Machlyes

The lake lay brackish and pale under the Libyan sun, its edges crusted white with salt, its reeds bent stiff in the wind coming off the water. Once a year that shore filled with the sound of girls striking one another. Sticks cracked against sticks. Stones found skin. Where the river Triton spilled into the shallows of Lake Tritonis, the unmarried women of the lake gathered into two companies and fought a real battle with real weapons, and the older people stood along the bank to watch who would fall.

The rite belonged to a festival of Athena, or of the goddess the Greeks decided to call Athena when they arrived and found her already worshipped there. Before the fighting began, the whole people chose the most beautiful of the maidens, fitted her with a Corinthian helmet and a full suit of Greek armour, set her in a chariot, and drove her the length of the lakeshore for everyone to see. Then the rest were divided and set against each other. The rule of the rite was hard. A girl who took a wound and later died of it was afterward named a false virgin, her death read as evidence that she had lied about her chastity. The ones who came through were counted honest, and the lake kept the custom for another year.

The people who lived along that water were the Machlyes. Herodotus set them beside a neighbouring tribe, the Auseans, the two divided by the Triton and told apart by something as small as the way they wore their hair, the Machlyes long behind, the Auseans long in front. In his account there is nothing monstrous about them. They were a Libyan people with a severe festival and a particular haircut, and that was all.

The strangeness came later, and it came from Rome. Pliny the Elder, gathering every marvel he could find at the margins of the earth, recorded on the authority of a writer named Calliphanes that the Machlyes lived beyond the Nasamones and were androgynous, each of them carrying both sexes in one body and able to perform the office of either by turns. Aristotle, he added, had specified the anatomy: the left breast a man’s, the right breast a woman’s. One person split down the centre into halves that did not agree.

No source lingers on their faces, their height, or the colour of their skin. What survived the crossing from Libya to the Greek page and then to the Roman one was the single detail strange enough to travel, the divided body, and around it only the long hair and the salt lake and the girls with their sticks. Everything else fell away. A whole people reduced to one anatomical rumour and a haircut.

How the story of the divided body began is not difficult to guess, and the guess is an old one. A people whose young women trained and fought and bled in public, whose men wore their hair streaming down their backs, would have looked, to a passing Greek or to a Roman reading that Greek, like a place where the usual arrangement of men and women had been rubbed out. From there it is a short step to a body that is both at once. The marvel may be nothing more than a rumour of the ritual, hardened across centuries of retelling until it set into flesh. Nobody who wrote about them had met them.

There is a bleak scene folded into the account, easy to miss under the ceremony. A girl goes down in the melee, is carried off, and does not recover, and the verdict that follows is not grief but suspicion: she must have lied. The rite did not only test the maidens of the Machlyes. It killed some of them, and then judged the dead.

Whatever they truly were, the Machlyes were self-contained in a way that clearly unsettled the men who described them. A body holding both sexes needs nothing outside itself to carry on. A tribe whose women arm themselves and fight is a tribe that does not wait on its men for defence. That self-sufficiency, more than any single wonder, is what the outsiders kept returning to, half in awe and half in unease, as though the Machlyes had quietly opted out of a bargain everyone else was bound by.

Their weakness was the same one that afflicts every marvel at the edge of a map. It could not survive being approached. The nearer the Greek world crept to Lake Tritonis with its settlers and its traders, the thinner the wonder wore, and what came back was haircuts and festivals rather than monsters. Their own rite thinned them further, one funeral at a time. By the age of the later writers the Machlyes had folded back into the ordinary Berber peoples of North Africa, and the divided body went with them into the margins of old books, where it has stayed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who were the Machlyes?

The Machlyes were a legendary tribe of ancient Libya, known only from Greek and Roman writers. They lived on the shores of Lake Tritonis in the north-west of the country, beside a neighbouring people called the Auseans, and were remembered chiefly for a violent yearly festival and for later reports that their bodies were androgynous.

Were the Machlyes really hermaphrodites?

The claim comes from Pliny the Elder, who wrote that the Machlyes were androgynous and could perform the function of either sex, with Aristotle adding that their left breast was male and their right female. Earlier, Herodotus described them without any such strangeness, so the androgyny is most likely a later legend, probably grown from the tribe’s warlike women and long-haired men rather than any real anatomy.

What was the Machlyes’ ritual battle?

At a yearly festival of the goddess the Greeks identified with Athena, the tribe’s unmarried women were divided into two companies and fought each other with sticks and stones. Any girl who died of her wounds was declared a false virgin, taken as proof she had lied about her chastity, while a chosen beauty was armoured in a Corinthian helmet and driven along the lakeshore in a chariot beforehand.

Where did the Machlyes live?

The Machlyes lived in Libya, on the shores of Lake Tritonis near the river Triton, in what Greek and Roman geographers treated as the far edge of the known world. Pliny placed them beyond the tribe of the Nasamones, and later writers came to identify them with the Berber peoples of North Africa.

Which ancient writers described the Machlyes?

The Machlyes appear in Herodotus, who recorded their festival and their long hair in the fifth century BCE, and in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History in the first century CE, which preserved the androgyny reported by Calliphanes and Aristotle. Nearly everything known about the tribe survives through these Greek and Roman accounts rather than any source of their own.

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