Review of Adrienne Mayor, The Amazons

101 Pages·2017·3.47 MB·English

by  John Porter

DRAFT VERSION

Review of Adrienne Mayor, The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World.
Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014. Pp. xiv, 519. ISBN 9780691147208.

© J.R. Porter, 2018

REVISED: 27 September 2018

This document, that represents a project that I set for myself over the past Summer and that is still very
much a work in progress, offers a primer of sorts for students in a senior undergraduate seminar that I
am designing on the figure of the Amazon. Knowing that many students will be interested in engaging
with various facets of Mayor’s discussion, and not wishing to devote an entire term to Mayor’s text,
I’ve set out some key issues that need to be considered in approaching her work along with a number
of specific case-studies designed to illustrate serious flaws in her specific arguments, her use of
ancient and modern source-materials, and her general approach to the issues she addresses.

I still have much to reflect on here, as well as a great deal to do in the way of re-checking my sources.
But the project has reached a point where I could use feedback from others. Suggestions and
corrections are welcome: [email protected]

Contents
1) Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 2
2) Greek Myth and the Question of Meaning .............................................................................. 3
3) Mayor’s Argument ................................................................................................................... 8
4) The Early Greek Amazon ...................................................................................................... 10
5) Mayor, Scholarly Nuance, and the Greek Language: Amazones Antianeirai ........................ 22
6) Ancient Confrères and Confused Modern Scholars .............................................................. 28
7) Atalantas (Ancient and Modern), or How Exactly Do Vigorous Warrior-Women
Operate? ....................................................................................................................... 30
8) The Hinterland ....................................................................................................................... 38
9) Literary Sources: Quintus of Smyrna .................................................................................... 39
10) Folktale and Not-So-Ancient Traditions ................................................................................ 41
11) Tragic Histories ...................................................................................................................... 43
12) Alexander & Co. ...................................................................................................................... 55
13) The Core I: The Ethnographic Amazon in Antiquity ............................................................ 67
14) The Core II: Tombs, Wounds, and Arrowheads, or How Do You Spot a Dead
Warrior-Woman? ........................................................................................................ 74
15) Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 92
16) Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 95
2
Introduction
Adrienne Mayor’s work has attracted a broad popular audience and gained a good deal of attention in the press; its
reception in scholarly reviews has been more tepid. While all praise the volume’s success in generating interest among a
popular audience, there has been general agreement that its arguments, its use of evidence, and even its fundamental
project are deeply flawed.1 No one to date has engaged in serious detail with the inadequacies of M.’s text, however,
while the understated and coded language of dismissal typical of the standard scholarly review is unlikely to convey to
enthusiasts just how problematic a text this is. (Note, for example, that it has not prevented the publisher from
employing a carefully selected blurb from Goldhill’s dismissive evaluation on the book-jacket.) This is a work written
by a person who holds a research position at Stanford; it has been published by a major university press; it is being
employed as a source by both undergraduate and graduate students, many of whom have no means of evaluating the
limitations of M.’s arguments: it really should be dissected and critiqued in greater detail. The problem is that M.’s
project itself is so sprawling and its flawed arguments so legion that a full-on critique would itself require another,
rather dense and tedious tome, especially if it were to address a general readership. Then there is the fashion in which
M. herself casts those who would champion competing views as members of that narrow-minded, sterile group of
established scholars who would repress the study of this wonderful world of powerful warrior-women and the
egalitarian society in which they supposedly flourished. (Who, after all, wants to join that art historian whose views are
so reductive and uninformed that he/she does not even deserve to be named?)2 Still, for what it is worth, here are some
thoughts that, right or wrong, I hope will point to some lines of inquiry.

http://www.worldfinancialreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/map1.jpg

M.’s central thesis is that the Amazons presented in early Greek art and literature are not mythical constructs but
represent an awareness (often fuzzy and inaccurate) of actual societies of men and women who inhabited the Eurasian

1 E.g., Boliaki, Eckhart, Goldhill 2014, Keith, Lampinen, McElroy/Figueira, Sebillotte Cuchet 2015. A principal exception would
seem to be John Boardman (jacket burb).
2 M. 26, with n. 15.
© J.R. Porter, 2018
3
steppes — the region often alluded to today as Scythia, an indeterminate term that includes “the great swath of territory
extending from Thrace …, the Black Sea, and northern Anatolia across the Caucasus Mountains to the Caspian Sea and
eastward to Central and Inner Asia.”3 For M., the various presentations of Amazons in Greek and Roman art and
literature display an awareness, however distorted, of particular features of “Amazonian” society, dress, fighting tactics,
even language that demonstrates that the early Greeks were not fabricating the notion of a community of warrior-
women from whole cloth but echoing contemporary reports of societies where women joined with the men in hunting
and in fighting external enemies — societies that M. proceeds to explore employing the findings, especially, of
archaeologists, ethnographers, and those who study the oral traditions of the North Caucasus.4

Before we go on, however, it is important to notice what just happened in my previous paragraph. Including northern
Anatolia in a listing of regions to be examined in a study of Eurasian steppe-culture is a bit like describing the west
coast of the United States as consisting of Washington State, Oregon, California, and Panama: it has no place there.
Northern Anatolia is presumably included by M. because this area (more specifically, the territory later known as
Pontus — map above) is the region where ancient accounts locate the mythical Amazons’ homeland. But the latter
consists largely of rugged mountainous terrain that in antiquity was settled by villages: it does not lie within the
Eurasian steppe nor is it a land of horse-riding nomads.5 By including it in her account, M. has elided a fairly prominent
stumbling-block in her thesis. This will not be the only instance in M.’s text where history, ethnography, and
archaeology come to be blended with myth (see below regarding “The Hinterland”) — often, as here, in a not altogether
straightforward fashion. A constant challenge in evaluating this text consists of distinguishing received fact from make-
believe.
Greek Myth and the Question of Meaning
The principal issue — and the one likely to be of central concern for most general Classicists — involves the
identification of these Scythian “warrior-women” as Amazons and the challenge to traditional attempts to read the
Greek Amazon as a mythical, ideologically freighted construct. Here we run up against M.’s maddening lack of
precision. In popular parlance it is common to find the term “amazon” employed metaphorically as a sexist term for any
woman who is particularly muscular, athletic, powerful, assertive, or so forth. This usage even crops up in scholarly
discourse: one of the challenges of researching the figure of the Amazon in, say, modern English literature is the
frequent use of the term as a rather slack metaphor that ultimately connotes little more than “powerful,” “independent,”
or “assertive” female character. Both Elizabeth I and Margaret Thatcher displayed such characteristics, but neither —
for reasons we will examine later on — was in any sense an Amazon. By defining “Amazon” as “warrior-woman” in

3 M. 35. Cf. Wheeler 2007b.
4 Cf. Blok 83-104, 408-22.
5 “Geographically, Pontus divided into two distinct parts — a narrow, coastal strip, and a mountainous, inland region interspersed
with fertile river valleys and separated from the sea by the Pontic Alps, which run parallel and close to the coast and which
limited routes of communications between the two zones. … There were three main cultural strands in the population: Greek
(mostly on the coast), Persian, and native Anatolian, both associated more with the interior. The most common form of social
organization, the villages, can scarcely have had other than age-old Anatolian connotations; they had been there from time
immemorial” (McGing).
© J.R. Porter, 2018
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her title M. has fixed the game from the beginning, dismissing, without any serious examination, studies that explore the
specific resonances that this figure suggested to early (male) Greek artists and poets and reducing her endeavor to a
matter of picking through various sorts of evidence — sociological, linguistic, archaeological, historical, literary — for
nuggets, deprived of context, that will strike a popular audience as proof of the historical existence of “Amazons” (in
her sense) and of the scholarly neglect, or actual suppression, that has kept this alleged fact hidden until now. A popular
work that focused on Scythian/Eurasian culture defined more rigorously and that lay the ground for a broader
examination of the various roles assumed by women in such societies would be both useful and welcome,6 but it would
require detailed discussions of method, the limitations and possible biases in the evidence, specific cultural contexts,
and similar issues: the general lack of concern with such matters provides perhaps the best indication of the nature of
M.’s work. We do get Scythian/Eurasian culture in this text, but only to a limited degree: all too often it is weirdly
skewed through the prism of Graeco-Roman sources in the service of M.’s curious project.

The traditional approach to the early Amazon has been to regard her, like any other mythical figure, as a fictional
creature that allowed the Greeks to explore themes and issues that were in some way relevant to their society. Perhaps
the clearest example of how such figures work, and of how the coded language of Greek myth can function, is provided
by the metopes (series of carved panels) that once adorned the outer colonnade of the Periclean Parthenon, just below
the eaves (what is known as a Doric frieze: see the images below).

https://amodernmanonancientwomen.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/metopes-close-updavid-gill.jpg
http://www.nashville.gov/portals/0/SiteContent/Parks/images/parthenon/Parthenon-Dusk.jpg

If you’ve taken a generic first-year course in Classical Greek culture, you’ve very likely been presented with this
material.7 Each side of the Parthenon presented a series of metopes (separated by grooved panels known as triglyphs)
devoted to a specific theme (shaded in pink in the diagram above). Those on the east side (over the entrance to the
temple) presented scenes from the battle between the gods and giants. Those over the west side (the side featured in
most photographs of the building) presented the battle between the Greeks and the Amazons.8 The north side portrayed
the Greeks vs. the Trojans, the south (the only side where these pieces survive to any significant degree) the Lapiths vs.

6 For an example of such a work, see Rolle 1989.
7 For a useful and more detailed account, see duBois chap. 2.
8 Von Bothmer 208-09.
© J.R. Porter, 2018
5
the centaurs. In combination with other decorative features of the temple (the free-standing sculpture of the two
pediments [gables: shaded in green in the diagram above], the continuous frieze that adorned the wall of the temple-
chamber itself [shaded in blue], the cult-statue of Athena Parthenos inside the main chamber), these images clearly were
intended to present a statement about the nature of the Athenian polis (city-state) — what it was to be an Athenian and,
more broadly, Greek.

On the surface, the metopes presented a series of straightforward oppositions between good and evil, order and chaos,
culture and savagery, with the Amazons falling on the negative side of that balance sheet — an apparent example of the
male Greek/Athenian’s hostility towards women. Many individuals who had occasion to visit the Athenian Acropolis in
antiquity likely interpreted the western triglyphs in exactly this fashion. The full picture is somewhat more complex
than this, however.

An examination of the triglyphs as a group prompts an interesting series of reflections:

East: Gods vs. Giants
West: Greeks vs. Amazons
North: Greeks vs. Trojans
South: Lapiths vs. Centaurs

The specific oppositions presented here suggest a broader scheme of contrasts that, as so often in Ancient Greek art,
point beyond the particulars of any one pair to a deeper set of connections that associate the various elements of the
scheme as a whole:

Divine — Monstrous
Male — Female
Greek — Non-Greek / “Barbarian”
Human — Bestial

This specific collocation of ideas encourages one to consider, not simply the parallels between the different sets of
oppositions, but the possible similarities that associate the categories on each side of the pole: one is inevitably led to
think beyond the particulars to contemplate, e.g., just what might associate the divine with the male, the Greek, and the
human.

For many moderns, this feature of the metopes merely compounds the ideological bias against women and non-Greeks,
producing a sort of hymn to the Greek “him,” who is presented as akin to the divine and as the one creature who is in
the fullest sense human. But the implications suggested by these images are somewhat more tricky. For one thing, only
the most complacent and naive jingoist could have attended a typical meeting of the Athenian ecclesia (popular
© J.R. Porter, 2018
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assembly) and come away regarding his fellow (male) citizens as heroic, godlike figures. The decorative program here
sets out an ideal — and, as such, a challenge — rather than a purported description of reality.

In considering the series “monstrous — female — non-Greek — bestial,” many a viewer must have remarked that
neither the Trojans (even if regarded through the lens of the Persian Other) nor the Amazons were monsters: in fact,
both art and literature (epic, tragedy) generally portray them as heroic and noble — even sympathetic. In the case of the
Amazons, there is the added question of the degree to which these figures were to be regarded as women. The Amazons
were female, but inhabited such a foreign world as to render them sui generis — in gendered terms, a type of anti-
woman (from the Greek perspective), especially in the context of the Parthenon where these figures stand in opposition
to the goddess and her city as represented by the cult of Athena Parthenos. One had only to step under the shelter of the
temple’s outer columns to see, in the continuous frieze that adorned the wall of the temple, the contrast between the
harmonious cult of Athena — in which male and female Athenians of various ages played a prominent role, along with
non-citizens [metics] — and the sterile and belligerent world of the Amazon.9

Regarded in this way, the Amazons of the Doric frieze are not offered up as a simplistic example of men battering
women down and thereby keeping them in their place but as part of a complex meditation on what it might mean to be
Athenian — one that reveals a definite patriarchal bias but that was addressed to women as well as men, and that was
intended to inspire and challenge them both. Other readings are possible, and many have been proposed,10 but this fact
simply reinforces my point: mythical tales and images offer a rich treasure-trove — a coded-language, as it were, that
encourages reflection.

As a result, Amazons will have a different significance in different depictions — or in the eyes of the different “readers”
of any one particular work: that is how myth, art, and literature operate. To ask what “the” meaning of the mythical
Amazon might be is as senseless as asking for “the” meaning of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Some depictions — and some
interpretations — will be more nuanced and compelling than others, but to deny that the figure of the Amazon was
employed, like other mythical figures, to explore various themes and associations is patently absurd. And yet,
perversely, this is precisely what M. in effect does in arguing that the true significance of the Greek Amazon lies in the
different ways in which she documents an awareness, however hazy or imprecise, of actual “Amazonian” societies in
the Eurasian steppes. This is a silly and needless gambit that gives the discussion a decidedly anti-intellectual cast in
places but allows M. to ratchet up the rhetorical temperature and rally the troops in support of her quest to reveal this
long unacknowledged truth:

SYMBOLIC FIGURES?
Archaeological evidence shows that Eurasian women fitting the description of mythic Amazons were contemporaries of the
ancient Greeks. Warlike women of the steppes also appear in the traditions of non-Hellenic cultures. Yet the idea that Amazons

9 It does not seem that non-citizens are portrayed on the frieze itself but their role in the procession would have been familiar to the
common citizen-viewer.
10 See, e.g., Osborne 62-77. A more contentious reading is offered by Connelly 1996 and 2014 (regarding which the critiques of, e.g.,
Queyrel and Cropp [BMCR 2014.09.14 and 2014.10.45] still hold).
© J.R. Porter, 2018
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were fantasy figures conjured up by Greek men to reflect anxiety-fraught aspects of their own Hellenic culture still holds sway.
Amazons in Greek art are interpreted as illustrations of myth, not reality. This view is expressed in a recent off-the-cuff
comment by a leading art historian: “It is useless to say anything about what the Amazons really were, because they were not
really anything.”

So many diverse meanings are projected onto Amazons that it is impossible to do them all justice here. Amazons have been
interpreted as negative role models for Greek women; as repulsive monsters or “Others” who threatened the Greek masculine
ego; as figures justifying gender inequality or expressing fears of female rebellion against male oppression; as enemies of
civilization; as symbols of wild, animal-like sexuality; as women who refuse to grow up and accept marriage and childbirth; as
asexual “un-women”; as political stand-ins for inferior barbarians, “effeminate” Persians, or foreign wives of Athenian citizens;
as representations of pubescent Greek girls or teenage Greek boys; and as an inside-out, upside-down mirror of Hellenic
culture.11

These observations are followed by a brief demonstration of ways in which “[s]ome interpretations are incompatible
with ancient and modern evidence,” a discussion that concludes with the assertion: “… explaining Amazons as wholly
make-believe figures created by Greeks for Greeks has resulted in a logjam of competing theories. Thanks to
archaeology, the tide is beginning to turn and Amazons are at last achieving ‘historical respectability.’”12

Clearly, M. asserts, all of these competing and contradictory theories reflect a profound confusion in the traditional
academic reading of the Amazon and a benighted blindness to the clarity and precision provided by M.’s
straightforward historical interpretation. But what then are we to do with a figure like Heracles, the comical and
gluttonous strongman-buffoon? How can that figure stand when we also have the savagely inhuman Heracles of
Sophocles’ Trachiniae? Or the tragically human Heracles of Euripides? What about the civilizing hero of the Labors, or
the enduring saint of the Stoics?13 How are we to sort out all of these contradictions in the evidence? Shall we go on to
consider the evidence for figures such as Odysseus, Electra, or the gods themselves, beginning with Zeus? Anyone who
has taken a 100-level course in Greek myth or Greek tragedy can readily see the fallacy in M.’s objections, and the
limitations of her historicizing approach.14

But there is a more fundamental problem here. Braund concludes his recent review of Penrose’s Postcolonial Amazons
with the following objection:

If we suppose that Greeks really did take their Amazons from distant parts (presumably very early in large part, since they are
visible at the outset of archaic Greece), we are left to wonder whether that would affect the complex function(s) of Amazons in
the course of the many Greek and Roman centuries that followed. Attempts to locate the actual Troy of Homer’s Iliad have not
in my view made a difference to readings of the poem, whether ancient or modern. It is true that modern culture wants to know

11 M. 26.
12 M. 27.
13 For an introductory overview of Heracles as a mythic figure, see: http://homepage.usask.ca/~jrp638/CourseNotes/Heraclesmyth.html
14 M. is of course aware of the polyvalent nature of Greek myth (e.g., M. 261) but, when it aids her argument, slips into an odd world
where mythical variant suddenly equals “evidence” and where disagreements between particular elements of the mythical
tradition, on the one hand, and the findings of modern archaeological/ethnographic studies of Eurasian steppe culture, on the
other, reveal that the former are “mistakes.”
© J.R. Porter, 2018
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whether Amazons really existed (in the most simple sense), for many different reasons, but there is something rather Victorian
about such a quest for the simple truth of complex myths, especially when diffusionism is the proffered answer. Our author
needs to show why Amazon origins matter, if they indeed do. Of course that is not to deny that Greek ideas about Amazons
were affected by contact with other societies (the point is routinely made with regard to Persians), but this is Greek application
of Amazon myth in the construction of non-Greeks, not merely the Greek discovery of Amazons among them.15

In the context of the present discussion, I would put the matter more simply via another analogy: we know that George
Washington was a historical figure and have a great deal of information about his life and career. But teasing out the
significance of “Little George and the Cherry Tree” for the American Colonial project entails a very different type of
investigation and ends up having precious little to do with the biography of its ostensible protagonist.16

At the most profound level, however, is M.’s seemingly wilful refusal to acknowledge fundamental issues of cultural
identity. Again, I’ll employ an analogy (this one from Holt Parker).17 Catullus may have been young and urban, and
would qualify in some regards as being professional, but it makes absolutely no sense to label him a Yuppie: doing so
would simply obscure his lived experience as well as his relationship to the complex society with which he engaged.
Labelling alleged “warrior-women” of the Eurasian steppes (and beyond) as Amazons is equally inane and, while it
might attract a readership, distorts our sense of each. The most essential feature of the early Greek Amazon is that she
somehow lived in a society without men: the lengths to which M. must go to efface or ignore this fact indicates just how
little interest she really has in this mythical creature; the fact that she can apply the term “Amazon” to women of the
Eurasian steppes demonstrates the severely limited nature of her understanding of the term “historical.”
Mayor’s Argument
But it is time to examine the ostensible connection between Eurasian warrior-women and the Greek Amazon. If one
accepts that such warrior-women existed, how might one demonstrate that they not only provided the inspiration for the
Greek Amazon but present the clearest lens through which to understand that figure today? Characteristically, M. short-
circuits the argument by omitting the second half of the discussion virtually altogether:

A PURELY GREEK INVENTION?
Western scholars often take it for granted that Amazons were the exclusive creative property of the ancient Greeks. “It is
important to stress that these foreign heroes existed only in Greek myth and not in native mythic traditions,” is how one
classicist expresses the claim. Another states that “Amazons are not represented in cultures based on non-Greek emblems and
norms.” But this unexamined assumption turns out to be false. The belief that Amazons existed only in Greek culture has led
classicists to maintain that all Amazon figures in Greek art and literature were doomed cardboard figures created to fill

15 BMCR 2018.06.48.
16 For a humorous take, see Wender 1976.
17 Parker 320-21.
© J.R. Porter, 2018
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conceptual, symbolic niches for the Greeks. Such a Hellenocentric claim is disproved by literary, historical, artistic, linguistic,
and archaeological evidence for warlike women of ancient Scythia in a wide range of other ancient cultures.18

Setting aside the slippery definition of the term “Amazon,” the unfounded allegations that traditional studies of the
Greek Amazon have relied on “unexamined assumptions,” the notion that the study of a Greek construct in the context
of Greek culture is somehow Hellenocentric, and M.’s curious goal to restore these mythical figures’ proper sense of
personhood, how does her argument play out? In a nutshell, it runs something like the following:

From ca. 700 BC to ca. AD 500, there flourished a group of related cultures (the Saka-Scythians, Thracians, Sarmatians) that
stretched roughly from modern Bulgaria, through Romania, Moldova, and the Ukraine, on to southwest Russia and Kazhakstan.
These were nomadic peoples who shared a migratory life centered on horses, archery, hunting, herding, trading, raiding, and
guerrilla-style warfare, whose presence is marked in the archaeological record by a common material culture: the so-called
“Scythian Triad” of distinctive weapons, horses, and artistic “animal-style” motifs, all of which are attested in burials from the
Carpathian Mountains to northern China.19 Most strikingly, these societies were characterized by a high level of equality
between men and women since, due to the “equalizing” combination of horseback-riding and archery (which allowed women to
be as fast and as deadly as men), women were accorded an important role in warfare and other activities that in most of Greece
would have been gendered as “male.” In Scythian society, as opposed to most Greek city-states, women could be hunters and
warriors without giving up femininity, male companionship, sex, and motherhood.

Many oral traditions about Amazons were already circulating before Homer’s day (the eighth/seventh century BC), as evidenced
by two passages in the Iliad, and it is around this time that the first recognizable images of Amazons begin to appear in Greek
art. Over the course of the 6th and 5th centuries, the Greeks’ knowledge of this Amazonian culture became more precise, as
witnessed initially in art and (now lost) poetry and, subsequently, in historical and ethnographic works from the Classical Period
on. All of it attests to the Greeks’ desire to record features of actual contemporary cultures with which they were in contact.20

18 M. 29-30.
19 On the dangers of employing this classification too broadly, see Moyer 125-26: “Because burials of various cultures incorporated
the elements of the Scythian triad, because the triad was found at sites far distant from Herodotus’ Scythia, and because the triad
pertained only to very wealthy burials, its use as diagnostic resulted in the cultural mis-identification of burials from other
cultures ….”
20 The above is a close paraphrase, with partial quotations, of a variety of passages from M.’s prologue and her second chapter.
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The Early Greek Amazon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ancient_peoples_of_Anatolia#/media/File:Asia_Minor_in_the_Greco-Roman_period_-_general_map_-_regions_and_main_settlements.jpg

Our earliest evidence for the Greek Amazon comes from Homer and Greek art. Homer has occasion to mention the
Amazons only twice,21 in both instances quite tangentially.

In Book 3 of the Iliad the elderly Priam, looking over the plains of Troy in the company of Helen and marveling at the
size of the Greek host, remarks:

“O son of Atreus, blessed, child of fortune and favour,
many are these beneath your sway, these sons of the Achaians.
Once before this time I visited Phrygia of the vineyards.
There I looked on the Phrygian men with their swarming horses,
so many of them, the people of Otreus and godlike Mygdon,
whose camp was spread at that time along the banks of Sangarios:
and I myself, a helper in war, was marshalled among them
on that day when the Amazon women came, men’s equals.
Yet even they [the Phrygian troops] were not so many as these glancing-eyed Achaians.”
(Iliad 3.182-90 — R. Lattimore, tr.)

In Book 6, we are told of the exploits of Glaucus’ famous grandfather Bellerophon:

21 Ancient readers regarded the Myrine of Iliad 2.813-14 as an Amazon (M. 41-42) but there is no indication of this in the text. Kirk
ad loc. notes that, despite the testimony of Strabo, the reference to “bounding Myrine” suggests a ritual dance rather than a
martial context. Further: Blok 148-49.
© J.R. Porter, 2018