Slavic Warrior Women, pt. 4: Warrior Women of Antiquity

Link to full dissertation, Amazons, Shieldmaidens, and Daring Polianitsy: Slavic Warrior Women in Medieval Literature and Folklore: https://libraetd.lib.virginia.edu/public_view/r207tq787

Time for Slavic Warrior women, part 4! Today we’ll be tackling an introduction to the Amazons and Scythians of Ancient Greek Literature, and then I’ll be going into some of the case studies I actually used for the extraordinary women whose narratives formed the backbone of my dissertation (but we’ll start those in part 5).

Amazons in battle (Amazonomachy) on a pot

Although the majority of documented rulers and warriors over the past few millennia have been men, history also presents examples of extraordinary women who fulfilled those roles. Ancient Greco-Roman art and literature depict warrior women from every social stratum, from peasants and barbarians to queens and goddesses. For example, Athena was the Greek goddess of wisdom and just war; Minerva, originally an Etruscan deity, became her Roman counterpart. The Greeks also revered Nike, goddess of victory; Eris, goddess of discord; and Ioke, the Hysminai, and the Androktasiai, female spirits associated with various aspects of battle. Similarly, the Romans honored Victoria, Nike’s equivalent; Bellona, whose name was synonymous with war; and Nerio, the personification of battle itself and the consort of Mars, the Roman war god. The rich tapestry of Greco-Roman mythology likewise proffers the stories of mortal women, such as the huntress Atalanta, who drew first blood against the Calydonian Bull, and the athlete Myrsine, who earned the favor of Athena through her prowess. And then, of course, there were the fantastic Amazons, a tribe of women who were the equals, and sometimes betters, of men.

At the intersection of history and literature, ancient authors also recorded the military achievements of attested warrior queens like Boudica, Tomyris, Amage, Zenobia, Artemisia, and Semiramis. To the Ancient Greeks and Romans, such queens were noteworthy not only because they were women who ruled, but because they were women who ruled well.^[1] After all, in the Greco-Roman point of view, other civilizations were anything but civilized, and one of the key aspects that made some of these other civilizations particularly barbaric was their freer approach to gender roles compared to the strictly separated sexes in Greece and Rome. So barbaric were the societies that produced women rulers, that their men wore not robes, togas, or tunics, but pants – a womanly invention, the Ancient Greeks thought, which they credited conversely to Semiramis, Tomyris, or the fictional sorceress Medea.^[2] 

Despite the Amazons’ continued dismissal as pure fiction, recent archaeology supports that warrior women existed among the various nomadic tribes who shared the Scythian culture. In some Scythian burial sites, women, entombed with weapons and bearing skeletal evidence of battle wounds, comprise nearly 40% of armed graves, indicating that the majority of Scythian women were buried with weapons.^[3] Even the geographer Strabo, writing with a skeptical mind, questions whether such an unbelievable history as that of the Amazons is pure imagination—after all, how could an army of women advance victorious so far into Greek territory as to lay siege to Athens, he questions, in reference to the Attic War—or if the relatively unchanged nature of their narratives over time indicates they were more historical than mythical.^[4] Strabo concludes that the Amazons are indeed merely myth, but his question nonetheless raises an interesting point about the literary mutability of fact versus fiction. Individual narratives, so often aggrandized in cultural memory, are less reliable as a source of historical truth, but the attribution of an entire war that culminated in the siege of one of the most eminent Greek cities lends credence to the real-world existence of the Amazons as a people.

Whether or not the Ancient Greeks and Romans believed in the Amazons, they certainly kept writing about them, and they encountered plenty of warrior women among the nomadic tribes who roamed the steppes of present-day Eastern Europe and Central Asia to substantiate those narratives.^[5] Although many distinct tribes known by many names populated this vast territory in ancient days, a shared culture, as evidenced not only by the literature composed about them but also by the material they left behind, united them.^[6] It is not only plausible, but probable that the women riding into battle alongside their brothers, fathers, and sons became mythologized into the legendary Amazons. Considering other ancient literate civilizations besides Greece and Rome likewise recorded encounters with warrior women among Eurasian nomads, the Amazons’ historicity increases.^[7]

In this chapter I will explore the role of warrior women in ancient literature, the foundation upon which ensuing literate European cultures erected testaments to their own Amazons. In doing so, I will discuss the individual narratives of three Amazon queens—Hippolyte, Antiope, and Penthesilea—as well as two historical queens—Tomyris, who ruled the Massagetae, and Amage, who ruled the Sarmatians. I will also address the ancient authors who recorded these narratives, for their personal experiences, biases, and agendas undoubtedly informed the way they depicted women in general and warrior women in particular. First, however, it is necessary to root these queens, fictional Amazons included, in their historical context. If a measure of truth underlies the stories of the Amazons, whether as a distinct tribe or as individual women scattered among various tribes, it is to be found among the Scythians.^[8] Considering their egalitarian approach to gender roles, geography, time period, military tactics, and general way of life, the Scythians are by far the most likely candidate for the origin of the Amazons.

The ancient authors recording these narratives did so centuries after the fact, if fact they ever were. In the years between action and record, the stories of fierce warrior queens from beyond the Black Sea existed only in oral tradition, transmitted down the generations and embellished with each retelling. However, the same can be said of famous Greek heroes like Heracles, Theseus, and Achilles. If heroes by those names ever existed in reality, their stories survived first in oral tradition until they were fantasticized and mythologized; only then did Homer and his descendants put stylus to tablet or pen to papyrus. We know more about individual Greek and Roman heroes than about individual Amazons and Scythians because their narratives were preserved by Greek and Roman writers. Scythians did not have a written language, so the preservation of their own stories could not outlive their civilization except for those stories that had already spread to another. Thus, everything we know about the Amazons and Scythians, we know because Greek authors chose to immortalize them alongside their native heroes. The foreign warrior women made such an impression on the pre-literate Greeks that their names and stories endured until the time they, too, could enter the written record.

The stories of individual Amazon warriors are as fantastical as those of other individual heroes, with Amazons interacting with gods, demigods, and monsters, though the Amazons themselves never exceed human limitations. Several prominent Greek heroes supposedly crossed paths and, in some cases, swords with famous Amazon queens. Heracles’s ninth labor involved retrieving Hippolyte’s war-belt, given to her by Ares, the god of war himself. Likewise, Theseus married Antiope, or in another version, Hippolyte. Achilles defeated Penthesilea, the last of the great Amazon queens, during the Trojan War. According to at least one ancient author whose work is unfortunately lost, it was actually Penthesilea, not Achilles, who slew Hector of Troy, even though she fought for the Trojan side.^[9] 

The narratives of warrior women in ancient literature must be gleaned from the narratives of warrior men, their relationships marked as often by romance as by conflict. Marriage may have been taboo to the Amazons, so much so that Theseus’s marriage to an Amazon queen was enough to trigger a war, but Amazons’ romantic entanglements with men—Greek and otherwise—occur in numerous stories, including the origin myth of the Sauromatians, another Scythian tribe. According to Herodotus, the Sauromatians were the descendants of Amazons who had been captured and enslaved by the Greeks. They rebelled against their captors, only to find themselves adrift at sea since they did not know how to sail. The Amazons wrecked their stolen ship on a strange shore, where they eventually attracted local Scythian warriors, who abandoned their own clans to form a new tribe with the Amazons. Their female descendants enjoyed the same freedoms as their Amazon forebears.^[10]

Perhaps there is some granule of historical truth buried in the exploits of such heroes, even if that truth is nothing more than that a certain person bearing a certain name existed and accomplished a deed worthy of remembrance. No one would argue sincerely that Heracles was a demigod or battled a hydra, but it is not impossible that an extraordinary man named Heracles hunted and warred in preliterate Greece, his exploits embellished in oral legend until ancient authors consolidated and preserved them. Likewise, it is not impossible that warrior queens like Hippolyte and Antiope interacted with those same preliterate Greeks, their names remembered and stories aggrandized over the generations as they were told and retold. The history of the Amazons as a whole potentially contains truths among the more obvious embellishments; inversely, the narratives of individual Amazons likely contain more embellishments than truth.^[11] Regardless of the ratio of fact to fiction, it is the individual narratives that capture the imagination. Works like Herodotus’s Histories and Strabo’s Geography contain invaluable information about the world these warriors, both men and women, occupied, but it is the stories of the individual heroes that add color to the map.

Citations:

[1] Mayor, Amazons: Lives & Legends, 58; Deborah Gera, Warrior Women: The Anonymous Tractatus De Mulieribus, E.J. (Brill, 1997): 17.

[2] Bonfante, Barbarians of Ancient Europe, 20; Renate Rolle, The World of the Scythians, trans. by F. G. Walls (University of California Press, 1989): 60.

[3] Murphy, Archaeology and Trauma, 11.

[4] Strabo, Geographica, 11.5.3.

[5] Pasi Loman, “No Woman, No War: Women’s Participation in Ancient Greek Warfare,” Greece & Rome 51, no. 1 (2004): 37; Guliaev, “Amazons in Scythia,” 124.

[6] Melyukova, “Scythians and Sarmatians,” 109; Nicola Di Cosmo, “The Northern Frontier in Pre-Imperial China (1500-221 _BC),” The Cambridge History of China, ed. by Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (Cambridge University Press): 891.

[7] Mayor, Amazons: Lives & Legends, 20.

[8] Marcus Justinus, Historiarum Philippicarum T. Pompeii Trogi libri XLIV in epitomen redacti, 2.1; Mayor, Amazons: Lives & Legends, 44.

[9] Mayor, Amazons: Lives and Legends, 302.

[10] Herodotus, Historíai, 4.110-4.116.

[11] Penrose, Postcolonial Amazons, 4.