Slavic Warrior Women, pt. 5: Hippolyte

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 5! Today we’ll start talking about the mythological Amazon queens whose narratives are best known, starting with—you guessed it—Hippolyte!

Mosaic of Amazon fighting Greek Warrior

As is often the case with heroic figures from bygone eras, several conflicting and overlapping narratives are attributed to Hippolyte and her sister Antiope, such that neither can be addressed without consideration for the other. Indeed, the narratives of Hippolyte and Antiope are so entangled that some suggest they are the same person. Hippolyte remains one of the most well-known Amazons owing in large part to her characterization in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which makes use of one of those entangled narratives. However, Shakespeare’s portrayal of Hippolyte bears little resemblance to the warrior queen of ancient literature. Shakespeare’s Hippolyte is mild, quiet, and deferential; the original Hippolyte was anything but.

While the specifics of the narratives differ, one role that is solely attributed to Hippolyte is the bearer of Ares’s war-belt, the retrieval of which is the objective of Heracles’s ninth labor. Usually translated into English with the more feminine sounding ‘girdle,’ the Greek word zōstēr (ζωστήρ) describes a wide leather belt worn originally by warriors to protect their midsection, as the word is used by Homer, though by the time of Pausanias it became associated with Greek clothing in general. The more mythologically-minded of ancient authors credit Ares with fathering the Amazons, while those more interested in history over fantasy remark instead that, as a warlike nation, the Amazons worshiped a warrior god, or more likely, a goddess, whom the Greeks equated with Artemis.^[1] Ares is recognized not only for fathering the Amazon nation, but also fathering individual Amazons, in particular those Amazon queens of renown, including Hippolyte. Thus, as a favorite of both his metaphorical and biological daughters, it comes as no surprise that Hippolyte bears Ares’s belt.^[2]

Hippolyte did not retain her belt indefinitely, but accounts differ on the nature of the loss. According to Diodorus and a few others, Hippolyte relinquishes her war-belt to Heracles against her will, but according to Apollodorus, her initial interactions with Heracles are friendly, and so she voluntarily offers it to him. In Diodorus’s version, Heracles fights the Amazons immediately upon his arrival at Themiscyra. After a bloody battle during which he decimates their army, he captures Hippolyte, thus taking the belt from her by force.^[3] According to the Phillipic Histories, as summarized by Justinus, the only reason Heracles was able to defeat the Amazons on their home turf was because the vast majority of the Amazon army was away on a military campaign, leaving Themiscyra guarded by only a small contingent. Meanwhile, Heracles had arrived with nine warships full of Greece’s finest heroes. Hippolyte was then captured by Heracles’s companion Theseus and taken back to Athens.^[4] Despite being the queen of a fierce warrior race, Hippolyte could not compete with a true Greek hero like Heracles.

However, in the more fantastical version put forth by Apollodorus in Library, Hippolyte greets Heracles in friendship as soon as he debarks his ship and, upon learning the reason for his visit is to retrieve her war-belt for the Mycenean princess Admete, she agrees to give it to him. It is only after Hera, the ever-vengeful queen of the gods, disguises herself as an Amazon to spread lies and discord among them that a battle breaks out between Heracles’s forces and the Amazons of Themiscyra. During this battle, Heracles kills Hippolyte and strips the belt from her corpse.^[5] In her initial willingness to part with her belt, the version of Apollodorus aligns more closely with the majority of ancient writers, including Apollonius Rhodius, Euripides, Isocrates, and Pausanias. Regardless of the friendliness of their initial interactions, however, the end result is the same: Hippolyte is defeated, and Heracles takes her belt.

If there is any merit to Aelian’s depiction of Scythian wedding duels, one interpretation of the apparent hostility between Hippolyte and Heracles could be as a failed courtship. As a Scythian warrior woman and a queen, Hippolyte would expect any romantic partner to be at least her equal in battle. By defeating her, Heracles proves his worth as a suitor. However, Heracles is Greek, not Scythian, and so he misinterprets the interaction. Ergo, when their interactions turn violent, Hippolyte is slain. Her initial willingness to gift her belt to Heracles in Apollodorus’s version underscores this interpretation, with the Amazon’s friendly overtures developing into combat. Apollodorus blames the machinations of Hera for the ensuing battle between Heracles and Hippolyte, but the events are nonetheless reminiscent of misunderstood Scythian courtship customs as suggested by Aelian. This same pattern—combat between a male and female warrior resulting in marriage—appears frequently in later folklore as well through the theme of bride-taking, which I will discuss more thoroughly in later chapters.

Yet, for both Diodorus and Apollodorus, and indeed, most of their contemporaries, Hippolyte’s importance ends the moment she parts with Ares’s belt. It is only the nature of that parting and the immediate results that differ for each author. It is important to remember that these accounts primarily concern the exploits of Heracles. Though Hippolyte, too, is the offspring of a deity, her divine lineage through Ares is inconsequential compared to that of Heracles, one of Zeus’s numerous offspring. Furthermore, no matter her military prowess or royal status, like too many other women in antiquity, Hippolyte is but an accessory in the hero’s narrative.^[6] In a folklore sense, she is a donor, possessing an item of value the hero needs to fulfil his quest; once that item is gone, her personal value diminishes. For Apollodorus, her loss of the belt and her death coincide, thus definitively ending her narrative. For Diodorus, her agency and significance end with the loss of the belt, resulting in her capture.

Here is where the other role sometimes attributed to Hippolyte begins: wife of Theseus.^[7] In some variations of Heracles’s ninth labor, Theseus accompanies him on his journey to Themiscyra. In the variations in which Hippolyte survives her initial encounter with Heracles, whether as a captive or as a willing companion, she follows Heracles and Theseus back to Athens. In the most common variation, Hippolyte joins them because she has fallen in love with Theseus, gladly becoming his consort or in some instances, his wife – a role taboo to Amazons.^[8] It is this version that Shakespeare portrays in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yet, one detail upon which ancient authors all agreed is that Theseus’s relationship with an Amazon, if it occurred at all, was brief and ill-fated. The notion of a romantic relationship between a Greek hero and a foreign barbarian was not unheard of, but the double foreignness of the Amazon—being both a warrior woman and a barbarian—necessitated a tragic end to such a relationship.

There could be no more tragic end to a relationship than all-out war, and war is what befell Athens as a result of Theseus’s marriage to an Amazon. Ancient accounts of the Attic War differ, to include the names of the primary actors involved, so I will also discuss the war in the next section as it pertains to Antiope. However, as some accounts of Hippolyte’s fate see her surviving the war, I will address it now. Sometimes the Attic War begins because Theseus puts aside Hippolyte to wed a woman named Phaedra, and so the scorned Amazon leads an army against him, invading Greece to exact her revenge. Other times, the Amazons invade Greece to recover their kidnapped sister, only to discover that she has not, in fact, been kidnapped, or else that she has fallen in love with her captor.^[9] According to Plutarch, the Amazons, led by Hippolyte, nearly defeat the Athenians several times after having cut a path of destruction across Greece to siege their city. After several months of brutal fighting, both sides at times gaining the upper hand, the war eventually concludes with a peace treaty, which Hippolyte is typically credited for mediating. Plutarch contends that, had the Amazons not agreed to peace, they may have ultimately defeated the Athenians.^[10] However, other authors posit that the Amazons were only able to make it as far as Athens in the first place because they enlisted the aid of other Scythian tribes; as soon as their Scythian allies desert them, the Amazons are soundly defeated, fleeing Greece in shambles.^[11]

Some accounts of Hippolyte’s fate see her dying during the war, but others see her survive, at least, for a time. As described by Quintus of Smyrna, Hippolyte returns to Themiscyra only to die in a hunting accident shortly thereafter, killed by a wayward spear intended for a stag. The name of the Amazon who threw the spear varies, but usually it is Molpadia or Penthesilea. Pausanias relays yet another variation of Hippolyte’s fate as recounted by the Megarians. Along with a handful of other Amazons, Hippolyte survives the final battle against the Greeks and retreats as far as the city of Megara. Once there, Hippolyte realizes that she cannot survive the rest of the journey to Themiscyra, and so she dies of a broken heart. The Megarians subsequently build a tomb to commemorate the site of her death, one of many such Amazon tombs peppering Greece.^[12] 

The myriad deaths ascribed to Hippolyte—murdered by Heracles, falling in battle, dying in a hunting accident, succumbing to a broken heart—contribute to the theory that Hippolyte is an amalgamation of several different women whose narratives became conflated over the years. Considering that these narratives originated centuries before the Greeks developed written literature, such conflation is not unexpected. In fact, the confusion and contamination of warrior women’s narratives is a common theme throughout my research. While the possibility remains that the mythical Amazon Hippolyte may have been inspired by a real Scythian queen, the complicated and contradictory biography the Greeks provide reveals more about how the Greeks viewed warrior women than about how such women actually lived or perceived themselves.^[13] 

That’s it for Hippolyte. Next installment, we’ll discuss an Amazon queen whose narrative often overlaps with Hippolyte’s, so much so that the two are often confused for each other. Next up will be Antiope!

Citations:

[1] Ballesteros-Pastor, “Bears and Bees in Themiscyra,” 335; Mayor, Amazons: Lives & Legends, 151.

[2] Hippolyte’s war-belt is mentioned by numerous ancient authors, including Homer, Euripides, Herodotus, Apollonius Rhodius, Apollodorus, and Diodorus.

[3] Diodorus, Bibliotheca historica, 2.46.3 – 2.46.4.

[4] Justinus, Historiarum Philippicarum T. Pompeii Trogi, 2.4.19 – 2.4.25.

[5] Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, 2.5.9.

[6] Chrystal, Women at War, xiii.

[7] More often, the role of Theseus’ Amazon wife is given to Antiope, Hippolyte’s sister, further entangling the two women’s narratives.

[8] Isocrates, Panathenaicus, 12.193.

[9] Ibid., 12.193.

[10] Plutarch, “Theseus,” Bíoi, 27.5.

[11] Justinus, Historiarum Philippicarum T. Pompeii Trogi, 2.4.26 – 2.4.30; Diodorus, Bibliotheca historica, 4.28.2.

[12] Pausanias, Helládos Periḗgēsis, 1.41.7.

[13] Penrose, Postcolonial Amazons, 3-4.