Amazons

Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: A nation of mounted warrior women, master archers and riders sworn to Ares and Artemis, who governed themselves entirely without men.
Role in Mythos: They served as the great foreign adversary of Greek heroes, the test that Heracles, Theseus, and Achilles each had to face at the edge of the civilized world.
Relation to Humans: They kept no permanent place for men in their society, meeting neighbouring peoples only to conceive daughters and returning or refusing the sons. To the Greeks they were both a threat to be conquered and a mirror held up to their own assumptions about who was allowed to fight.

Dust rose along the Thermodon before the riders were visible, a brown haze hanging over the river plain where the grass had been beaten flat by hooves. Then they came on at a canter, women in close-fitting trousers and soft leather caps, bows already strung, quivers knocking at their hips. They rode as though the horse were an extension of the leg, loosing arrows at full gallop and wheeling away before anyone could close the gap. The Greeks who told these stories gave them a name that most likely meant nothing more exotic than warriors, and they placed their homeland at the rim of the known world, on the southern shore of the Black Sea, in a kingdom that had decided it could do without men.

That kingdom had a capital, Themiscyra, set on the banks of the Thermodon river in the region the Greeks called Pontus. The arrangement there was simple and, to a Greek audience, faintly scandalous. The Amazons ruled themselves, fought their own wars, and raised only their daughters. For the continuation of the line they met with men of neighbouring peoples for a season and no longer, then sent any sons back to their fathers or refused to keep them at all. Daughters were taught the bow, the spear, and the horse from the moment they could hold them. The whole society was built around the one activity Greek women were most firmly kept away from, and that inversion is half the reason the Amazons mattered so much to the people who invented them.

Their patrons were the hard gods. They were said to be children or devotees of Ares, the war god, and they kept a particular devotion to Artemis, the huntress who ran wild and answered to no husband. The oldest tradition makes their first queen a woman named Otrera, sometimes called a consort of Ares and the mother of the famous Amazon queens who came after. She taught herself to fight with sword and bow, then taught the women around her, and the nation grew from that. Some versions credit her with founding the great shrine of Artemis at Ephesus, which gave the myth a real building to point at. The stories disagree on the details of her line, as myths usually do, but they agree on the shape of it: one woman, armed, who decided other women should be armed too.

The breast story is the part everyone remembers and the part that is almost certainly wrong. Ancient writers, reaching for a Greek root, claimed the name came from a-mazos, without breast, and explained that the Amazons cut or burned off the right breast in childhood so it would not foul the bowstring. The art never shows this. Vase painters and sculptors gave them two breasts and dressed them in the bright patterned clothing the Greeks associated with the East, trousers and long sleeves and pointed caps, with crescent-moon shields and the double-bladed axe called the labrys. The likelier origin of the name is a foreign word for warriors that the Greeks heard and then tried, badly, to make sense of in their own tongue.

The heroes came to them one by one. For his ninth labour Heracles was sent to fetch the war-belt of the Amazon queen Hippolyta, a girdle given to her by Ares as a mark of her standing above the rest. In the gentler version she meets him at the shore and simply agrees to hand it over, until Hera, disguised among the warriors, spreads the rumour that the Greeks have come to abduct their queen. The Amazons charge, the truce dies, and Heracles kills Hippolyta and takes the belt from her body. Theseus sailed in his wake and carried off another of their number, Antiope, back to Athens. The Amazons did not let that stand. They crossed half the world on horseback and laid siege to the city itself, fighting in the streets below the Acropolis, and the Athenians built that battle into the stonework of the Parthenon, where it stood for the triumph of their order over everything wild and foreign.

The most haunting of them arrived too late to matter and is remembered anyway. Penthesilea came to Troy after Hector was dead, leading her warriors to fight for the failing city, some say to wash off the guilt of having accidentally killed her own sister Hippolyta on a hunt. She cut through the Greek line until she met Achilles. He drove his spear through her, and as she fell he lifted her helmet and saw her face, and the story has it that he fell in love with the woman he had just killed, too late to do anything but grieve. It is one of the cruelest small scenes in all of Greek myth.

Their power was real and specific. They were the finest horse-archers the Greek imagination could produce, able to shoot accurately at the gallop and fight as cavalry centuries before Greek armies trusted such things, and they fought with the axe and the light crescent shield in close work. Their weakness was the one the heroes always exploited. They were mortal women, not monsters, and they could be deceived, ambushed, and outlasted; Hera’s lie undid Hippolyta, an abduction drew them into a war on hostile ground, and one by one their queens fell to single combat against the greatest fighters of the age. They could be beaten. The Greeks needed them to be, because the whole point of the Amazon was that she was magnificent and then defeated.

There may have been real women behind the dust. Out on the steppe between the Black Sea and the Caspian, archaeologists keep opening graves of Scythian and Sarmatian women buried with bows, arrows, swords, and the bones of horses, some of them with battle injuries, some in gold headdresses. Herodotus already guessed at the connection, claiming the Sarmatians were born of Scythians who took Amazon wives. The Greeks met horse peoples whose women rode and shot and sometimes died fighting, and out of that meeting they built a nation at the edge of the map and spent the next thousand years conquering it in stone and paint.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who were the Amazons in Greek mythology?

The Amazons were a nation of warrior women in Greek mythology who lived at the edge of the Greek world, most often placed at Themiscyra on the Thermodon river by the southern shore of the Black Sea. They governed themselves without men, raised only their daughters, and were renowned as horse-archers devoted to the war god Ares and the huntress Artemis.

Did the Amazons really cut off one breast?

Almost certainly not. The idea comes from an ancient Greek attempt to explain the name as a-mazos, meaning “without breast,” with the claim that Amazons removed the right breast to draw a bow more easily. Greek art consistently depicts Amazons with both breasts, and the name more likely derives from a foreign word for warriors that the Greeks reinterpreted.

What happened between Heracles and the Amazon queen Hippolyta?

For his ninth labour, Heracles was sent to bring back the war-belt of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. In the common version she agrees to give it to him peacefully, but the goddess Hera, disguised as an Amazon, convinces the warriors that Heracles plans to kidnap their queen. A battle breaks out, Heracles kills Hippolyta, and he takes the belt from her body.

How did Penthesilea die?

Penthesilea, an Amazon queen, came to fight for Troy after Hector’s death and was killed in battle by the Greek hero Achilles. As she died, Achilles removed her helmet, saw her face, and was struck with grief and love for the warrior he had just slain. Some traditions say she had come to Troy seeking to atone for accidentally killing her sister Hippolyta during a hunt.

Were the Amazons based on real people?

They may have been inspired by real steppe cultures. Archaeologists have excavated graves of Scythian and Sarmatian women buried with weapons, horses, and battle wounds in the lands between the Black Sea and the Caspian. The historian Herodotus connected the Sarmatians to the Amazons directly, suggesting the Greek myth grew out of contact with horse peoples whose women fought.