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First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © John Man 2017
Cover photograph © Getty Images/DeAgostini

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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473541757
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9780593077597 (hb)
9780593077603 (tpb)

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Introduction

CHANGING MYTHS, EMERGING TRUTHS

WHEN I WAS six, my parents took me to see a stage version of Peter Pan in London. I was amazed by Peter’s ability to fly, a skill he passes on to the Darling children. I asked my mother if she could teach me. She told me to ask Peter. So I wrote to him, c/o whatever theatre it was. To my intense joy, he replied. Revealing a remarkable ability to use a typewriter, he told me that the key was practice. My mother warned that it might take a while. I was up for it, and set about learning to fly by jumping off my parents’ bed, many times, with my mother assuring me that I had remained aloft just a split second longer each time I jumped. It was hard work, and progress immeasurable. Soon it was time for tea. I don’t recall a second flying lesson.

Growing up in an English village, I lacked a ready source of books but read comics, which were already evolving into what would become graphic novels. One of the protagonists was Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, who was totally convincing to me. Another was Superman, who wasn’t. At eight, I had grown older and wiser. I knew from personal experience that flying was impossible. For me, Superman lacked credibility. I simply did not buy into any of his abilities, super-strength, super-vision, all the rest.

I was out of step with popular culture. Superheroes, a term that includes superheroines and supervillains, have remained the mainstays of countless comics, graphic novels and films for fifty years, and show no sign of falling from grace. One website lists 699 of them in alphabetical order from A-Bomb to Zoom. Only one appeals to me: not because she’s been around for over seventy years, not because she has recently starred in her own blockbuster, but because of the depth of her back-story. This is Wonder Woman, daughter of Zeus, princess of the Amazons.

In fact, Wonder Woman is even more Amazonian than the Amazons of Greek legend. About 2,750 years ago, the Greeks spun tales about their Amazons as superb women warriors in order to show how terrific men were to defeat them in battle or tumble them into bed. Wonder Woman is not about to be defeated or bedded, even by superheroes. She is equal to, even superior to, any man, super or not. The ancient fable has evolved to suit today’s market for superheroes.

Aristotle defined man as a political animal, meaning he was most at home in a polis, a city-state like his own Athens. Well, he was wrong in two senses – wrong morally, at least from today’s perspective, because he ignored Athens’s women; and also wrong in the sense of being incorrect. Long before his time, people who were no less human than Greeks had developed an entirely un-polis-like existence on the grasslands of inner Asia, one in which men and women shared a different way of life, without cities or states. The men were both herders and warriors. So were their women.

Thanks to archaeologists, we now know more about them than Aristotle possibly could. Wonder Woman, it turns out, had real ancestral sisters. Right across inner Asia are grave mounds, tens of thousands of them. These tombs were made by ‘Scythians’ – a generalized term for several related cultures – who were expert in using the grasslands that run in irregular swathes from Hungary to Mongolia. Most tombs were robbed; but some contained treasures, preserved by cold. Archaeologists have found – are finding, will go on finding – what the grave-robbers missed: deep-frozen gold, decorations, clothing, bones and bodies. Among them are women whose possessions included weapons and whose remains show signs of violent death: real Amazons, products of a different way of life and a far more sophisticated one than the Greeks dreamed of.

The myth endured, growing new branches down the centuries, influencing art and literature and popular culture, giving the name of Amazon not only to individual warrior women (and countless women fighting for countless causes) but also, more accurately, to very rare groups of women fighters. The myth interacted with the real world: the Amazon rainforest and amazon.com are branches of the same tree. Another branch is Wonder Woman, with her surprisingly radical agenda. In the vision of Wonder Woman’s creator – not Zeus, but William Moulton Marston, in All Star Comics No. 8 in 1941 – Amazons were as strong and sexy as in Greek legend, but destined for domination of men not defeat by them. That (he believed) was the way to enduring peace between women and men. ‘Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to,’ he said, ‘and they’ll be proud to become her willing slaves!’ Aristotle would have been appalled.

A LEGEND AND ITS MEANING

IMAGINE YOURSELF TO be a suitably educated scholar, transported back in time to Athens 2,500 years ago. It’s a fine spring day. Wishing to feel in tune with Athenian history, you find yourself climbing the Areopagus, the summit of creamy marble near the Acropolis. You know it as the Hill of Ares, named after the god of war – Mars as he would become in Roman times. You are not alone. You come upon an old man in a tunic, resting on a boulder, his head on a stick. You could do with a break. You start a conversation. He’s glad of the company, and something of a historian himself. You ask: was this really the famous rock on which the early city council met? Of course it was, he says. He explains that it has nothing to do with Ares. No one ever worshipped Ares here. It’s actually named after arae, curses, because at the bottom of the hill is the cave of the Dread Ones, the Awful Goddesses, the Eumenides, the Furies, who hunted and cursed criminals. The council sat here because it was the key to the city from ancient times, long before the Acropolis. Why, this was the place that stopped the Amazons when they attacked Athens. Oh, you say, you mean the Amazons were real? You thought it was just one tale among many. Of course they were real, these warrior women who lived somewhere to the east, just beyond the edge of the civilized world. Tales passed down the generations – from before writing, before the Siege of Troy, before Homer – recorded how the heroes of old had actually visited them. The Amazons were as much part of Greek history as the gods.

‘Well, of course, no one has actually seen a god,’ he explains. ‘At least, not in my time.’ But the evidence is there in the stories told by our forefathers and in all the shrines and the rituals and sacrifices and oracles and dreams and the way people behave. ‘Do you know what men are like in battle? Have you seen the wildness of a bereaved woman? They’re possessed! We are all driven by the gods. That’s why we pray to them, and please them with sacrifices.’ To doubt the gods would be to doubt Greek identity. ‘So of course we believe the gods to be real, and the Amazons too.’

We, here and now, in the twenty-first century, have our doubts. Why should anyone take these beliefs seriously? Because they are evidence of a sort – doorways to the minds of those who lived in a long-vanished society that is still with us, rooted in our thought, government, art, drama. Perhaps in our minds as well as theirs the gods represent psychological truths about rage, love, jealousy, loyalty and betrayal. Perhaps also the legends hint at historical truths, as Homer’s great epic of a legendary war points towards the real city of Troy that you can still visit today. It’s worth taking a look at the legends. We may learn something about our history and about ourselves.

Stories of the Amazons arose in the dream-time before written records, centuries before the fifth century BC, the Golden Age of the Greeks. Back then, the ancestors of the Greeks dominated the eastern Mediterranean from great cities, like Tiryns, Argos and Mycenae, after which their Bronze Age culture is now named. Some time around 1250 BC, the Mycenaean Greeks fought a people across the Aegean in what is now western Turkey. They were probably Luwians, a culture related to the Hittites of central Turkey.fn1 In any event, they were not Greeks. Their main city was the port of Troy, today’s Hisarlik, where Troy’s ruin is a tourist site. The legends blamed the start of the war on a Trojan who stole the divinely beautiful Helen from the Greeks. The storytellers gave the Trojans Greek names: Paris, Priam, Hector, Hecuba. Homer, rewriting the legends in the Iliad, mentions ‘Tiryns with her tremendous walls’. Tiryns, like its sister-city Mycenae, was and is real. Both had tremendous walls, which are still tremendous today – vast blocks of stone, each carved to fit its neighbour, irregular and snug as newly moulded clay.

Our first story concerns Eurystheus, king of Argos, Mycenae or Tiryns, perhaps all three, for versions vary. It sounds a little bit credible, because they were and are all real places. But no one knows if Eurystheus was real, let alone when he ruled, because at that time the Greeks had no script and no records. His legendary rival was the semi-divine, ingenious and muscular hero Heracles (Hercules as he became in Roman times). Heracles needs to expiate the crime of killing his own children in a fit of madness. So he accepts the challenges laid down by Eurystheus: he must take on twelve tasks, all of which are supposedly missions impossible, but the most heroic of all Greeks accomplishes them all, as he must, for he is one of those who, after the collapse of Mycenae in 1100 BC and after 300 more dark-age years, became one of the founding fathers of what we call Ancient Greece.

Task No. 9 is given by the king’s daughter, Admete, a priestess of Hera (Juno to the Romans), the goddess who is always seeking Heracles’s destruction. Admete covets the power of the queen of the Amazons, Hippolyte as she is in Greek (Hippolyta in later times). Her name reveals something, because it means ‘Releases the Horses’ – in Greek, not some Amazonian tongue, so clearly we are in the realm of fable, not historical truth. On the other hand, she shares the horsey element of her name (hippo, as in hippopotamus, ‘water horse’) with many other Amazons – the Greeks knew these awesome creatures were horse-riders.

Like many a legendary and semi-divine figure, Hippolyte is defined by her attribute, a golden ‘girdle’, a belt of some kind, perhaps to hold a dagger or sword. The girdle is the MacGuffin in this story, a MacGuffin being defined by the film director Alfred Hitchcock as something that everyone wants and which therefore drives the plot of a film, or in this case a legend. Sometimes, the MacGuffin is merely desired for reasons no one can quite understand. Sometimes, it really is powerful, like the Ark itself in Raiders of the Lost Ark. In this case the girdle is more like the ring in Lord of the Rings. It has no power of its own, but it drives people mad with desire. Hippolyte was given it by her father, the war god Ares, and he was the son of Zeus (the Roman Jupiter), so she, as granddaughter of the top god, owns something which pretty much means she should rule the world. That’s why Admete wants it for her Mycenaean people, and why it would be good for the future of Greece if Heracles can get it.

So he ventures eastwards, out of Greek territory, along the southern shores of the Black Sea. If there is a smidgen of truth in this fable, the journey would have taken Heracles and his companions close to territory claimed by the Hittites of central Turkey. On the Black Sea coast, Hittite rule was tenuous. This was no-man’s-land, occupied by who knew what barbarians. The Greeks filled this blank with their worst fears, a tribe of women, for what could be more threatening to a male-dominated society than untamed women? What more of a challenge to male warriors than to tame them?

As rumours become credible when sourced to a friend of a friend, so legends gain conviction if firmly located in time and place. The Greeks attached this one to the river Thermodon, now known as the Terme, which wanders across a grassy plain. The Amazon warrior women had a capital, Themiscyra,fn2 now overlain by the little town of Termes, near the river’s mouth. The people of Termes are grateful for the link, according to their website, because they hold an annual festival celebrating the Amazons – ‘ladies-only archery, horseback-riding, cooking contests and row-boat rides’. Archery and horses sound appropriate, cookery and rowing less so.

The Amazons have long had their reputation, recorded in the words of many later writers: a people great in war, and if ever they gave birth to children, they reared the females and killed the boys. Diodorus, writing in Sicily in the first century BC, says the Amazon queen ‘made war upon people after people of neighbouring lands, and as the tide of her fortune continued favourable, she was so filled with pride that she gave herself the appellation of Daughter of Ares, but to the men she assigned the spinning of wool.’ He goes on about how she trained the Amazon girls in hunting and warfare, and conquered her neighbours, and built palaces and shrines galore, and handed power to queen after queen ‘who ruled with distinction and advanced the nation of the Amazons in both power and fame’, until many generations later Heracles arrived.

He camps. Queen Hippolyte comes to see him. He explains about her girdle (not, it seems, troubled by linguistic differences). They get on well. Perhaps, as some versions say, they are attracted to each other. She agrees to give him her girdle, just like that, no questions asked. But inspired by Heracles’s opponent, the goddess Hera, some Amazons whip up their troops with the fear that the Greeks are about to kidnap the queen. They charge, Heracles kills Hippolyte, seizes her girdle and beats a hasty retreat with it, back to Tiryns, where he places it in the temple of Hera.

That’s the default version of the legend. The many other versions before and since pile detail on detail. In one, Heracles resorts to a surprise attack on the unsuspecting Amazons. In another, Heracles and Hippolyte fight it out in a long duel. Or there is a great battle between the two armies, with many combatants being named on both sides. Heracles kills Aella, named for her speed, but now too slow, then Philippis, and Prothoe, a sevenfold victor, and Eriboea, who boasts she needs no help but finds she’s wrong, and another eight of them, all named, the last being Alcippe, who had vowed to die a maiden, and does, falling to Heracles’s sword. So, in Diodorus’s words, ‘the race of them was utterly exterminated.’

Well, not exactly, because there was a problem with the Amazons. Their Black Sea homeland, though part of legend, was also part of the real world and, as the Greeks began to explore further, they would have discovered that there was, in point of fact, no nation of Amazons. To retain credibility, they needed another homeland. Legend provided one. Herodotus, writing in the mid-fifth century BC, repeats it.

When the Greeks sail away from the River Thermodon, they take with them a bunch of Amazons. Once at sea, these battle-hardened warriors mutiny, slay their captors and seize the ship. Unable to handle it, they are blown 400 kilometres north across the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov – the shallow, marshy lake that the Greeks called Maeotis – landing them somewhere near the marshes at the mouth of the River Don. This is the land of the horse-riding Scythians. The Amazons steal some horses and set off in search of booty. The Scythians determine to resist, but, having discovered that the new arrivals are women, they set about trying to win them over by persuasion. Young Scythian men camp peacefully nearby and edge closer day by day. They see some Amazons leaving camp to relieve themselves on the steppe, the way girls do in Mongolia today. One of the lads approaches. They have sex, the difference in language being no hindrance. She makes signs: Let’s meet again – bring a friend – so will I. The word spreads, the camps combine. The girls start to learn Scythian. ‘Come back with us,’ say the men. ‘We’ll marry you.’ In Herodotus’s words, the independent-minded girls demur:

Our ways are too much at variance. We are riders, our business is with the bow and the spear, and we know nothing of women’s work. But in your country no woman has anything to do with such things – your women stay at home in their wagons occupied with feminine tasks, and never go out to hunt or for any other purpose. We could not possibly agree.

Instead they tell the men to go off home, bring back their share of their family property and settle the other side of the Don. Agreed. All migrate three days east and three days north, forming a new tribe, the Sauromatians (more on them later). The women keep to their old ways, hunting on horseback, sometimes with their men, sometimes without, raiding and fighting. ‘They have a marriage law which forbids a girl to marry until she has killed an enemy in battle.’ Thus the Amazons can remain in Greek legends as a distant nation, though when all this is supposed to have happened is lost in the mists of time.

The next chapter in the saga of the Amazons concerns Theseus, legendary founder of Athens. Plutarch, writing in the first century ad, takes the story as seriously as possible, trying to tease history from hearsay. It’s a hopeless task, because the facts, if there are any, are lost in a mass of contradictory folklore. ‘Nor is it to be wondered at,’ says Plutarch, commenting on his inability to write a definitive account, ‘that in events of such antiquity, history should be in disorder.’ He has many sources, but they all disagree. Names and events shift like phantoms, and no one has a clue when these supposedly great events happened.

It was Theseus’s fault for going to the land of the Amazons. Perhaps he went with Heracles, or perhaps later. Anyway, he is given a generous reception. A beauty named Antiope, who may or may not be the Amazon queen and is sometimes confused with Hippolyte, falls for Theseus. The plot is thickened by a young man called Solois, who falls for Antiope, is rejected and drowns himself for love. Pausing to rename a river after the boy and found a city in his honour, Theseus either captures Antiope or she follows him home. There she has a son, Hippolytus, but Theseus abandons her for a new love, Phaedra, opening another chapter in which Phaedra falls in love with her stepson. Both die nasty deaths.

Meanwhile, back in their homeland, the Amazons are furious about Heracles killing Hippolyte and about Antiope’s fate. They invade Athens, forcing their way inside the city walls, right up to the Areopagus. Yes, they really did, says Plutarch. Local names, graves and sacrificial practices prove it. Certainly, many other writers believed it. Aeschylus, Herodotus’s contemporary, playwright and author of the trilogy The Oresteia, presents an Athens that had come through war (with the Persians) thanks to benevolent gods and great leaders. Among past disasters was the Amazon invasion. For four months the two sides battled, back and forth between gates, rivers and hills, all named and known to Athenians. The Athenians gained the upper hand, the Amazons surrendered. Antiope died in action, fighting against her own people, on the side of progress and civilization.

Towards the end of The Eumenides, the third of the Oresteia plays, Athena, on the very outcrop supposedly reached by the Amazons, proclaims the dawn of a new era, overruling the Furies:

This will be the court where judges reign.

This is the Crag of Ares, where the Amazons
pitched their tents when they came marching down
on Theseus, full tilt in their fury.

In an age when legend was history and history legend, who would doubt that the Amazons were real?

The Amazons re-enter the legends again unmeasured years later, during the Siege of Troy. That brings us to the verge of written history. Assuming the siege took place, it would have been about 1250 BC, being recorded in folk-memory, passed down the generations from bard to bard, its many versions constantly revised, until the whole oral library of legend was distilled by Homer and written down about 750 BC, using a version of the alphabetical script invented 1,000 years earlier in Egypt, which had been working its way northwards ever since.

In this, the final version of the Trojan War legends, pinned like butterflies by script, the war has been going on for nine years. Homer takes us inside Troy for a flashback. The radiant Helen joins King Priam on the walls to look out over the battlefield. They see great Greek warriors below, and Priam wonders at the size of the Greek army, the Achaeans as Homer calls them (after a legendary ancestor, Achaeus). The sight takes Priam back to his youth, when he was campaigning against some unnamed enemy with Phrygians on the steppes of central Turkey. (Trojans and Phrygians were neighbours and natural allies: Priam’s wife, Hecuba, was a Phrygian princess.) Camping on what is now the River Sakarya, the Phrygians had summoned help from a third force:

And they allotted me as their ally

My place among them when the Amazons

Came down, those women who were a match for men;

But that host never equalled this,

The army of the keen-eyed men of Achaea.

Now the Amazons, Greek enemies of old, are about to re-enter Greek legend as allies of their other enemy, the Trojans.

The story is told by Quintus, a Greek poet who lived in Smyrna on the west coast of today’s Turkey in the third century ad. He, like Homer, edited together many versions of legends that fill the gap in Homer’s epics, between the near-end of the Trojan War – it is Quintus who tells the story of the Trojan Horse – and the adventures of Odysseus.

Quintus picks up the story from the end of the Iliad. Troy’s hero, Hector, is dead, dragged around the city by the horses of his killer, Achilles, his body burned and buried. The war will go on. But a new force enters the fray – the Amazons led by Hippolyte’s sister, Penthesilea. It turns out, for the purposes of this version of the story, that Hippolyte was not killed by Heracles after all, but by Penthesilea, by mistake, with a spear, when she missed her intended target, a stag, and struck her sister instead. She has come with twelve companions as a sort of penance, to help the Trojans and escape ‘the dreaded spirits of vengeance, who … were following her unseen.’ She is a glory, standing out from her troops as the full moon shines through departing storm clouds. The Trojans, running to greet her, are astounded by the sight of her:

Looking like one of the blessed immortals; in her face

There was beauty that frightened and dazzled at once.

Her smile was ravishing, and from beneath her brows

Her love-enkindling eyes like sunbeams flashed.

She comes like rain on a parched land. Priam, like a blind man who miraculously sees the light of day – for Quintus, like Homer, is never short of a simile – leads her to his palace, feasts her, and learns her purpose: to kill Achilles, destroy the Greeks and toss their ships upon a fire. Fool, mutters Hector’s widow, Andromache: doesn’t Penthesilea know she’s no match for Achilles?

But she wakes full of confidence, ‘thinking she would perform a mighty deed that day.’ She arms herself – golden greaves (the soldier’s equivalent of shin-pads), breastplate, helmet, shield, sword in its silver-and-ivory sheath, two-edged battleaxe, and two spears. Out she rides, proud beyond all bounds, leading Trojans as a ram its flock, advancing on the Greeks like a wind-whipped bush fire. This, remember, is the daughter of the god of war and granddaughter of Zeus himself. The Greeks see her coming, and stream from their ships to fight her.

Like flesh-devouring beasts, the armies clash. Greek warriors die by the dozen, all named, and others butcher Amazons in gory detail:

Quickly Podarkes struck the beauteous Klonie.

Right through her belly passed the heavy spear, and with it

Came at once a stream of blood and all her entrails.

Penthesilea strikes back, her spear piercing Podarkes’s right arm, opening an artery. Spurting blood, he pulls back, to bleed to death in a comrade’s arms. Divine Bremousa, speared close to her right breast, falls like a mountain ash to the woodsman’s axe, her joints undone by death. Spears and swords cut hearts and bellies and collarbones. Two of Penthesilea’s twelve companions, Alkibie and Derimacheia, lose their heads to a single stroke of Diomedes’s sword, and like slaughtered heifers

So these two fell by the hand of Tydeus’s son

Out on the plain of Troy far away from their heads.

Countless hearts are stilled, falling fast as autumn leaves or drops of rain, many listed by name and parentage and birthplace, crushed into the blood-drenched earth like threshed grain. It’s a wonder that warriors can swing their swords in such a forest of similes. The lioness, Penthesilea, pursues her prey as a wave on the deep-booming sea follows speeding ships round bellowing headlands. Her strength and courage grow, her limbs are ever light, like a calf leaping into a springtime garden, eager for its dewy grass. Trojans marvel. Surely, says one, this is no mere woman, but a goddess – fool that this Trojan is, unaware of grievous woes approaching.

But the woes are still a way off. Achilles – hero of Greek heroes, sacker of cities, vulnerable only in his heel – is mourning at the grave of his friend, Patroklos, with his cousin Ajax, both unaware of the battle raging nearby.

Now the scene shifts inside the city. Trojan women long to join in, roused as humming bees at winter’s end, until reminded by the prudent housewife Theano that war should be left to the men, and

As for the Amazons, merciless warfare, horsemanship

And all the work of men have been their joy from childhood.

Therefore, she says, stay away from battle and ‘busy yourselves with looms inside your homes’. The author being male and Greek, this is not fertile ground for feminism.

Now Ajax and Achilles hear the dismal clamour of Greeks dying at Penthesilea’s spear-point like lofty trees uprooted by a howling gale. They arm themselves and rush to join the fight, killing like lions feasting on an unshepherded flock.

And there is Penthesilea. She casts a spear, which shatters on Achilles’s shield. A second glances off Ajax’s silver greave. Ajax leaps aside, leaving the two to fight it out.

Achilles mocks Penthesilea, reminding her that he and Ajax are the greatest warriors in the world, telling her she’s doomed, like a fawn confronted by a mountain lion. He attacks, spearing her above the right breast and moving in to drag her from her horse. Despite her wound she has time to consider – draw her sword and fight, or surrender and hope for mercy? Too slow: Achilles casts his spear and impales her and her horse together. (Don’t think about this too closely, because it doesn’t make sense.) They fall. Pillowed by her horse, she quivers and dies like meat on a spit, or a fir snapped off by the north wind’s icy blast. The Trojans see her dead and flee for the city, leaving Achilles rejoicing at his victory.

Then he removes Penthesilea’s glittering helmet, to reveal a beauty that astonishes the watching Greeks and turns Achilles’s jubilation to grief for killing her instead of marrying her. A warrior named Thersites, known for his insulting behaviour, says he’s shocked by Achilles’s reaction. Does he want to marry a wretched dead Amazon? What sort of pervert is he?

Your accursed mind has no concern at all

For glorious deeds of valour once you catch sight of a woman …

Nothing is more pernicious to mortal men

Than pleasure in a woman’s bed.

Incensed, Achilles punches Thersites on the jaw, below the ear, knocking out all his teeth. He falls face-forward in his own blood, to the delight of the other Greeks, all except Thersites’s cousin, Diomedes. It takes a mass of them to hold the two apart and prevent a further fight.

A message arrives from Priam, requesting Penthesilea’s body for a lavish burial. Both sides arrange a ceasefire. Feeling only pity and admiration, Achilles and Ajax hand her body over. A great funeral fire consumes her. After the flames are doused with wine, the Trojans collect her bones, drench them in perfumed oil, lay them in a casket, pack them with the fat of the best cows and bury her outside Troy, beside the walls, in the rich tomb of Priam’s father, Laomedon. Her fallen companions are buried nearby, while the Greeks burn and bury their own dead. Alone amongst them, Podarkes, speared by Penthesilea when the battle opened, is given a burial mound. And then the Greeks feast through the night till the goddess Dawn’s arrival.

These tales existed in many versions. They were popular for hundreds of years, from the seventh century BC onwards, with scores of writers referring back to the victory over the Amazons and the slaying of Penthesilea as essential to Greece’s origins. No one made a distinction between myth and history. Everyone just ‘knew’ that there had been a victory over the Amazons, just as they knew that there had been a victory over the Persians (490–478 BC). The first was myth, the second was fact, but it was impossible to tell fact from fiction: both carried conviction.

And not only in words. War with Amazons was just as popular in painting, ceramics and architecture, so popular that the theme’s countless manifestations have a collective name: they are amazonomachies (‘Amazon battles’). They are one of three popular ‘–machies’, each of the others being equally legendary: the wars against the Centaurs (centauromachies) and the giants (titanomachies). These subjects appear on hundreds of vases and in friezes and paintings held in museums around the world.

They were included in one of the most famous of Greek sculptures, the vast (12-metre) gold-and-ivory statue of Athena, patron goddess of Athens, in the Parthenon. Made by, or under the direction of, Phidias, the greatest sculptor of the ancient world, some say of all time, it stood for about 1,000 years as a statement of Greek wealth and power, until stolen by the Romans, after which it vanished. But it was portrayed on coins and in small-scale copies, providing research for a replica in Nashville, Tennessee, finished in 1990. The point for our subject is not Athena herself, but her shield, on the outside of which were thirty silver or bronze figures of Greeks fighting Amazons. Nothing could have better proclaimed the significance of the theme in Athenian eyes.

Its importance is emphasized again by a series of marble slabs that have been on show at the British Museum for 200 years. Their story is worth telling because it involves a mystery, a murder and much controversy.

It starts about 430 BC, in the Arcadian village of Skliros, surrounded by the forested hills of Messinia, some 160 kilometres south-west of Athens. In 429 BC, plague struck Athens. In remote Arcadia, it left remarkably few dead. On the flanks of Mount Kotilon (1,226 metres high), at a place called Bassai (now better known in its Latin spelling, Bassae), a platform of rock gives terrific views over mountains to the sea. In this wild spot, some extremely talented architect – perhaps even Ictinos, who co-designed the Parthenon – built a temple to Apollo in his manifestation as Apollo Epikourios, ‘the Helper’. The name is the only evidence that the temple dates from the year of the plague: no one knows for sure. If it was a thank-you note, it was a very fine one, with many features similar to those of the Parthenon: thirty-eight limestone columns, a marble roof held up by marble beams, and much more, which we will get to shortly. ‘Of all the temples in the Peloponnese,’ wrote the Greek traveller and writer Pausanias in his guide to Greece 500 years later, this ranked as No. 2 ‘for the beauty of its stone and the symmetry of its proportions.’ (No. 1 was in Tegea, 40 kilometres to the east.)

For the next 1,500 years, that was all anyone knew of the temple. Hills, trees, malaria, remoteness and bandits combined to hide it from the world, until in November 1765 a Parisian architect, Joachim Bocher, took a break from supervising the building of villas on the island of Zakynthos and started exploring the Arcadian mountains of the Peloponnese peninsula (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries still often referred to by its medieval name, the Morea). Quite by chance, he stumbled on the ruined temple, recognized what it was, took some notes and planned to return to do a proper survey. He never made it. On his next trip, he vanished, without explanation. A French traveller named François Pouqueville was in the area in 1798 and heard what happened. The locals, he wrote,

relate to all strangers a story of a traveller who was assassinated more than thirty years ago as he went to visit the ruins of Apollo Epicurius, the Saviour … they speak of his death as if it was a disaster fresh in their memories, and had happened within a few months, but say that all their endeavours to find out the perpetrators of so horrible a deed were unavailing. I have thought that this might very possibly be Mons[ieur] Bocher, the architect, who had travelled once successfully over the Morea, but, returning there a second time, disappeared suddenly and was never heard of more.fn3

So the temple remained hidden for another forty-five years, and then one year more. In 1811, a team of four antiquarians with armed guards, a tent and cooking pots arrived at Bassae, hoping for great things. They were met by a crowd of ‘young Arcadians’ carrying baskets of fruit and flowers. The local Turkish administrator – Greece then being under Turkish rule – was not so welcoming, accused them of lacking authorization and ordered them to leave. They returned the following year, with a larger team, 200 local workers, the right permits and a deal with the Turkish governor to share the proceeds of finds, which – he imagined – would be of silver.

Now at last, after removing several metres of rubble, the temple’s real treasure came to light: the Bassae Frieze, 23 metres of marble panels, which had once run all around the temple above its limestone columns, carved not in bas (that is, low) relief but high relief, portraying Greeks fighting Centaurs and Amazons. The finds were obviously masterpieces. The Turkish governor was disappointed, and relinquished his share for £750 – just in time, for he was replaced by a new pasha who sent his men chasing after the disappearing stones. Too late: the panels reached Zakynthos, where a British gunboat stood by to guard the agents of empire against Turkish officials, and also a curious French privateer. These were dangerous waters and dangerous times, for the French, under Napoleon, had only recently been driven from Egypt and were that very summer advancing on Moscow, soon to be driven back by General Winter. In the port, a British Museum rep bought the carvings for 60,000 Spanish dollars.

More troubles lay ahead. Charles Cockerell, the expedition’s leader, was not there to complete his notes, so the finds were minutely recorded by a German, Carl Haller von Hallerstein, who lost almost all of his drawings in a shipwreck. He started to redraw them, but died before he finished. His papers were sent for safe-keeping to Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, who lost them; they eventually turned up in a cupboard bought at an auction almost fifty years later. Other members of the expedition and later visitors to the site made their own records, none of them definitive, all conflicting. But at least the British Museum gave the frieze its own temple-sized room, Gallery 16, where you can admire it today.

And ponder. Sixty thousand Spanish dollars was a staggering sum, something like £20,000 at the time (when a family could live comfortably on £100 per year), or around £10 million today. Where did the cash go? Not to the local Greeks, nor to their Turkish rulers. The whole episode is like a lesser version of what happened to the Elgin Marbles, taken from the Parthenon and Acropolis over the previous decade – stolen or saved, depending on your point of view. So far, the Greeks haven’t asked for the Bassae Frieze back, but then the temple itself is still in the process of restoration, under wraps. Watch this space.

Meanwhile, admire. Naked Greek heroes fight Amazonian heroines in diaphanous dresses that leave little to the imagination. All of the bodies are naturalistic, seemingly carved from life, but also stylized, like athletes performing battle scenes. Like athletes, but very unlike real warriors, they are all beautiful. The panels look as if they should be telling a story, like an archaic graphic novel, but no one can agree on an order and thus determine what the storylines should be, if they ever existed. The British Museum grouped the panels into eleven centauromachies and twelve amazonomachies, but any further connection depended on details of carving (like an elbow overlapping a join that seems to fit into a blank space on the neighbouring panel) and on matching up the holes where bronze dowls had been inserted. That was persuasively done in the 1930s,fn4 but there are seven trillion ways of arranging twenty-three panels. Ten have been seriously proposed. The controversy continues.

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.

CONTENTS

Also by John Man

AMAZONS

The Real Warrior Women of the Ancient World

JOHN MAN

Introduction

CHANGING MYTHS, EMERGING TRUTHS

1

A LEGEND AND ITS MEANING