Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(35)

No explanation is offered for why Admete might want Hippolyta’s war belt, only that she has set her heart on it. Perhaps she has a yearning for something which Pseudo-Apollodorus describes as being a gift from Ares, and a symbol of Hippolyta’s supremacy over all the Amazons; perhaps she wishes she too could wear brightly coloured leggings and swing a war axe. So Heracles sets out in his ship, kills a large number of men in assorted fracas en route, and arrives at the harbour of Themiscyra. Considering the reputation for slaughter which must accompany Heracles, Hippolyta behaves in an extraordinarily generous manner. She approaches him, not armed to the teeth and ready to kill this dangerous adventurer, but peacefully, to ask why he has come.

When he explains that he wants her belt, she doesn’t argue, or barter. She simply promises to give it to him. This is scarcely the behaviour of the bellicose barbarian women we have been led to expect. Why should Hippolyta give away her prized belt to a man she has never met before, who only wants it as a trinket or status symbol for a girl she has never met at all? The belt was a present from Ares, after all, and as we know from other stories, gifts from gods are enormously valuable to heroes: Perseus required a whole set of them to take on Medusa. And yet Hippolyta is willing to hand over her father’s belt without any argument. Later authors would suggest an instant attraction formed between the two heroes, which serves to explain Hippolyta’s kindness. The notion that this barbarian woman might simply be generous with her fighting equipment is obviously too strange to stand: there must be romance in the air. But generosity at first sight is all we see in the scene on the Metropolitan Museum pottery fragment, which is four or five hundred years older than this written account.

The Amazons and the Greeks end up fighting, in spite of this seemingly auspicious beginning. The guilty party is (as so often in Greek myth) the goddess Hera, whose malevolence is both boundless and multi-directional. Her dislike of Heracles is unwavering, caused by the fact that Zeus fathered him with a mortal woman, Alcmene: there are few things that irritate Hera more than the offspring of her husband’s many infidelities. To stir up trouble against Heracles in this instance, Hera disguises herself as an Amazon and tells the other women that these xenoi – strangers, or foreigners (from which we take the word ‘xenophobia’) – are kidnapping their queen. The Amazons pick up their arms and hasten to see what is happening to the queen, who has been talking to Heracles on his ship. Heracles, seeing a bunch of armed women approaching on horseback, assumes he has been tricked. Showing his customary calm reason, he asks no questions but simply kills Hippolyta and takes her belt. Plutarch also has him take her axe away with him17 (those who choose to see the belt purely as a piece of sexual symbolism tend to overlook this part. One hesitates to imagine what a woman’s fighting-axe might represent, but I feel confident Freud would be no help at all). Heracles and his men fight the Amazons and then he sails away to Troy. Hippolyta’s generosity was worth nothing when set against the paranoia of a murderous man.

Pausanias, in his Description of Greece, tells us about the temple of Zeus at Olympia which has the labours of Heracles carved onto it. The taking of Hippolyta’s belt was placed above the doors. Additionally, on the base of the throne of the statue of Zeus (a huge gold-and ivory-decorated figure) is a scene of an Amazonomachy. Pausanias looks at this scene of Heracles fighting the Amazons and carefully counts the number of combatants on each side: twenty-nine. He also notes that Theseus is fighting alongside Heracles.

In some versions of their respective myths, Theseus and Heracles team up against the Amazons, as on the relief which Pausanias admires. In other versions, Theseus makes his own separate voyage to the Amazons after Heracles had done the same. The biographer Plutarch discusses these variations in his Life of Theseus.18 In the earliest versions he has found of the story, Theseus receives the Amazon Antiope as a reward for his bravery in fighting her sisters. But Plutarch finds this unconvincing: none of the other men on the Heraclean expedition take an Amazon captive, he explains. Plutarch finds the alternative explanation more plausible. He mentions the author Bion, who claimed that Theseus took the Amazon by deceit (this would be very much in keeping with Theseus’ attitude to women, it must be said. As Plutarch drily puts it, there are other stories about Theseus’ marriages which had neither good beginnings nor happy endings).19 By nature, Bion says, the Amazons were philandrous – ‘fond of men’ – and didn’t flee from Theseus, but rather sent him gifts as a welcome guest. He invited the Amazon who brought the gifts onto his ship and then set sail with her still on board.

This, then, provides the cause for the second Amazonomachy: when the Amazons invade Athens to try to reclaim their lost sister, Antiope. Plutarch says this Amazon war was neither a minor nor womanish task for Theseus. He did not underestimate the perils of fighting these formidable warriors, and nor should we. The Amazons, Plutarch adds, wouldn’t have made their camp nor fought hand-to-hand battles between the Pnyx and the Museion (two hills not far from the centre of Athens) if they hadn’t been fearless in conquering the surrounding country. An Amazon invasion, in other words, is impressive. They make sure they control the surrounding area before they take on a city. In spite of Theseus having a whole city of men at his disposal, the war lasts for three months. Cleidemus, one of Plutarch’s sources, says that hostilities ended when Hippolyta secured a treaty between the two sides (Cleidemus gives Antiope’s name as Hippolyta, Plutarch explains). And when the tragedian Aeschylus describes the Amazons fighting in Athens, he imagines they built their own citadel on the Hill of Ares, to rival those that Theseus had built;20 in other words, this Amazon battle wasn’t just a scrap or guerrilla warfare, but an all-out siege.