Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T15:43:18.374Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ancient Amazons ‘ Heroes, Outsiders or Women?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Lorna Hardwick
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The network of associations of the word Amazon still plays a part in the shorthand of modern discourse. Its connotations may vary from a slightly comic praise of sporting excellence in women to underlying insinuations that Amazons are not quite feminine. When applied by politicians and journalists to the women in the Peace Camp at Greenham Common during the 1980s, for example, the epithet Amazon carried the implication that these women rejected men and had developed a society apart (therefore (sịc) they must be subversives, lesbians, communists, hippies – etc. etc.). Modern usage perhaps emphasizes the unusual or even threatening associations; Amazons are, for whatever reason, outside the ‘normal’ parameters of life-style and achievements. Ancient usage presupposed an additional element, Amazons as a subject for artistic and poetic interest. The reasons why this was so do much to explain how and why the image of the Amazons communicated certain associations and how these in turn relate to underlying assumptions about the framework of Greek society and its values.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , April 1990 , pp. 14 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. ‘Women in charge: the function of alternatives in early Greek tradition and the ancient idea of matriarchy’, Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967), 1–35. Pembroke argues that the similarities in structure in the examples of customs of marriage and sexual intercourse attributed by Herodotus to non-Greeks do not suggest a historical relativism but indicate rather the construction of an image of foreigners, with practices and values alien to those of Greeks, and in symmetrical tension with themCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Anthropology and the Greeks (London, 1978), p. 241Google Scholar.

3. Discussed in Humphreys, ibid., pp. 265–75 with reference to B. Bernstein, Class Codes and Control Vols. 1–3 (London, 1971).

4. Iliad 3.189.

5. Iliad 6.186.

6. Pindar, Ol. 13.87–90 (tr. J. E. Sandys).

7. Pindar Fr. 158 (Bergk) = 172 (Loeb).

8. Pindar, Ol.8.47.

9. 4.110–8.

10. 4.114 (tr. A. de Selincourt).

11. Fr. 16, 17 in F. Jacoby, F Gr H 3 B 45–46.

12. 4.117.

13. [Aeschylus], Prometheus Bound 410–5 (tr. P. Vellacott).

14. Ibid., 719–24.

15. Isocrates, , Panegyricus 68–70Google Scholar.

16. Isocrates, , Panathenaicus 193Google Scholar.

17. Lysias, , Funeral Oration 18Google Scholar.

18. Hippocratic, Airs, Waters, Places 33Google Scholar.

19. Ibid., 43.

20. Plutarch, , Theseus 26–28Google Scholar.

21. Compare the attitudes implicit in Shakespeare's Midsummer Nights Dream Act 1, scene 1, 16ff.: Theseus to the Amazon queen, ‘Hippolyta, I woo'd thee with my swoid/And won they love doing thee injuries.’

22. 2.5.1–4.

23. ‘The Origins of the Classical Style in Sculpture', JHS 106 (1986), 71–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. Amazons in Greek Art (Oxford, 1957)Google Scholar.

25. Nauplia Museum 4509. Drawing and photo D. von Bothmer, ibid., Plate 1.

26. Ibid., chapter 2.

27. Ibid., chapter 3.

28. Olpe, Munich 1745 (repainted). Bothmer, Plate LXVIII no. 6.

29. Oxford 1927. 4065. Bothmer, Plate LXVIII no. 6.

30. Athens 15002, signed by Pasiades as potter.

31. London B673. Bothmer, Plate LXXIII no. 3.

32. Paris, Louvre CA 1710. Bothmer, Plate LXXIII no. 7.

33. Bothmer, chapter 10.

34. Ibid., chapter 9, p. 147.

35. 10.11.5.

36. Discussed by Bothmer, op. cit., chapter VII, pp. 117–9.

37. 5.10.9.

38. 5.11.4.

39. An Introduction to Greek Sculpture (London, 1981), chapter 5Google Scholar.

40. The Elgin Marbles (London, 1984), p. 19Google Scholar.

41. Op. cit., pp. 95–96.

42. Walcot, P., ‘The Funeral Speech: a Study of Values’, G&R 20 (1973), 111–21Google Scholar, Loraux, N., The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City (Cambridge, Mass, and London, 1986), passimGoogle Scholar.

43. 1.1.

44. Nandy, Ashis, At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar explores (in relation to colonialist domination of India) the polarity of ‘warrior’ masculine and ‘passive’ feminine as ‘normal’ forms of gender, challenged by Gandhi. In a different context Cairns, D. and Richards, S., Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester, 1988) chapter 3, ‘An essentially feminine race’, discuss ascendancy attitudes to the Celtic tradition in IrelandGoogle Scholar.

45. The usage is discussed by Goldhill, S., ‘Battle Narrative and Politics in Aeschylus’ Persae', JHS 108 (1988), 189–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46. Lysistrata 678–9.

47. N.H. 34.53; Amazon statue (marble copy) Met. Museum, New York 32.11.4.

48. Aeschylus, , Eumenides 625–8Google Scholar.

49. Aristophanes, , Lysistrata 670ff. and cf. 404Google Scholar.

50. 5.455 (tr. H. D. P. Lee).

51. Women in Greek Myth (London, 1986), p. 27Google Scholar.

52. I should like to acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions made by members of the London Classics Seminar and the Women in the Arts Research Seminar at the Open University.