Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(34)

The tight leg-coverings (and sometimes also long sleeves on their tunics) are shown in incredible geometric detail on red-figure vases. A krater in the Metropolitan Museum in New York (attributed to the gloriously named Painter of the Woolly Satyrs in the mid-fifth century BCE)10 shows an Amazonomachy – a battle between Greeks and Amazons. The Amazons are wearing the most intricate designs on their leggings: chequerboard squares, tight zig-zags, hollow diamonds within a diamond grid. One has an armoured tunic, and another wears a decorated cap. One has the skin of a large cat as a cloak: his paw hangs against her thigh. Two Greek men are fighting these women: they are facing in opposite directions. The one facing to our left, closest to the viewer, is down on the ground. He is cowering behind his large round shield, as an Amazon on horseback thrusts her spear at him. We can see the sole of one of his bare feet; the Amazons have lace-up ankle boots protecting theirs. The other Greek draws back his spear to attack the two Amazons in front of him. Both women have their arms raised as they wield their battleaxes. Follow the scene around the pot and we find men riding a chariot to come and help their comrades.

There are a number of things which are remarkable about this scene. The first is that the Amazons are far more ornately clad than the Greeks. The men’s plain tunics contrast with their own finely decorated shields, but the Amazons are a riot of pattern and texture. The second is that this is a pretty even battle and the result is in question. One man is down, one is outnumbered, but more men are coming to join the fray. The men fight alone, as does the Amazon on horseback. The two women on foot fight alongside each other, comrades in arms. This is surely why Diodorus Siculus could say that the Amazons were ‘superior in strength and eager for war’.11 These women aren’t fighting because they’ve been attacked and they have to, they’re fighting because they’re warriors and they were born to. Another intriguing feature of the painting is the type of axe which two Amazons are wielding. The handle is long and thin, the blade sharply pointed. Amazons were so closely associated with this particular type of weapon (securis, to give it its Latin name) that Pliny the Elder tells us that it was invented by Penthesilea, the Amazon queen who fought at Troy.12 Not only were Amazons respected fighters, but they were innovators in the art of war. No wonder Homer called them antianeirai,13 ‘equivalent to men’. Homer also describes war belts, incidentally – the leather and metal belts worn by the great warriors of the Trojan War – and he too uses the word zōstēr, the same word other authors use for Hippolyta’s belt.

So when Heracles is sent to acquire Hippolyta’s belt, this is the object he is looking for. There is assuredly a sexual subtext to a man – and particularly a man so renowned for his multiple, complex and sometimes violent personal relationships – seeking to remove a particular item of clothing from a woman, particularly something worn around the waist or hips. But trying to convey that by translating the word zōstēr as something other than ‘war belt’ costs far more than it is worth; Hippolyta deserves better. Besides, there is often a sexual, indeed a sexually aggressive subtext in Heracles’ adventures: we would do well to remember that Heracles is performing his labours only as a penance for the murder of his wife and children during temporary insanity (this part of his story was wisely omitted from the Disney animated film Hercules, which is by far my favourite cinematic adaptation of any Greek myth, omissions notwithstanding).

Heracles arrives at the Amazons’ home, which is placed most frequently at Themiscyra, on the southern coast of the Black Sea, although they are occasionally placed in Libya. His reception is, perhaps, surprising. The warrior women do not attack him. Instead, he is received by Hippolyta and her women in a scene we can see on a fourth-century BCE pottery fragment held by the Metropolitan Museum.14 A somewhat uncomfortable Heracles stands, making his case to Hippolyta: his raised eyebrows and wide eyes give him an anxious expression. Amazons surround him, armed with axes, so perhaps this is what is alarming him. Hippolyta sits serenely in front of her guest. She is wearing a belt (it looks like leather studded with metal discs). Perhaps this is the very one he has come to claim.

We can read a more detailed version of this story in Pseudo-Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca. Eurystheus orders Heracles to bring back Hippolyta’s belt for his daughter, Admete. We glean some extra information about Hippolyta here: she rules over the Amazons, a people skilled in war, who live around the River Thermodon.15 Pseudo-Apollodorus describes their lives as andrian – ‘manly’. He then repeats one of the stranger myths to appear in the Amazon story: that they ironed one breast to aid the successful throwing of spears or firing of arrows (sometimes it is more dramatic still: surgical removal). This is not a practice with which the Amazons are associated earlier in literature (Pseudo-Apollodorus is writing in either the first or second century CE), or in visual representations. None of the vase paintings mentioned above shows single-breasted Amazons, and none of the Amazons seems to be struggling to cope with her weapon. Indeed, vase paintings often show another female figure – the goddess Artemis, who was renowned for her hunting skills – with a bow and arrow, and she holds the bow at arm’s length from her torso. Even the most pneumatic breasts would be no hindrance.16

So where does the mysterious breast-removal idea come from? The Greeks were enormous fans of what we might call folk-etymology, but a less generous person might describe as nonsense. They loved to find meanings in names through the words which appeared to lurk within them (the obsession that some fifth-century BCE intellectuals had with doing this is mocked magnificently by the comedian Aristophanes in his play The Clouds). ‘Amazon’ was believed to derive from the negating prefix ‘a-’ and the word mastos, meaning ‘breast’ (we obviously derive our word ‘mastitis’ from this Greek word). But the name ‘Amazon’ wasn’t Greek: there are several suggestions as to which language it may have been borrowed from, but we don’t know its origin for sure. The one thing we do know is that it was a loan-word for the Greeks, a word taken from another language. Attempts to impose Greek meaning onto it were a diversion for intellectuals with too much free time, but nothing more meaningful than that.