquests across Anatolia and Armenia by the “Scythian-born women who had by chance gained control over the tribes of Asia and held them for almost a hundred years, before returning to their kinsfolk at the Marpesian Rock.” Amazons retained “power in that region up to the time of Alexander the Great” (here Jordanes alludes to Alexander’s meeting with Amazons on the southern shore of the Caspian; chapter 20). By Jordanes’s time—more than a thousand years after Homer and Herodotus—the fame of the warlike Scythian women, called Amazons, evoked such respect and awe that the legendary Amazon queens were claimed as ancestors of the powerful Goths.29
World History
