In a 1971 issue of Greece & Rome a scholar made a fascinating suggestion about the origins of the heroic Amazons. In what today would be considered racist language K.A. Bisset proposed that the mythical warrior women may have been inspired by Greeks encountering beardless men on the Eurasian steppes: ‘My suggestion is that the legend derives from the first encounter of Europeans with a beardless small-statured race of bow-toting mongoloids. There is nothing especially original in the general idea’ (p. 150). Bisset found this more plausible than the idea that women could be warriors, arguing that the military prowess and breastlessness of Amazons in classical literature should ‘make us highly suspicious’ of the gender identity ascribed to them.
Even 50 years on, this article reflects a dominant strand of classical research on the Amazons, in which the heroic warriors are viewed as a figment of the Greek male imagination, created as a useful psychocultural projection of alterity, the threatening barbarian Other to the Greek male self. As M. Beard put it in a 2017 talk hosted by the London Review of Books: ‘The hard truth is that the Amazons were a construct of the Greek, male, mythic imagination’.
This conviction has recently been challenged, most notably by A. Mayor's The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World (2016). In this study Mayor collects a variety of archaeological, literary and linguistic evidence to argue that the mythical Greek Amazons were based on historical counterparts living and fighting in Asia Minor and beyond. While Mayor's findings have been characterised as ‘intriguing but not indisputable’ (T. Eckhart, The Classical Journal 111 [2016]), her intrigue is shared by a new generation of scholars, who are re-examining the role and depiction of Amazons in classical antiquity, reappraising their literary function and socio-cultural significance in the light of gender and sexuality studies. B.'s volume must be counted among them and is a testament to the immense potential of combining Gender Studies and the Classics for a reappraisal of the Amazons and the discovery and deconstruction of prevalent biases and blind spots in classical criticism.
B. argues that established assumptions about Amazons as the (barbarian) Other to the (male) classical society do not hold up to a careful analysis of the most important heroic epics of Greek and Roman literature. Demonstrating that Amazons have made up a defining (if sometimes small) unit of epic poetry for more than 1,000 years, from Homer to Virgil, she argues that they cannot have been fundamentally strange to ancient culture.
Her argument is threefold: firstly, her analysis reveals that Amazons feature exclusively in battle scenes, which calls into question the equation of warfare and biological masculinity in ancient cultures. Amazons are portrayed as natural or heroic participants in battle, B. argues, which implies that warriorhood was not conceived of as a purely masculine category, but must be viewed as transgendered, in the sense of that it may have belonged to and been adopted by both men and women.
In an intriguing second step B. argues that warriorhood and heroism in the epics are also diverse in terms of ethnicity: there is no textual indication that the ethnic or gender alterity of Amazons was considered as a threat in epic poetry. Particularly instructive is the example of Camilla in Virgil's Aeneid, who has been frequently read as ‘doubly Othered’: not only a woman who is a warrior, but also a warrior who is a stranger, from the east rather than the west. Arguing against such interpretations, B. points out that Camilla is characterised in the same manner as archetypical male warriors such as Hector or Patroclus in the Iliad or Turnus in the Aeneid: imperfect, but certainly heroic. As such, B. argues that heroism in epic poetry is both transgendered and ethnically diverse.
In a final step B. underlines that Amazon episodes as a structural unit of epic poetry changed and developed over time, culminating in Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica, where all women are portrayed as suited to warfare, independent of their ethnic or racial identity: when the Trojan woman Hippodamia sees the Amazon queen Penthesilea ride into battle, she calls her fellow Trojan women to arms. The Trojan women are deterred only by their lack of training, not by an essential inability to fight.
B.'s meticulous analysis of the epics is as precise as it is convincing, making her study a profitable contribution to the re-evaluation of Amazons in particular and gender roles and heroism in classical literature more broadly. Her study is particularly strong where it highlights how previous interpretations of Amazons were informed by the biases of their critics rather than firm textual evidence. These instances do not only rectify gender and ethnic biases exemplified by Bisset's 1971 article and still alive today, they also present moments of particular intellectual productivity, yielding new and fascinating insights into epics that have been the subject of extensive study for centuries. These passages are exemplary for demonstrating the productive potential of combining Gender Studies and the Classics to interrogate ossified conclusions and offer fresh perspectives to the field.
Considering the strength of her arguments, B. could have dedicated more space to the consequences of discovering the Amazons as a structural unit of the heroic epics and conceiving of warriorhood as transgendered as well as ethnically diverse. It strikes a sympathetic reader that her conclusions could have been more ambitious, foregrounding the vitality of her approach. It also seems remiss not to mention the curious absence of Amazons in the public reception of classical literature in the twenty-first century. Instead, B. focuses on the depiction of Amazons in the medieval era as a further avenue of research.
These are quibbles, however. B.'s book is a clear, precise and careful study that demonstrates the productive relationship between Classics and Gender Studies; with Penthesilea und ihre Schwestern B. has laid the groundwork for and made a valuable contribution to a reappraisal of the literary and social significance of Amazons in heroic epic and argues convincingly that heroism should be understood as both transgendered and ethnically diverse. It only remains to be hoped that colleagues and students will share her intrigue and continue her efforts, keeping the Classics open to new developments and fresh perspectives.
