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- [00:00]
Tristan Hughes
Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes and if you would like the Ancients ad free. Get early access and bonus episodes. Sign up to History Hit with the History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabateans and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:26]
Verizon Representative
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- [00:56]
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- [01:51]
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- [02:35]
Tristan Hughes
The Amazons. Their idea is one of the most romantic and resonant in all antiquity. A mythological race of women that lived on the plain of Themyscira next to the Black Sea and featured in several of the biggest episodes from Greek mythology, From Heracles Labors to Jason and the Argonauts to the Iliad, where an Amazon queen battles the Greek hero Achilles. They were renowned warriors who in Greek mythology lived in prehistoric times, long before the age of classical Athens or Alexander the Great. Their stories endured and became popular across the Greek world. But the Amazons also did much more than just fighting. They were founders of cities, of festivals and peoples. They were guileful superwomen that became closely entwined with wonders of the ancient world. Today, we're going to explore various myths and legends of the Amazons that have endured from ancient Greece. We'll be delving into how the ancient Greeks perceived these alluring, clever and dangerous warrior women. Our guest is Dr. David Braunt, Emeritus professor at the University of Exeter. David. He has just released a brand new book all about the Amazons and their presence throughout the ancient Greek world. It was a pleasure to interview him and I hope you enjoy. David, we are talking about the Amazons today. Your brand new book, the Amazons, they seem as popular as ever. But am I also right that modern perceptions of Amazons, they're very different to what the ancient Greeks thought?
- [04:10]
Dr. David Braunt
Yeah, very often they are. There's a lot going on, you know, and actually, before I say anything else, I think I should just make one, I think, quite important sort of ethical point that my book, my research is all about getting to grips with Greek thinking in the ancient world about Amazons. And I'm aware that, you know, because that doesn't fit very well with a lot about Amazons that people think they know often things which they're very committed to. That kind of awkwardness of fit could actually be quite problematic for some people. You know, I'm aware that there are people who draw a great strength from and support really from their ideas about Amazons. And I don't really want to damage that. I mean, to explain what I mean, I happened across a Polish group, for example, of women who've had breast cancer and surgery and that sort of stuff. And they clearly find the whole Amazon myth as they perceive it, to be really helpful to them. And I'm kind of nervous at producing a book which doesn't exactly threaten that, but kind of risks it, shall we say? Yeah. So I just want to make that point. That is not my Goal. I'm all in support of whatever anybody wants to do with Amazons. Really. My purpose is, as it were, the history of the myth, the myth in Greek reality is what I'm aiming at. And I'm quite open for people now to do whatever they want with Amazons. You know, that's the beauty of myth, it's endlessly elastic. And I guess the reason people are still very interested in Amazons is precisely because it touches base with all sorts of really big issues in modern society. You know, everything surrounding gender for a start. My women of Poland for example, as well. All kinds of things which actually at times are a bit surprising to me, you know, not to mention all the TV stuff, all the films and everything. There's a lot of kind of noise around ancient Amazons. My focus is very much to try and get beyond all that and to look at what Greeks of antiquity, and to a small extent Romans too, what they had to say about Amazons and in particular to explain why they made so much of them, why they put them on their great public buildings, why they have, you know, three of the seven wonders of the world have Amazons quite prominently. And there's a lot of texts about Amazons, myths about Amazons in plays which explore real human difficulties and so forth. The ceramics of the ancient world, which are really quite important for us as an insight into the private life. The lives of ancient Greeks quite often feature Amazons and Amazon's really doing a lot of very interesting things. And we even connect with some rather surprising myths. You know, the Trojan War, for example. Everybody likes the Trojan War. Yeah, Brad Pitt charging about and so forth. No Amazons in that film as far as I remember. But in the ancient myth of Troy, just as Homer's account finishes, the war goes on and Hector has just been killed at the end of the Homeric version of Troy. And what happens? The Amazon queen turns up to fill his boots and she takes his place defending Troy. And that immediately generates a whole series of questions. And it shows, for example, that the Amazons aren't exclusive with regard to men. Very often we find them in alliance with men or male based communities, shall we say, patriarchal Troy we might call it, with old Priam in charge and various key heroic figures. And yet the Amazon queen and her followers have no problem turning up and fighting for Troy and actually dying there. I think there's special reasons for that. But as I say, the Amazons myth, it just touches a lot, a lot in antiquity and really quite a lot today, as I've tried To outline, David.
- [08:41]
Tristan Hughes
It is so interesting all of these different channels we can go down these avenues to explore with understanding how the ancient Greeks perceived the Amazons. I also really liked there your mention of Three Wonders of the World, which we will get to as this chat goes on. But is it also then important to highlight that actually, from what you were saying, mythology, Greek mythology, is not our only source for the Amazons. I mean, archaeology is also really important, too.
- [09:09]
Dr. David Braunt
Well, some people have claimed as much. Really, the answer to that is no, it isn't. Now, unless by archaeology you mean the material culture and for example, vases that have survived and so forth with their images or buildings. What exactly do you mean there, Tristan, in terms of archaeology is important too. Are you talking about the material culture survivals?
- [09:34]
Tristan Hughes
Well, in regards to archaeology, I was thinking more about kind of how they're depicted, as you mentioned, on temple reliefs or in pottery or in coinage, which may give us more of a sense of how the Greeks viewed these mythological figures.
- [09:47]
Dr. David Braunt
That's certainly true. I thought you might be alluding to something quite different. It's worth addressing, perhaps. There has been a sustained attempt over the last 10 years or so to claim that Amazons have been found literally dug up through excavation. And this really is an unhelpful confusion in English. English usage, generally, there are two ways of using the word Amazons. This is where the confusion comes in. The general usage of Amazons is, as we all know, tough, resilient, resourceful women who might pick up a weapon, might even form an army or something. That's the general image of Amazons. Yep. There's also the far more specific meaning of Amazons, which is the Amazons of Greek thought, myth, belief in ancient times. Now, those two things need to be kept well apart. In terms of the ancient Amazons, we really have nothing in terms of excavations that have relevance. People claim we do and tend to say we have a lot, but trust me, we do not. What we do find are women around the ancient world from time to time, either individually or maybe in small clusters, with or without men. We do find women who are buried with several kinds of weapon. Okay. Very recently there was a bit of a fuss on the Scilly Isles of all places. Quite a long way, really from, you know, the Greek main street where a woman seems to have been excavated, buried with a large spear. And of course, immediately people say Amazon, Amazon. And, you know, maybe so maybe this was a woman who in life went into battle with her large spear. But archaeologists, you know, we spend an awful lot of time Trying to work out a methodology for getting into these grave goods, as they're called, to try to understand actually why these are buried there. The simple question is, why was this spear put in this burial? The short answer is we do not know. One option is, yes, it was her favorite spear that she took into battle, but there are plenty of other options which confuse the picture. Maybe it's put there as a symbol of something important, important to maybe the woman and maybe the people that buried her. Maybe it's her husband's favourite spear that's gone in there. And one might even speculate about, you know, the phallic nature of the spear. We know in other contexts that weapons very often symbolic of the supernatural, of gods and so forth, so that it might be the case that we have weapons put in there as. As part of a broader sense of religion and ritual. We just don't know. Maybe the spear is put there as a valuable thing in a context where maybe there were too many valuable things available to be put in a burial in the City Isles. Now, you know, I focus on this one thing. I've had no contact whatsoever with the people who've excavated that and so forth, but I did notice how immediately we go from finding a weapon in a burial to Amazons. Now, normally we don't find spears actually, with buried women, we tend to find arrows. Most commonly, we find them buried with. In all sorts of contexts, in all sorts of places. I was looking some buried in the middle of Athens the other day. So there are many, many ways of interpreting these grave goods. And the mistake, as I would see it, is to take the fact that from time to time, female burials contained what we might think of as weapons, to move from that to saying, aha, we have found an Amazon. And it's worth saying actually also that, especially with the older excavations, when you look more carefully and people on the whole don't, I'm afraid, but when you do look more carefully, you find that actually the sexing of the skeleton is pretty iffy. You find that there's a cluster of burials altogether. So we're not clear whether any weapon there was to do with the female or to do with men who are also buried there. And thereabouts, sometimes we're told triumphantly, you'll get my sense that I'm rather short of patience with this because it's, on the whole unhelpful. We are sometimes told triumphantly, look, this woman was killed violently. Well, unfortunately, a lot of people in the ancient world were killed violently, and that includes women. Doesn't tell you that they went to war to get killed violently. They were on the wrong end of somebody's spear or knife or whatever.
- [15:16]
Tristan Hughes
If we go a bit more onto the myth surrounding the Amazons by the ancient Greeks, I mean, first off, do we know why the ancient Greeks created this story of the Amazons? Do we know much about the origins of the Amazon mythology and, you know, the mindset behind the Greeks, who would have created it?
- [15:36]
Dr. David Braunt
Now, that's a really interesting question, Tristan. I think the first point that needs to be stressed is that Amazons are already baked into Greek culture when Greek culture first comes to us. I mean, if we follow the traditional view, which I do, that we should date Greek culture from around 700 B.C. in other words, the beginning of Archaic Greece, as we tend to call it, we look to the early texts and we look in particular to Homer. And although Amazons don't appear at all in the Odyssey, which is quite interesting, they do appear in the Iliad not once, not twice, but three times. And indeed an interesting Amazon burial just outside the city of Troy, which is used as a sort of focus for Trojan military power and organization, actually. So Amazons are already, as Greek culture starts to sort of raise its head, are already there. Now you were asking whether you know, where it may all come from. And clearly this is always a problem because, you know, you go in search of beginnings and you get into a sort of infinite regress. There's a glimpse of that already with Amazons. Again, a lot of daft claims have been made about Amazon myth origins. But on a positive note, I think what's going on is that Amazons are in the great swathe of myth that comes from what we tend to call the near east into Greek culture. And this, this involves, you know, a whole massive stuff. You know, Prometheus, for example. Good one. And much, much more besides. And I suspect that Amazons are coming in there. This is not a field I'm particularly expert in. However, I've noticed that those who work on Hittite texts, of which we have very few, unfortunately, dating from what, the early ish second millennium BC so, you know, whereas Greek culture begins, say 700 BC, this is more 1700 BC, a thousand years before. In these Hittite texts, there's just a hint of Amazons. There's certainly female power and queens and that sort of thing. And those who specialize in this are doing two rather interesting things. One is they're suspecting Amazon myth at this early stage. And secondly, they're also engaged in this Inevitable search for beginnings, which is an infinite regress. So just as I'm now saying, okay, probably it comes from the near east, and the Hittites, the Hittite specialists are saying, well, it may come from further over in the near east, maybe a thousand years before. So you can go on and on, you know, and you end up with sort of Amazons in caves, as it were. You know, it's important to think about origins, but don't expect much in the way of answers would be my thought on the subject, which is why, by and large, I haven't gone down that road very much. I'm very much more interested in the myth as embedded in Greek society in this very powerful way. So that they, as you were saying, they get into temples, the inevitable pottery and so forth, and also a whole series of key stories, including, you know, Troy there in the Argonautic epic, which is also very early, already there again in 700 BC, referred to in Homer, et cetera. So, yeah, Amazons, I think, are there in some ways for the same reasons that they have survived so much now. They touch real society, we can call it that everyday society in a whole series of ways. And I think that's perhaps the way to go in trying to understand all of this, and that's really what I've tried to do.
- [19:56]
Tristan Hughes
David, is it also important to highlight, and I know you do so in your book, how the myths of the Amazons, they are created by men and they're written for men as well. Is that also important to highlight? Because I know there's like the word fantasy surrounding them as well.
- [20:12]
Dr. David Braunt
Yeah, there is. I always sign up for that as the general view created by men and for men. I mean, this is a society which right through antiquity is dominated by men. And these Amazons, they're not feminists in the sense that they have an agenda which is all that worrying to Greek men. Actually, the idea of Amazons as alluring is actually quite new, and it's something which I've placed far more stress on than most researchers ever have. But one really only has to look at the pictures and read the texts. The ancient Greeks themselves were very unclear about their sense of whether Amazons had ever once walked the earth. By and large, it's a bit like people believing in the literal truth of religious texts now. You know, they sort of believed in them and at the same time wouldn't really want to press it. They are quite happy to believe in a general way, as now perhaps somebody might believe in Jesus performing miracles without actually wanting to go very far in thinking that, you know, a few loaves and fish might feed a multitude. The ancient world is very like that with Amazons. They're perceived by and large as a set of a state. Indeed an ethnos is the word, a people of women who are all somehow in the prime of life. We hear very little about Amazon children and we hear absolutely nothing about middle aged or older Amazons. Amazons are always somehow at around the age that a Greek woman in a sort of normative sense would be expecting to be married. Usually that's where Amazons are located in Greek thought. They in that sense are indeed alluring. And in some of the stories we have about them, they are identified specifically as of great breeding stock. You know, they will produce really strong sons in particular. So that's something which we often find as a wonderful story in Herodotus, which is built all around that. So we can talk about fantasy, but we've also got to have some sense that these women are dangerous. Of course they can fight. So it's a kind of mixed fantasy. It's a fantasy where these women warriors we're going to call them, that are a challenge to, to the Greek male and particularly perhaps the young Greek male looking to be a hero, an Achilles, a Heracles even. And at the same time, these are potentially first class. Again, it's kind of difficult to talk about this without, without being a bit sort of, I don't know, crude around the edges perhaps, but they're very attractive women physically. And part of the road to heroism in Greek male thought is not only being able to go out and defeat these Amazon women and all kinds of other opponents, but also, and in some ways even more importantly, to be able to resist their female charms. Okay, so when you go out as a young hero Greek out there to do battle with an Amazon, you are taking on an opponent who is doubly dangerous. She can fight you and kill you, but she can also see you off with her sheer attraction. One particularly famous and I think really rather astonishing version of that is in the so called duel between an Amazon queen and the famous Achilles, where actually nobody survives Achilles. Achilles just kills anybody in front of him. And so when the Amazon queen comes across Achilles, I'm afraid we all know what's going to happen. And it happens very quickly. We call it a duel. It's no duel at all. He simply kills her on the spot. However, however, although he's done that part of the hero role, he's not really equipped to cope with the other aspect of Amazon power. Because as she dies, he looks into her face, into her eyes, and is totally, totally overwhelmed by strange emotions of passion. Love, as it's often called. Slightly odd in this context, but nevertheless. And he starts to think, hang on, here I am, I've killed this woman who would have been a great wife, partner for me, but I've just killed her. And he's disturbed by that, disturbed very deeply. So that when one of the others in the Greek army happens to be passing and says something, we don't quite know what he says, but we know it's offensive to Achilles about this. Achilles turns on him and kills him on the spot. He's totally distraught. And this causes problems for Achilles. You know, he's killed one of his own men for saying the wrong thing. It's all getting a bit out of hand. And that's the power of the Amazon. She's powerful as a warrior, but she's also powerful with all the skills that the young Greek hero would tend to associate with the women around him. So that the outlook of the young Greek hero, who I agree, is totally central to all of this, the outlook that he's got is that this is the ultimate challenge. It's not question of going out and killing a monster, you're going out and killing this beautiful creature. But there's a danger in that beauty, a great danger. And Amazon queens in particular, like the one killed by Achilles, are particularly outstanding in that regard and are flagged as such in the ancient texts. And we got some really very nice pictures of them. You know, they look great and what can you do? There's a nice vase in Manchester which shows the young Heracles going to see the Amazon queen on one of his missions. It's his ninth labour, in fact. He's got to go and persuade her to give him her belt, her battle belt. And they seem to get on quite well. But Heracles, we see him in the vase looking at this queen who looks like a sort of ancient version. I always think of Barbarella in the famous Jane Fonda role, covered in fur and all kinds of boots and things. It's all very potentially. It depends on the viewer, of course, but potentially a kind of erotic scene. And according to myth, just as Heracles and the queen were going to have a sexual escapade, one of the goddesses, Hera, who had a problem with all this, intervened, caused a riot among the Amazons, so that Heracles, in fact, just had to kill the queen and all the other Amazons that He could to get away with the belt that he come to get. So, you know, this double mixture is really important. I think both the sex and the violence together. That's what's going on with Amazons. And I think that's why they're part of this complex fantasy and so powerful for Greek society because Greeks in general were facing the whole issue of how to live their lives. And Amazons were offering all kinds of suggestions for, as it were, ways to go or not go. And that would apply in epic heroic contexts. And it would apply also in the more everyday context within, for example, a city like Athens. And that's quite aside from all the public images and so forth. We're talking here about the area that we know least about, which is the private everyday world. Well, yes, of the Greek, the Greek male and the Greek female. Unfortunately, we just don't have that much from the Greek females. It would be wonderful if we had a Greek female author telling us about all this, but we don't. But occasionally we have a Greek male author suggesting what female figures might have thought about Amazons. And when they do that, it's really not very different. There's no sign of a, a kind of female take on Amazon's as distinct from the male take on Amazon. So clearly in experiential ways there will be obvious differences.
- [30:04]
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- [30:35]
Dr. David Braunt
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- [30:40]
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- [30:41]
Dr. David Braunt
Well, you can't see it, but trust me, it looks delicious.
- [30:45]
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- [30:50]
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- [31:45]
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- [32:42]
Tristan Hughes
Well, David, you've covered a lot of different points there, including, you know, some of the big myths in which Amazons are associated. You mentioned there, of course, Achilles and Heracles and the portrayal and, you know, sex and violence and so on. We'll come back to certain areas of that and hopefully we'll get to Athens as well because they feel important in the story of the Amazons. But if we explore the mythology a bit more, did the Greeks place the Amazons in a particular area of the world? I mean, where did Greek myth locate the Amazon homelands? Is there a real geographic region for that?
- [33:18]
Dr. David Braunt
Yes.
- [33:19]
Tristan Hughes
And do we know much about the whole Amazon society? What do the Greeks tell about that?
- [33:23]
Dr. David Braunt
Right, yeah. No, the Greek culture is pretty clear about this. Actually, though there are one or two loose ends in terms of their earliest origins and their sort of ethnicity, for want of a better word. Greeks regarded the Amazons as coming from Thrace, in other words, roughly the area between Northern Greece, Thessaloniki, etc. Up to more or less the Danube, Bulgaria, Romania, those areas. That's where they thought they came from originally. That goes together with a set of myths which talk about in prehistoric times major movements of peoples from that area, from Thrace, that sort of Danubian area, from Thrace eastwards, and the peoples cities, etc. Along what is now the south coast of the Black Sea and northern Turkey. They often have a story about migration from Thrace, as if in some sense Greeks thought That and these peoples themselves apparently thought that Thracian influence had spread right across the southern, in particular, Black Sea, as far as the Caucasus Mountains, in what is now Georgia, and beyond that actually, and even into Azerbaijan and so forth, and the shores of the Caspian. So the Amazons are part of those stories of Thracians moving eastwards. Now, the Amazons, however, stop at a particular fascinating location. Actually one of the greenest and most fertile areas around the whole coast of the Black Sea. And this is in what is now north east Turkey, on the shores of the Black Sea, immediately east of the modern town of Samsun, which is ancient Amisos. And there you can actually go to a sort of Amazon theme park, if you like. And the locals, I'm reliably informed, are very proud of their Amazon past, their Amazon connection. And I think that's borne out by the fact that in a small town there, which is taken to be the epicentre of all of this little place called Terme, you find in the main square a very large statue of a very lively Amazon. To this day, it's a modern statue. But what's interesting about it is that there's clearly a communal commitment to this Amazon past. And in a society, you know, it's pretty patriarchal society really, around those parts. So again, there's a kind of a mirror image of what's going on with, with ancient Greece, perhaps. But that area is known in the ancient world in a way today too, as the plain of Themyscira. So going back to the point the Amazons have drifted or marched or whatever they've done, from Thrace, which they've left completely behind them, to this place on the eastern part of the Black Sea, the southeastern part of the Black Sea, northern Turkey, where they establish cities, we call them cities, as usual. In the ancient world, what we tend to mean are small towns, villages even. And there at those three rather rustic villages, they spend a lot of time with their horses. They're great horsewomen, rather obsessed with horses, actually. They have their society there. Now what happens is, as I mentioned briefly, Heracles rather reluctantly smashes the whole society and never really recovers. But in terms of Amazon society there, we have a consistent sense that it's a monarchy, a monarchy with a queen, of course. And we have a whole mess of rather kind of silly, you might say, stories. You see, with myth, myth doesn't feel the need to offer a kind of ethnography. Myth gives us highlights and often things which really don't fit together very well. I mean, you might say, well, how can it be, for example, that Amazons are always, you know, teenagers in their early 20s, something like that? How can that be? It makes no sense. But nevertheless, myth doesn't worry about that. But the people that do worry about that are, in a way, people like you and me, people who, you know, want to have a fuller story. And so as antiquity goes on, particularly with the later periods, the 4th, 3rd century BC and onwards, we find various writers coming up with their own notions of what went on in the private lives of Amazons. Mostly it's an obsession with Amazon's sex with either neighbours, sometimes a lot of deliberately crippled males that they keep for sexual purposes. This is all pretty sort of torrid stuff which is not part of the. The mainline traditional myth. The mainline traditional myth is much more interested in, for example, Heracles smashing the Amazon culture.
- [39:03]
Tristan Hughes
That's there because it's interesting, isn't it? You get that later idea sometimes of the Amazons being almost man haters. And you mentioned that kind of more infamous portrayal of the Amazons that comes later. But is it very clear, like, as well, from the. The tales that you have, that although that part of the myth isn't fully fledged out, you know, it's a very capable society of independent women, but also heterosexual women as well.
- [39:31]
Dr. David Braunt
They're all, as far as we hear, actually rather keenly heterosexual, you might say. They certainly do not hate men. What they want to do is to have their own independent state and actually that's why they have to fight, because if they weren't able to fight, then they wouldn't be able to have this independent state because they, you know, the ancient world's a violent place and they would be subjugated one way and another. They by no means hate men, they get on very well with men, but they do go to war with a whole series of cities and peoples and so forth. They're kind of surprising in that way, perhaps. And this idea of hating men, you know, it's really hard to find anything like that in the ancient texts. Almost nothing. After all, since this is this, as we called it, a fantasy of men for men and maybe for women too, it would perhaps be a little bit surprising if they were, as it were, men haters. They're really not.
- [40:36]
Tristan Hughes
We get our sense, you know, that the Amazons are pretty different to Greek women. But were those differences, were they sometimes bridged? Was it sometimes not the case that some Greek women were very different to Amazons?
- [40:49]
Dr. David Braunt
Yeah, this has been overplayed a lot, really. And you know, one reason I got into writing this book is that I spent years teaching about Amazons and I found it very hard to recommend anything to my students. I mean, that's why I wrote the book, really. And we have a whole sort of set of slightly daft ideas. I mean, yes, Amazons are unlike, if you like, normative Greek women in certain regards. They have their own political system, a system within which they are out and about riding horses, indeed, not sidesaddle, which is also quite important, and that they're doing things that, in general, in Greek society, women did not do, particularly the more wealthy and prominent women, poor women, on the whole, did whatever they had to do to get by. We tend to forget them. So it's fair enough to talk about them being different to Greek women, say, however. However, they're by no means as different as has been claimed over the years. You know, quite apart from their obviously same biology, we find women in Greek culture who are really good warriors. We find, for example, a particularly notable one called Atalante, a woman of Arcadia in the Peloponnese in southern Greece who's a match for any man. And indeed, there's a whole myth around her, an early and important myth, the myth of the Caledonian boar. She is the one, the first one to damage this huge beast, this great big wild pig, but a massive one. When all the youths of Greece want to be the first one to draw blood from this creature, it's a woman that does it, Atalante, who manages to hit it. And the result of that is all sorts of argument about, well, you know, should women really be allowed to come and do this kind of stuff? There was a whole debate about whether Atalante should join the Argonautic expedition to go with Jason and the other heroes of his day to get the Golden Fleece. In one or two versions of the story, she's allowed to go, but it's problematic. In the best known version by a guy called Apollonius Rhodius, Jason says to her, look, I'd love to take you. You know, you deserve to come, but my God, can you imagine? You'd be the only woman on the boat. We're rowing all the way across the Aegean Sea and Black Sea and we're going to face who knows what. You're just going to cause mayhem. And again, partly because women like this, from a Greek male perspective, are by and large very attractive. So poor Atlanta, Atalante, despite the fact that she'd probably be the best warrior on the ship, perhaps doesn't get to go at all. So there are stories about Greek women like this, and the distinction, the contrast between Amazons and ordinary Greek women, as it were, is much weaker than has often been understood. And I think that's underlined, particularly where we have a transition where Amazons actually become normative Greek females. The classic case of that is the Athenian hero Theseus, whose story, you know, we can explore if you like. But the general point is very clear. Amazons and real Greek women actually are fundamentally very similar. So that stories about Amazons are also stories about female potential. I think that's very important.
- [44:51]
Tristan Hughes
Well, you mentioned there the story of Theseus and Athens, and yes, I would like us to explore that in a bit, but I feel we should talk a bit about Amazon warfare and how the myths portray the Amazons and how they fight. Now, David, we get this idea today, quite a big idea, isn't it? Like with the bow and arrow and so on and so forth. But do we know? I mean, what do the sources say? What do they reveal about how the Amazons fought?
- [45:19]
Dr. David Braunt
Right. That comes in sort of two slightly different packages. In the straightforwardly grand epic contexts, like the duel with Achilles, the women fight as Achilles fights, which is in the epic style, in other words, with large spears mostly used for throwing. However, although you get the use of javelins more generally in most stories about Amazons, outside that narrow kind of epic vision, you have Amazons who are fighting with bows and arrows in particular, and also axes. The Greeks imagined axes very much as a domestic weapon. And occasionally a woman chooses to kill her husband or something with an axe because, you know, lying around the Greek house, there were plenty of axes. So that axes are regarded very often as a female accoutrement. And indeed, they're also particularly connected with Thrace. So in Amazon's, we've got women from Thrace, so doubly we should see them wielding axes, which usually Greek warriors don't tend to make much of. The archers very often have a small axe with them. So that perhaps goes with the bow and arrow side of things. There's a whole kind of ethical vision of how one should go to war, which Greeks often sort of hold forth on one way or another. The bow and arrow is regarded as something which is perhaps not entirely heroic. Heracles, for example, got a lot of stick by using a bow and arrow quite a lot of the time. It's a little bit cowardly. You're a bit like, say, Paris in the Trojan story. You're not really much of a warrior if you use A bow and arrow all the time. Heracles does it some of the time. Paris does it all the time. It's a sort of cowardly weapon in the sense that you're fighting at a distance. So actually quite suitable in the sense of what women might be able to do usefully on the battlefield. The standard Greek battlefield, we can call it, that is all about a kind of rugby game, in a way. A rugby game with spears and shields where each side forms this sort of thick phalanx and charge into each other as if in a rugby scrum. Now, okay, women can do that, but they're automatically physically up against it, given the, in general, the larger weight and size of their male opponents. So normally when Greeks imagine Amazons fighting, they're doing this more distance stuff. Now, remarkably, Plato, of all people, who, although he's a bit of a dry stick, he holds forth on the whole idea of whether actually it might be a good idea for Greek states to train their young women in using bows and arrows. Why not? He says they can fire an arrow just as well as any man. And where's the problem? Let's train not only the young men to be warriors, but train the young women to be able to be warriors at a distance. The bow and arrow, or maybe even throwing a javelin or something of that sort. And indeed, given their love of horses, throwing a javelin or firing an arrow, or sometimes wielding a big axe on horseback, there is a kind of internal logic to all of this. From a Greek perspective, Thracian warfare as.
- [49:17]
Tristan Hughes
Well, where they have that, you know, the kind of the javelin and the mounted warrior idea, they're calling it most, the skirmisher cavalry. Is there a sense that the Greeks might have modeled that idea of Amazon warfare on the actual Thracians that they would have faced, you know, to the north of the Greek world in the central Mediterranean?
- [49:37]
Dr. David Braunt
Yeah, I think that's almost inescapable. It's kind of hard to know what comes first, but it's a kind of rational package, isn't it? These are Thracian women. They fight like Thracians. Why wouldn't they?
- [49:49]
Tristan Hughes
Well, let's explore something else.
- [49:51]
Dr. David Braunt
Now.
- [49:51]
Tristan Hughes
We'll move a bit away from the fighting because we can talk about fighting for so long. But with the Amazons and how they are portrayed in the ancient Greek myths, it feels like there are almost secret, lesser known parts of the Amazon story and what they were renowned for. And one of the things I have in my notes is astronomy. So, David, how big is astronomy to the Amazons?
- [50:14]
Dr. David Braunt
Yeah, quite Big, actually. And as you rightly say, it's something which never, never gets a look in. I mean, part of the problem with pretty much everything that's been written about Amazons over the years is that there's been this relentless obsession with. With their fighting. And, yes, they fight and they fight very well, but they do a lot else. Amazons are incredibly creative, incredibly intelligent and wise in all sorts of ways. Let's not forget that there's an element of divinity about them. They're not immortal, they're not gods, but they are, in ways which myth never quite explains properly, they are the daughters of the war God Ares. Okay? So that they have a lot in their, if you like, in their genetics. Now, we have quite a few stories of Amazons planning and constructing major buildings. For example, a temple of Ares up there in the southern Black Sea for their father, a temple, a whole temple, planned, conceived, orientated, created by Amazons. Which is an extraordinary thing because in the ancient world, I mean, we see all those temples as you go around, you know, you see the Parthenon. I've just come back from Sicily. You go to Agrigento, full of temples. But we need to be clear that these temples are really hard to build. They cost a bomb, and you've really got to know what you're doing. And we do know that it was not unusual for there to be major problems in construction. And yet these Amazons, they can do all that. Now, one of the other things they can do is they can look to the heavens. And we actually have Bless him in a play of Euripides, a whole account of an Amazon vision of the stars. Because Euripides tells of a tapestry which is in itself quite interesting. Amazons can weave, too. They sometimes claim that they can't, but they can. They do the female jobs, weaving, as usually understood by the Greeks, a female job. But they also do the astronomy, because the tapestry in Euripides is a whole picture, a magnificent, huge picture of the stars seen in very much female terms. So the figures who are featured are, in one way or another, key to primary female concerns, including, for example, the hunter Orion. Orion, who's a male, but who is a very nasty male from a female perspective. He's a kind of determined rapist. And, you know, we see him having a bad time up in the heavens in this tapestry that Euripides offers us in one of his less known plays called the Ion. And the tapestry said to be kept in vaults in Delphi, in the Temple of Apollo. Whether there ever was anything of that sort. In the temple of Apollo there were tapestries for sure, and a lot of other bric a brac, you might say. So the general idea is very appealing and sensible enough. But what Euripides does is show us these Amazons who study the stars. They study the stars in a particularly female kind of way, which doesn't develop a great deal, but nevertheless, it's there.
- [54:20]
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- [56:00]
Tristan Hughes
Do we also get a sense in the surviving myths and even, you know, with playwrights and so on and historians? I believe I've got my notes Herodotus here as well that the Amazons also, you know, one of their many traits and like kind of the legendary stories that become associated with them is that they become linked to the founding of cities and the, the creation of new peoples and sanctuaries across the Greek world and indeed beyond the borders of the Greek world too.
- [56:30]
Dr. David Braunt
Yes, absolutely right. And you're right to mention Herodotus in particular in book four of his histories. I think it's about chapter 110 onwards, if anybody wants to look it up. Herodotus himself shows no enthusiasm for Amazons. Actually what he's trying to do is to explain the background to a whole bunch of peoples who are there in the broader Black Sea world when the Persians turn up to try and take over. And one of those peoples, the Sauromatians, Sauromatae, they have women who go out hunting with their husbands, who may even go to war with their husbands. And Herodotus says that there's a story that all of this goes back to Amazon genetics in a nutshell. What has happened is that Heracles has smashed up the Amazon state. A small number of Amazons, Amazons go in all directions. A small number are taken back towards Greece on board ships. But the Amazons, being a tough lot, take over the ships. Now they don't quite know how to work ships, but nevertheless there they are on the ships and they get thrown up on land on the northern coast of the Black Sea. And there they do what Amazons do best, they pinch some horses because they're in this new world. They're refugees, but they're very resilient and they seize horses. The have punch ups etc with the locals, the so called Scythians. And the Scythians soon discover that these are women and they think, well, this is interesting, why don't we send our young boys out to breed basically with some of these strange powerful women who've turned up and will have some really good grandchildren etc. And so the old Scythians send out the young ones who meet the Amazons and fairly quickly, because these Amazons are clever, very quickly form erotic relationships with the Amazons. The Amazons then start to say to the young Scythians, look, normally we'd go back with you to your families, but we can't do that because your families, you know, they just don't live like us. The women of Scythia spend all their time sat about in wagons. We can't do that. Incidentally, this is one text which among many, which torpedoes a popular idea that the Amazons are in some sense Scythians. They're not. Anyway, so the young Scythian men, very impressed with the Amazons, go home to their families, take what they can and together with the Amazons, according to this origin myth, strike eastwards, cross the Don into what is now South Russia and establish a new people called the Sauromatians, and so says Herodotus. That's the reason why, because all of this is an explanatory myth. That's the reason why the women of the Sarmatians look a bit like Amazons, because way back when there were some Amazons cast ashore. And the result of that genetic mix between a few Amazons there and a few Scythians, the genetic mix is the Saromatian people. The whole business of the destruction of the Amazon state is a large part of this larger tale of creativity. And I really want to sort of emphasize that. It seems to me a huge pity that through this obsession with Amazon's fighting, we lose so often their incredible creativity, as you said, creating peoples, in this case the Saromatians, creating sanctuaries and so forth, and creating whole cities and much else besides. I happen to be talking to a lady in Izmir not long ago who told me that the women of Izmir, which ancient Smyrna in western Turkey, I dare say, well known enough. And the women there are very proud that their city is named after an Amazon, an Amazon called Smyrni, and they feel that they're descended somehow from Amazons. And the women of Turkish Izmir take a particular pleasure in that. Rather as the women and others, I think, of northern Turkey around Samsun, did I mention earlier, is that the kind.
- [61:23]
Tristan Hughes
Of the ancient city of Sinop or Sinope or that kind of area as well, which seems to. If it was like around that Black Sea area, is there a very strong link to Amazons that can endure even down to the present day?
- [61:35]
Dr. David Braunt
Yes, it's well known, this story of this Amazon woman who turned up there and allegedly drank too much. It's a common stereotype we have in the ancient world for women. Women tend to get drunk a lot, according to ancient Greeks. And particularly the peoples of the northern world get drunk a lot as well. So a woman of the northern world is going to be a serious drinker. The Thracian language has allegedly the word San' a to mean a woman that drinks too much. And the name of Sinope is sometimes derived from that particular story. There are a lot of myths surrounding Sinop Sinope, actually, but that's quite a significant one. But it's all going on as well, not not only on the northern coast, but also on the western coast of what's Turkey. I mean, I mentioned. I think I mentioned Bodrum, I mentioned Izmir also a bit up the road at Ephesus. The situation there is quite remarkable. The hugely important, hugely important temple, sanctuary, temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the wonders of the world, was created with, and sometimes in some versions by the Amazons, Amazons who had taken refuge there, thrown out of their homeland by Heracles and incidentally also sometimes Dionysus. Now, Dionysus in all of this has been outrageously ignored and I've tried to say a bit about that and may well come back to it in the future. In the book, Dionysus also goes to war with the Amazons and we know we need to think about that too. But the temple there, the sanctuary of Artemis at Ephesus, is all about Amazon and is about also the new life that Amazons will have away from their homeland up there on the Black Sea, which no longer exists thanks to Heracles. And they are made, as it were, civilized in the sense that they no longer, or at least so much go out fighting or go out hunting. They're turned into a more normative female as priestesses and temple servants of the goddess. The goddess, incidentally, who is also very important in the land where they come from up there in the north. One aspect of why these Amazons are so. What should we call them, for want of a better word, civilized, I suppose, from a Greek perspective, not monstrous, is that they sign up for these deities. Amazons are close, very close to Artemis, and therefore, inescapably also close, particularly to her twin brother Apollo. Now, which is one reason why we find them in Delphi. These are Amazons who aren't in some sense separate from, certainly not hostile to the deities of Greece. They are closely aligned with several of them. I've mentioned Ares already and here we have Artemis, Apollo. You know, it's a quite serious list. They don't get on with all of them. They don't tend to get on with Athena, for example, who's a different kind of female. But again, you know, it shows you that fighting isn't really as important as people want it to be. Of all the female deities, the most full blown military one is Athena, who tends to go around dressed in her famous warrior's helmet and the kit of the traditional heavy infantry. And she doesn't get on with Amazons very much. I think that's helpful in trying to see that Amazons are much more than women who fight.
- [65:37]
Tristan Hughes
And it was very good of you there also, David, to highlight something that I had questions for, but I didn't think we'd have time to cover, which was, you know, that big presence of Amazons in art and in the stories at great sanctuaries like Delphi and Olympia. And they're linked to particular Greek festivals as well. And that's another key aspect of their story. So I'm really glad you mentioned that. And also, of course, the links to wonders of the ancient world like the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. I mentioned it earlier, so I feel I must ask this now before we wrap up. We talked about the Black Sea region and the Amazons there. I don't think we'll have time to cover the importance of the Amazons for the western Greeks and cities like what will become Marseille in France and that extraordinary kind of great geographic length that the Amazons cover. And the Amazons remain important to Greeks, these various different cities across the Mediterranean. But I must ask about Athens, especially as you mentioned, Athena there. Why does classical Athens in particular so like the 5th century, why do the Athenians have such an obsession with the Amazons?
- [66:44]
Dr. David Braunt
They do, because it really was the Amazon invasion of Attica, Athens that marked the city coming to fruition. The earliest version we have of this really is probably that of Aeschylus in his trilogy the oresteia. That's what458BC first performed and re performed thereafter. There the Amazons come down to attack Athens, partly at least, because they're jealous of its fine buildings. They don't like the idea that somebody else has been out there creating a fine city, which Theseus has done. So they come down to have a go at Theseus. Now that's something which again tends to be completely overlooked. And it partly explains place names, for example, near the Acropolis and so forth. Now, the other aspect of it is that Theseus has himself been up to the land of the Amazons in the southern Black Sea, various versions, either on his own or in partnership with others, in particular with Heracles sometimes. And as a result he's brought back with him a particular Amazon female. She's kind of a queen, and she goes under various names. Anti ope is one of those. She's sometimes called Hippolytae. There are plenty of Hippolytes in Amazon stories. And she has other names too. Now she goes back with Theseus and is the whole business is actually told differently so much there's a question mark as to whether she's actually carried off as it were, looted, grabbed, abducted from her homeland, and there's certainly a good deal of that, or whether she actually is entranced by Theseus. And incidentally, Theseus himself is the great lover of so much of ancient Greek myth. So to be entrapped for a woman to be entranced by Theseus is by no means unusual. So she goes back to Athens and in Athens she becomes briefly Theseus partner, Theseus queen, and she tries to play the part of an Athenian woman. It's one of the transitions that we find where an Amazon can become a Greek woman, as it were. And in that context, when the rest of the Amazons turn up to lay siege to Athens, which they do quite successfully, although as always in the stories of Greeks versus Amazons, the Amazons ultimately lose, but nevertheless do well when these Amazons turn up. The Antiope, shall we call her Theseus's partner, stands beside Theseus on his side fighting for Athens, and actually gets into a duel with the new Amazon queen, who tends to be grotesquely ignored, a woman called Malpadia. In the end, both women die and both women are commemorated in the landscape of Athens. So that in the 4th century BC, you, you might say to somebody, I'll see you near the Amazon, meaning Antiope's tomb. So it's very much a picture of Amazons who are there as the city faces its first real challenge. Not the only challenge. There are also other challenges that come along around the same time from people from the Peloponnese in the south, people from the north. But the defeat of the Amazons for Athenians was a very special moment. A defeat which actually included having at least 1Amazon Fighting 4 Athens.
- [71:03]
Tristan Hughes
And is it a myth then that they later try and substitute Amazons for Persians or the other way around? There always seems to be that link, isn't there, between Amazons and Persians. But the truth of that feels a bit more. Well, take it away.
- [71:16]
Dr. David Braunt
Okay, well, the Amazon's Persians thing is, I'm afraid, another red herring, I should say that I don't set out to, to sort of disrupt these, these connections. It just doesn't work. And others before me, actually a minority of people have long since observed this. The. It's true that the Amazon homeland is just about in the Persian Empire, but it's a very isolated, distant corner of the Persian Empire up there on the Black Sea. It really is. And there's very little to see about Amazon Amazons that has anything Persian in it. As we've seen, as we've seen over and over again, they're Thracians. It simply doesn't work. It was suggested because by the art historians, actually there's nothing in any text. It was suggested that maybe there's some sort of linkage because sometimes not Very often Amazons and Persians can look a bit the same in vase painting. That's why now the fact is that the representation of non Greeks in vase painting is notoriously haphazard because these guys, they, the painters themselves, they just produce something which looks sort of foreign. Ish. And it's true that, you know, with some of these images the Amazons can look like Persians, but actually the truth is that that's, that's very rare. And in the Persian wars for example, there's really no sign of that. And after the Persian wars when we hear about how Aeschylus play the Persians, there's no indication there that Amazons are in any way relevant to the Persian wars. When Greek artists, Athenian artists wanted to show Amazons in art, they showed Amazons. They didn't need to show Persians who are kind of like Amazons or Amazons who are kind of like Persians. They wanted to show Persians, they showed Persians, they wanted to show Amazons, they showed Amazons. On one building, the so called painted Stoa Star Poikile painted in the middle of the 5th century BC, we have one huge picture with Greeks fighting Persians, Athenians fighting Persians and another big picture with Athenians fighting Amazons, no problem. So I'm afraid the whole Persians, Amazons thing is an unhelpful bit of nonsense, really. Sorry about that.
- [73:43]
Tristan Hughes
Well, David, this has been a wonderful chat. We covered so many different themes and topics of the Amazons over this past hour or so and there are still so many other themes we could explore. But alas, we don't have time. We didn't even cover Alexander the Great and his sex marathon with one later Amazon Queen, which is fascinating, isn't it? But I'm guessing that as time goes on, as the centuries go on, Hellenistic period and then into Roman times and then the rise of Christianity, that the Amazon story, it remains popular across the Mediterranean. It's still there, but it evolves and it evolves down into present day, where the name Amazons remains as big as it. I'm presuming it ever has been.
- [74:24]
Dr. David Braunt
Yeah, I think that's right. You do notice with the advance of time, from about AD 300 onwards, Amazons get rather nastier. They spend their time eating snakes and tortoises, they train their horses to eat people, all kinds of crazy stuff. But we've moved well away from the mainstream beliefs of the archaic and classical Greeks. That meant they wanted to put Amazons on their temples and so forth. And we're into a world where you can say what the hell you like. Really?
- [74:58]
Tristan Hughes
Well, David, this has been fantastic. Last but certainly not least, your new book which explores all the themes we've covered today and so many more about the Amazons.
- [75:07]
Dr. David Braunt
It is called Amazons the History behind the Legend. What it means is how Amazons are important in Greek society and why we cover, you know, the whole military aspect. But I just want to get people thinking about other things Amazons do, you know, their intelligence, their ability to create, you know, they're a beauty. They're not monsters. Unless you perhaps perceive beauty as somehow monstrous, it's certainly dangerous, as is their warfare.
- [75:39]
Tristan Hughes
Well, David, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.
- [75:44]
Dr. David Braunt
My pleasure, Tristan.
- [75:48]
Tristan Hughes
Well, there you go. There was Dr. David Braun talking all things the Amazons in ancient Greece. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you for listening. Please follow the ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor if you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, where we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of Historyhit's podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe@historyhit.com subscribe that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.
- [76:34]
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- [77:04]
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