Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(40)

We only need to remember how Achilles behaved after he killed Troy’s earlier defender, Hector: defiling his corpse by dragging it behind his chariot and refusing to allow his burial. Achilles’ treatment of Penthesilea is, in contrast, a model of respect. He carries her body as though she were a comrade, and the Greeks return her to Priam without hesitation: no bargaining, no arguing. Priam and his men burn her on a pyre. The funeral is costly and ceremonial: she is treated as a beloved daughter.46 They put her bones in a casket and inter them next to the bones of Laomedon, father of Priam and once-king of Troy. It is hard to imagine any fallen warrior being more lauded or lamented than Penthesilea, by friend and enemy alike.

So Penthesilea is no less a warrior because she died so quickly at the hands of Achilles. No matter how great a fighter someone is, Achilles is always better, faster, more bloodthirsty. The act of seeking to fight him at all – given his extraordinary martial superiority – is the sign of a true warrior. And Penthesilea achieves what many warriors strive to achieve throughout the Iliad: personal fame and a glorious death. These may seem to us like illusory goals. No death looks glorious up close, least of all one in battle. And glory – the estimation of our peers – is worth what, in the end? Achilles, once dead in the Underworld, tells Odysseus that he would rather be a living peasant than a king among the dead. The glory which he pursued so angrily throughout the Iliad was not, in the end, worth dying for.

But that is another poem, and Odysseus is many years away from his visit to the dead; Achilles still lives and breathes. So, by the standards of the heroic code which apply during the war, at least (Achilles doesn’t change his mind until after he has died, which is obviously too late in every sense), Penthesilea has lived and died well. She has sought to be purified for the accidental killing of her sister, she has brought hope and inspiration to the Trojans (who will continue to hold out against the Greeks until they are tricked by the wooden-horse wheeze). She has fought as an ally to a battered city, and received the assistance of the gods she resembles. She is buried with full honour beside the king of the city she tried to save. What better hero could she have been?

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Fast forward to the twenty-first century and we can perhaps answer that question. Wonder Woman – as played by Gal Gadot in the Patty Jenkins film – is the ultimate warrior. Diana – to give Wonder Woman her actual name – is the daughter of Hippolyta (Connie Neilsen) and niece of Antiope (Robin Wright). Penthesilea is a named (but minor) character in the film. These Amazons live in Themyscira: almost identically named to the Ancient Greek Amazon homeland, but not quite.

Diana grows up wanting to be a great warrior like her aunt, but her mother tries to prevent her training in any kind of combat. Inevitably, Diana trains with Antiope in secret until Hippolyta finds out. She allows them to continue only if Diana trains to be the best Amazon warrior there has ever been. Hippolyta tells Diana the history of the Amazons as a bedtime story: Zeus created them to protect humankind from the ravages of war, which are orchestrated by Ares. He also left them a weapon, should Ares ever return, known as the Godkiller. Diana believes this to be the sword with which she is learning to fight. Hippolyta also tells Diana that she was not born but rather sculpted from clay and brought to life with Zeus’ help.

It’s an intriguing reworking of the familiar story. Firstly, we might note that Diana has something in common with Pandora: she is made from clay but given an animated existence by a god. A more significant shift is that Ares has gone from being the father of Amazons – and protector, in terms of the armour he gives Penthesilea – to the enemy of Amazons and mortals alike. It is a feature of our times that we now view war as an unadulterated evil. The ancient idea that you might wish to be good at war (as contained in Athene’s offer to Paris, in the hope of winning the golden apple), or that skill in defensive war might be desirable, has largely disappeared. Now, better informed about the nature and consequences of war perhaps (though proportionately many fewer of us have first-hand experience of it), we are more likely to desire peace than martial prowess. We particularly tend to feel this about the First World War, during which this film is set. Diana is drawn into the war when an Allied spy, Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), crashes into the sea just off Themyscira, pursued by enemy fighters. She saves his life and he explains the conflict taking place outside Themyscira’s enchanted borders. Diana realizes that the huge death toll he describes must be the result of more than human cruelty: she concludes that Ares has returned and only she and her Godkiller sword can destroy him. She decides she must accompany Steve back to London and try to hunt down the war god. Her mother Hippolyta tells her that if she leaves she will never be able to return. But for Diana, her responsibility is clear. She must protect and save those who are dying in the war, no matter what the personal cost.

Again, we see a shift in the role of the Amazons. They are still the warriors we saw in our ancient sources, but they have deliberately held themselves apart from human affairs, although they have been cast in a semi-divine, protective role. Men have not sought them out because they don’t even know the Amazons exist. And there is no hint of Amazons as aggressors, a race which will attack to avenge a perceived wrong (as they are sometimes depicted in ancient sources). These modern Amazons don’t want a war; they do everything in their power to avoid one. It is a single, lone Amazon who decides she must fight an immortal enemy. In this, she is unlike any of her Amazonian foremothers. She may seem to resemble Penthesilea, heading onto the battlefield to fight Achilles. But unlike Penthesilea with her twelve Amazon comrades, Diana goes alone. She will acquire a gang once she gets to London, but none of them is an Amazon. Perhaps it was a question of emphasis: Wonder Woman might not seem so wondrous if there are a whole bunch of women who can fight almost as well as she can. Or perhaps it is simply another instance of the regrettable tendency in late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century film-making to cast one woman among a gang of men in adventure stories (the original Star Wars films are an excellent example, although the phenomenon tends to be known after a small blue Belgian character: the Smurfette).