Searching for the Amazons Read online

  One thing everyone agrees on is that the Amazons invaded Greece.

  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 in
side 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 (centaur-omachies) 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.3

  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,4 but there are seven trillion ways of arranging twenty-three panels. Ten have been seriously proposed. The controversy continues.