Searching for the Amazons

by John Man

  Still, there are a few things that can be said about the frieze’s purpose.

  You feel you should know who is who, and many have felt they do. But one thing we can’t say is that all these warriors are individuals. In fact, only three are identifiable – Heracles, because he always wore a lion skin, and Apollo and his sister Artemis, goddess of the hunt (Diana to the Romans), identified by their war chariot, drawn by deer as legend decreed. The rest are enigmatic. Take the panel that may show Achilles and Penthesilea. She is defeated, facing death, dressed in a negligee; he’s the rampant warrior, stark naked, wielding sword and shield. Is it really them? She’s begging for her life, and he seems to be hesitant. Is this the moment he falls in love with her, just as he must kill her? That doesn’t quite fit. In the myth, he sees her face when he removes her helmet after her death. So perhaps the two are Theseus and Antiope? Or is that Theseus in another slab, helping his wounded friend Pirithous? And those Amazons on horseback – are they Amazon queens (Hippolyte, Orithia and Antiope or Menalippe) or just any Amazons? Nothing quite works if you try to pin names and incidents on the figures.

  Perhaps that was never the intention. After all, the frieze was originally too high up for anyone to identify individual figures. It’s the themes that matter. Anyone, even at a distance, can see there is the rough balance of forces and morality. Five Amazons beat their opponents, eight Greeks do the same, four fights seem to be in the balance, three Amazons and Greeks are wounded. There are examples of compassion on both sides. Both care for companions, one Amazon restrains another, a Greek prevents another Greek from killing an Amazon. Achilles may or may not deliver the death-blow to the Amazon who may or may not be Penthesilea raising an arm, either in a gesture of submission or a request for mercy. In one panel, two Amazons flee towards an altar, which should grant the holy right of sanctuary, but two Greeks attack them, apparently ignoring this civilizing rule. Who’s going to win? It’s not clear. There’s a similar balance in the battle against the Centaurs.

  The only clue to the outcome is the panel showing Apollo and Artemis approaching in their deer-drawn chariot. Surely, this being Apollo’s temple, he will carry the Greeks to victory? This seems to be the bottom line: Greek warriors are matched in heroism and compassion by the heroism and compassion of their enemies, but Greek civilization will triumph over the forces of barbarism, because god, or rather a god, in this case Apollo, is on the Greek side.

  The question raised by all these tales and dramatic poses is: why? What on earth was so appealing about the Amazons that Greeks should have been obsessed by them?

  In historical terms, of course, the idea is rubbish. There was no nation of Amazons, as there were no Centaurs or Titans. That’s what we say, now, in the twenty-first century, because we have a well-developed sense of what is real and what is not, don’t we? Or do we? Are dreams real, in the same way that my desk is real? Obviously not: dreams are in my mind, cannot be reproduced, do not exist outside me. Yet I may be frightened by a dream, believe it to have meaning, may act upon it by talking about it, may decide I need psychiatric advice and end up paying money to seek understanding. So my dream can affect the real world. How real is the past? It exists in objects that endure, in the present consequences produced by past events, in evidence like writing and memory and the memory of others. But sometimes that evidence is as ephemeral as the snows of yesteryear. Sometimes we are deceived about the nature of ‘reality’. My mother had a suspicion that fairies existed, because as a child she had seen fake photographs that seemed to prove them to be real. In a world that knew nothing of evolution or the nature of comets, unicorns and dragons seemed like certainties. If God exists, as many assert, if the gods existed, as many once asserted, then perhaps Titans did, battling in the heavens with bolts of lightning. Those who had heard of men and women riders who were at one with their horses had no good reason to doubt the existence of Centaurs and Amazons.

  But still the question remains: why settle on Amazons as a major theme for legends and pseudo-histories and art?

  One suggestion is that perhaps all these mythical battles symbolize the recent real battles against the Persians. Well, almost certainly not. For one thing, Greeks portrayed Amazons long before the Persian Wars. For another, the Greeks were never shy of mentioning the Persians. Herodotus wrote about them at great length. Greek artists often portrayed Persians, showing the Greeks as victorious, the Persians as inferior. No writer suggested that Amazons were really Persians. There is no need for that hypothesis.

  There are three other possibilities. Here are two of them (we’ll get to the third in Chapter 2).

  First, fashion. The Greeks just loved their mythologies. As an artist or sculptor, you simply could not escape them. Years ago, I spent time with a tribe in the rainforests of eastern Ecuador. The Waorani had very little contact with other tribes, and decorated their bodies with red and black lines (red from the juice of achiote fruit and black from a mixture of charcoal and a hard, inedible fruit called genipa). Mostly, they made zig-zag patterns and dots on their arms. On their backs, men drew a solid black patch, the women a candlestick shape. Why? I was writing about these people. I wanted an explanation. What did the decorations mean? Did the zig-zag lines symbolize the meandering rivers? Were the dots insects? No, the patterns didn’t mean anything. ‘We think it’s nice,’ they said. ‘That’s how you paint bodies.’ In Ancient Greece, if you wanted to sponsor or make art, you focused on mythology, not the current world. That was how to add value to buildings and objects. That’s what you did if you painted or sculpted.

  Second, symbolism. It’s a fair assumption that Athenian art asserted Athenian values – civilization and high culture as opposed to barbarism. This was, after all, a culture in which men ruled. Athenian democracy excluded women. Women were to be kept in their place, in the home, at the loom. Female emotions were a sort of Greek unconscious, a threat to the stability of the family and the state. Given a chance, they explode and destroy, as Medea murdered her own children, or Antigone challenged the state by burying her brother Polynices against the instructions of her uncle King Creon.

  The Amazons symbolize the ultimate threat to Greek masculine ideals. Take Herodotus’s story of Amazons mating with Scythians. The Amazons – the women – are in control. They mate with the Scythian youths by choice. They refuse to join Scythian society. Instead, they entice the youths into forming a new tribe, the Sauromatians, who retain the old ways, with the Amazons as horse-riding, virginal man-killers. It looks as if the Scythian youths are in fact Greek youths going through their transition to adulthood, who never return to their own people but remain trapped in an endless youth, entirely dominated by their Amazon lovers. It is a cautionary tale.

  To these ‘facts’ add in xenophobia. It always boosts the self-image of a state to show how culturally inferior foreigners are. Athenians defended themselves on foot, with swords and spears. So did their main rivals, the Persians, who were therefore, though enemies, at least half-civilized. The deeper threat came from further afield, from the dark heart of Asia, the vast steppe-lands beyond the Black Sea. No one knew much about them, except that they rode horses and fought on horseback using powerful little bows to devastating effect. To cap it all, the women were as good at horseback archery as the men, and had their own sub-group, the Sauromatians. They were the Other, the ultimate threat – not a practical threat, because they were not about to invade, but a threat to Greek values.

  The elements are all in place to present the ultimate threat: women. The Amazons are sexy, demanding and beautiful, women through and through, and therefore at the mercy of dangerous emotions. They are also superb warriors, acting as an army when necessary. Both their femininity and pugnacity combine with the fact that they are aliens, barbarians – a people whose language sounds like bar-bar-bar. They are the very opposite of everything sophisticated Greek men stand for.

  That’s the point. The Greeks needed them as opponents, to be conquered whenever they appear,
even if only in stories. They must be defeated; but not easily. As the Bassae Frieze shows, they are equal to the Greeks in fighting ability. It takes real heroes to defeat them, plus a little extra from the gods. The stronger the Amazons are, the harder they fight, the greater will seem the heroism, courage, sexual prowess, fighting ability and sheer divine rightness of the Greek men. In this view, the whole industry of amazonomachy was an exercise to shore up the Greek male idea of themselves and their male-dominated culture.

  This was true in 500 BC. It remained true for 700 years, inherited unchanged by the Romans. They put the battling warriors on their coffins, especially after they became fashionable for the rich in the second and third centuries AD. Mostly made of marble, imported from Greece either ready for use or half-made so that they could be custom-finished in Italy, it was only natural for Roman clients to want Greek mythological themes, of which the battle of the Greeks and Amazons was among the most popular. Some scholars have read significance into the choices, but others say that the only thing that mattered was to display wealth and status in traditional terms. The Romans were as macho as the Greeks, and rich Romans were just as eager to identify with heroes who could put the almost-but-not-quite-as-heroic Amazons in their place.

  1 Luwian was written in both cuneiform, a widely used script invented in what is now Iraq, and hieroglyphic, from Egypt. Both predated Greek alphabetical script by over 3,000 years.

  2 Often misspelled ‘Themyscira’, especially online. Its etymology is Themis (with an i), ‘established by custom’, plus ‘cyra’ (with a hardc, as in ‘case’, and a y), which derives from the same root as kyros, ‘lord’. To Greeks, its name suggested it was the nation’s long-established place of government.

  3 From the English version, Travels in the Morea, Albania and other parts of the Ottoman Empire, 1813. The French original was published in 1805. Pouqueville had an astonishing life as adventurer, diplomat and scholar. Ex-priest, revolutionary and doctor, he accompanied Napoleon to Egypt in the fight against Nelson’s fleet, negotiated an exchange of prisoners, met Nelson, was captured by pirates, was handed over to Ali Pasha, the Albanian ex-bandit, mass-murderer and torturer who ruled semi-independent Turkey-in-Europe, became his physician, won enough freedom to explore the area (hence his book and this quote), spent two years in prison in a plague-ridden Constantinople, kept a secret journal in code, was again granted freedom for his skills as a doctor, studied and later wrote about the plague, won fame and fortune with an autobiography, served as France’s envoy to Ali Pasha, researched the archaeology of Greece, became a passionate advocate of all things Greek, wrote up his travels and researches in six meticulous volumes, and became an established figure in Parisian salons – and all this before his death at 68, in 1838.

  4 William Bell Dinsmoor, ‘The Temple of Apollo at Bassae’, Metropolitan Museum Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (March 1933), pp. 204–27.

  2

  CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE SCYTHIAN KIND

  THERE’S A THIRD REASON WHY AMAZONS WERE SO IMPORTANT to the Greeks, fashion and symbolism apart: they really were real, these horse-riding, bow-wielding wives, daughters and mothers of numerous inner Asian tribes. Every now and then, they emerged from legend and from their distant homelands, bursting into the Greek world like aliens from another dimension.

  They were not, of course, Amazons as the Greeks believed Amazons to be. These horsewomen were not from any nation as such, but from many sub-groups of ‘Scythians’, a general term for unrecorded tribes of hardy ‘pastoral nomads’, as anthropologists call them, who were the products of a longterm social revolution 3,000 years before the Ancient Greeks.

  As every schoolchild used to know, early civilizations rose around the continental edges and along the great rivers. The Eurasian heartland – an ocean of grass stretching from the Far East to Hungary, flowing between northern forests and deserts and vast mountain chains – was no use to anyone, except hunters who could kill grazing animals like gazelle and wild horses. But in well-watered valleys, Bronze Age peoples led settled lives, leaving great burial mounds of piled-up rocks, graves made of massive slabs of stone and pillars carved with animal images, principally deer. Anyone driving round the Mongolian countryside today – easy enough in dry weather because there are no roads or fences – comes across rock piles (kherigsurs) and ‘deer stones’ dating from the second millennium BC.

  About 3500 BC we learned how to ride, which changed everything. With nothing but a bit and reins, horse-riders could herd horses, sheep, cattle, goats, camels, reindeer and yaks. Saddles helped, but were not a necessity. Iron stirrups even less so, because a rope looped round the toe did the job – the first iron stirrups probably date from the second century AD. To stay with your herds, all you needed was a tent (which evolved into today’s warm, cool, wind-shouldering domes of felt) and a wagon to put it on. Grass, when processed by animals, became food, fuel, clothing and more. This new grassland culture spread slowly, then received a boost from climate change round about 1000 BC. As the milder climate spread from east to west, pastures became richer, herds and populations grew, and clans of pastoral nomads drifted westwards. By now, they knew how to forge iron for swords and arrowheads. Horse-riders, armed with powerful little bows, could gallop wherever there was grass and raid whoever happened to be in the way, like other pastoral nomads and merchant caravans and – on the edges of their world – villages and cities. Settled societies had no answer to them, because they vanished like mist at dawn. For 2,000 years, Central Asia was the source of anthropological tsunamis, waves of tribes displacing and absorbing each other in unrecorded revolutions, but sometimes washing up against settled societies at their edges, whether the Great Wall in the east or the Danube in the west.

  In the early first millennium BC pastoral nomads known as Cimmerians had established themselves from the borderlands of China to the Black Sea, where they became the distant neighbours of the Greeks. By then, some pastoral-nomadic groups had settlements of their own, where they produced fine works of art, especially gold ornaments. The Assyrians recorded wars with them from 714 BC but they themselves had no writing, so, even as Greek civilization rose in the seventh and sixth centuries BC nothing except enigmatic burials hint at how the Cimmerians were displaced by various Scythian peoples. The Greeks knew about the Scythians only from peripheral contacts. Sometimes they came as traders or mercenaries to Athens, where Greeks made fun of them for their drunken, crude ways and appalling Greek. In Greek comedies, Scythians, in their high-pointed hats, perform the role of foreign country bumpkins, talking pidgin Greek.

  Herodotus is our major source. In about 460 BC he travelled to Olbia at the mouths of the Bug and Dnieper rivers, then a thriving Greek frontier city on today’s Ukrainian coast, now a fine archaeological site. From here, trading caravans run by Scythians set out for Central Asia and vanished into who-knew-where. In Herodotus’s day, somewhere unvisited by Greeks there was a Scythian king, Ariapeithes, ruler of the so-called Royal Scythians, who had agreed to place Olbia under his protection. He had a local agent called Thymnes, who became Herodotus’s informant.5

  So Herodotus knew a little about the Scythian homeland, if only from the edge. He spoke of big rivers and much pastureland. He particularly admired the Dnieper for its blue waters and fish. He probably knew the marshy, reedy lower reaches where it merges with the Bug, never travelling upriver to the rapids that made the river unnavigable until they were dammed in the 1930s. But that was a fraction of the whole, the world of the steppes, which remained a mystery to him. As he wrote, ‘I have never met anyone who claims to have actually seen it.’

  The daunting reality was this:

  To the north, from the Carpathian Mountains eastwards, stretches what came to be called the Pontic Steppe (from Pontos, ‘the Sea’, as Greeks called the Black Sea) – 6,500 kilometres of grass, all the way to the Khingan Mountains of Manchuria. It flows irregularly. To the south lie deserts and mountains, the wastes of the present day – stans and western China,
the ice-bound peaks of the Tien Shan and the Tibetan plateau. Northwards, infinities of forest. Scythians, like many other grassland cultures, needed both: the grass, of course, but also the forests to supply wood for bows, arrows, carts and tent frames; and animal furs, especially luxurious ones like sable, ermine and mink, which conferred status and were useful as trade items.

  To outsiders, the steppe was depressing, even in summer: oceans of herbs and grasses – wormwood, vetch, milkweed, sage, lavender, caraway, mint, mullein, spurge – billowing to the horizon. Chekhov described it in his short story, The Steppe’, as it was in summer in the 1880s before the plough claimed it:

  On and on you travel, but where it all begins and where it ends you just cannot make out. First, far ahead where the sky met the earth – near some ancient burial mounds and a windmill resembling from afar a tiny man waving his arms – a broad, bright yellow band crept over the ground . . . until suddenly the whole wide prairie flung off the penumbra of dawn, smiled and sparkled with dew . . . Arctic petrels swooped over the road with happy cries, gophers called to each other in the grass, and from somewhere far to the left came the plaint of lapwings . . . Grasshoppers, cicadas, field crickets and mole crickets fiddled their squeaking monotonous tunes in the grass. But time passed, the dew evaporated, the air grew still and the disillusioned steppe assumed its jaded July aspect. The grass drooped, the life went out of everything. The sunburnt hills, brown-green and – in the distance – mauvish, with their calm pastel shades, the plain, the misty horizon, the sky arching overhead and appearing so awesomely deep and transparent here in the steppe, where there are no woods or high hills – it all seemed boundless, now, and numb with misery.