Slavic Warrior Women, pt. 7: Penthesilea

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 7! Today we’ll be talking about my personal favorite Amazon, none other than Penthesilea, who fell defending the walls of Troy against the invading Greeks.

Alongside Hippolyte and Antiope, Penthesilea is one of the Amazons most well-known in contemporary culture thanks to her recurrent appearance in works of art and literature in the interceding millennia.^[1] Yet, these women share more than just fame. Like Hippolyte and Antiope, Penthesilea is a proud queen as well as a warrior. She likewise confronts a legendary demi-god. Where Hippolyte and Antiope face off with Heracles and Theseus, Penthesilea duels none other than Achilles. All three also serve as key combatants in famous wars that likely have some basis in real events, even if those events did not unfold precisely as described.^[2] Where Hippolyte and Antiope served in the Attic War, Penthesilea served at Troy. Numerous ancient authors discuss Penthesilea’s participation in the Trojan War, including Diodorus, Apollodorus, and others whose works survive only in summary by subsequent writers, like Marcus Justinus’s epitome of Pompeius Trogus’s Philippic Histories.

Filling the leadership void in the aftermath of the Attic War, Penthesilea becomes the queen of the Amazons. Though authors disagree on the identity of Penthesilea’s mother, with some crediting Otrere, who was also the mother of Hippolyte and Antiope, and others saying she was born to a Thracian woman, Ares is nonetheless her father.^[3] She is as fierce a warrior as any of the war god’s daughters. According to some authors, it was Penthesilea who slew Hippolyte in a hunting accident, though others lay the blame with another Amazon named Molpadia. Most authors posit that Hippolyte’s death, if it came at the hand of her sister during a hunt, was accidental. Several authors, including Diodorus of Sicily and Quintus of Smyrna, cite Penthesilea’s accidental killing of Hippolyte as the stimulus for her participation in the Trojan War: it was penance by means of a suicide mission.^[4]  

Racked with grief and possibly guilt, thus seeking atonement through a valiant death, Penthesilea leads a small band of Amazons to Troy to help defend the city against the invading Greeks. While defending Troy, Penthesilea and her fellow Amazons cut down numerous Greek soldiers, though her sisters-in-arms each fall eventually to Greek spear or sword. In most versions of her narrative, Penthesilea fights so well that she draws the attention of Achilles, who does not identify her gender beneath her armor. They fight an epic duel amid the chaos of the battlefield, but no Amazon, no matter how brave, heroic, or skilled, could hope to defeat the likes of Achilles. Penthesilea is doomed the moment he notices her. It is only as she is dying of a mortal wound—pierced through the breast in a single stroke that also takes her horse—that Achilles realizes his opponent is a woman, and so he falls in love as only a tragic hero could.^[5] According to Quintus of Smyrna, however, Achilles is aware that he is fighting an Amazon throughout the duel since it is Penthesilea who calls him out by name and challenges him. Therefore, her death is as much a result of her own hubris as of Achilles’s spear, though the end result is the same: Achilles falls in love as Penthesilea takes her final breath, a detail that some ancient authors viewed as diminishing Achilles’s power, while others interpreted it as an example of love conquering death.^[6]

In keeping with the ancient moral imperative to be humble in victory as presented by Herodotus and Diodorus, Penthesilea’s death at the hands of Achilles is inevitable not only because of her status as a foreign barbarian and a woman, but because of her arrogance. Quintus of Smyrna’s effusive praise of Penthesilea’s battle prowess, as some have observed, approaches the divine.^[7] Before she challenges Achilles, she is a valiant goddess of destruction, hewing through Greek opponents in a whirlwind of violence. However, she is not truly a goddess, but a mortal. The only fitting reward for such arrogance in a mortal is death, especially when that mortal is both a woman and a foreigner.

According to most authors, Penthesilea was the last Amazon worthy of the warrior’s mantle, with their civilization dwindling and disappearing after her death. Between the massive losses during their failed invasion of Greece and then the loss of the entire detachment that accompanied Penthesilea to Troy, though only ten women are named in that detachment, the Amazons had few warriors and leaders left to defend their homeland.^[8] Thus, their power and reputation all but vanished, with little mention of any Amazon again until Thalestris, who briefly consorts with Alexander the Great. However, even early historians dismissed Thalestris as a fabrication, an affair added to mythologize Alexander’s accomplishments and put him on par with legendary heroes like Heracles and Theseus. Since they interacted with Amazons, so, too, must he. Apart from her supposed liaison with Alexander, no mention is made of Thalestris.^[9] Thus, Penthesilea stands as the last great queen of the fictionalized Scythian Amazons, but she is not the last great queen Ancient Greco-Roman authors documented among the rest of the Scythians.

That’s it for Penthesilea. Next time, we’ll shift focus from Amazons to women whose narratives are rooted in history, not myth. While the Amazons likely trace back to real women—whose narratives were aggrandized and mythologized over centuries of existing in oral literature before ancient authors recorded them in written form—the Scythian queens I’ll discuss next are decidedly rooted in fact.

Citations:

[1] Chrystal, Women at War, 20 – 21.

[2] Barry S. Strauss, The Trojan War: A New History (Simon & Schuster, 2006): 7; Carol G. Thomas and Craig Conant, The Trojan War (University of Oklahoma Press, 2005): 2.

[3] Dowden, “Amazons: Development and Functions,” 99.

[4] Chrystal, Women at War, 22; Lee Fratantuono, “The Penthesilead of Quintus Smyrnaeus: A Study in Epic Reversal,” Wiener Studien 129 (2016): 208.

[5] Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, E.5.2.

[6] Marco Fantuzzi, Achilles in Love: Intertextual Studies (Oxford University Press, 2012): 278 and 285.

[7] Fratantuono, “Penthesilead of Quintus Smyrnaeus,” 222.

[8] Diodorus, Bibliotheca historica, 2.46.4 – 2.46.6.

[9] Strabo, Geographica, 11.5.4; Chrystal, Women at War, 25.