The Amazons

What makes the Amazons one of the most captivating myths in ancient Greek culture? Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr. David Braund, Emeritus Professor at the University of Exeter, to explore and celebrate the legends of the Amazons in ancient Greek culture. From their portrayal through iconic myths involving Heracles, Achilles, and Theseus to modern misconceptions, Tristan and David reveal the Amazons' roles in epic tales like the Trojan War and their artistic representations on ancient Greek vases and temple reliefs. These formidable warrior women were not only central figures in mythology but also revered city founders, astronomers and festival creators, far more than their popular depiction as alluring and dangerous figures. MORE Achilles https://open.spotify.com/episode/6uNHjwkzMHT5Ql2NHixZvl?si=7098cc9c847141e4 The Thracians https://open.spotify.com/episode/6uvIfj2fkYhoJZsn4y1SDX?si=1yLefV8PSSO2ZzZzY5T9yA Ares: God of War https://open.spotify.com/episode/6mER4RZ11k56eqV1uoVvNs Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 1:16Tristan 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's 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 Klascolathens or Alexander the Great. Their stories endured and became popular across the Greek world. But the Amazons also did much more than just fighting.

• 1:58Tristan Hughes?

  They were founders of cities, of festivals and peoples. They were garland superwomen, thus 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 Braun, 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.

• 2:37Tristan Hughes?

  David, we are talking about the Amazons today, your brand new book. The Amazons, they seem as popular as ever.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:45Tristan Hughes?

  But am I also right that modern perceptions of Amazons, they're very different to what the ancient Greeks thought?

• 2:51Speaker 02

  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, and then 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.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  And I don't really want to damage that. I mean, to explain what I mean, I happen to, 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, I, I just, 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 is what I'm aiming at.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  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 it it touches base with all sorts of really big issues in in modern society, you know, everything's surrounding gender for a start. My Women of Poland, for example, as well. All kinds of things which actually at at 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,

• 5:06Speaker 02

  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 in plays which explore real human difficulties and so forth. The 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

• 5:51Speaker 02

  feature Amazons. And Amazons 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.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  And then 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,

• 7:18Speaker 02

  and really quite a lot today, as I've tried to outline.

• 7:22Tristan Hughes?

  David, 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.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Well, some people have claimed as much. Really, the answer to that is, no, it isn't.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  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's survival?

• 8:15Tristan 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.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  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, are tough, resilient, resourceful women who might pick up a weapon, might even form an army or something.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  That's the general image of Amazons, yeah? 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,

• 9:52Speaker 02

  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's a bit of a fuss on the silly 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, oh, 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

• 10:36Speaker 02

  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 the the simple question is, we don't, why was this spear put in this burial? The short answer is, we do not know. One option is, yes, it was her favourite spear that she took into battle. But there are plenty of other options which 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.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  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 there were too many valuable things available to be put in in in a burial in the city of.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  Now, you know, I focus on this one thing, I've had no contact whatsoever with the 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 of interpreting these grave goods. And and the the mistake, as I would see it, is to take the fact that from time to time,

• 12:44Speaker 02

  female burials contained what we might think of as weapons, to to move from that to say, aha, we have found an Amazon. And it's worth saying, actually, also, 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.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  Sometimes we're told triumphantly, I, I, you, you'll get my sense of, I'm rather short of patience with this because it's on the whole unhelpful. We are sometimes told triumphantly, ah, 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.

• 13:57Tristan Hughes?

  If we go a bit more on to 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 myth? And, you know, the mindset behind the Greeks who would have created it?

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Now, that's a really interesting question, Trista. 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, if we follow the traditional view, which I, I do, that we should date Greek culture from around 700 B.C. In other words, at 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.

• 15:00Tristan Hughes?

  Ah.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  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 organisation, actually. So Amazons are already, as Greek culture starts to sort of raise its head, are already there. Now, you're 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.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  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 mass of stuff, you know, Prometheus, for example, a good one, and, 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, are dating from what the early-ish second millennium B.C.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  So, you know, whereas Greek culture begins, say, 700 B.C., this is more 1700 B.C., 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 specialise in this are doing two rather interesting things. One is they're suspecting Amazons myth at this early stage. And secondly, they're also engaged in this inevitable search for beginnings, which is an infinite regress.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  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,

• 17:55Speaker 02

  the inevitable pottery and so forth, and also a whole series of key stories in, including, you know, Troy. They're in the Argonautic Epic, which is also very early, already there again in 700 B.C., 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.

• 18:37Tristan 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.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, there is. I always sign up for that as a 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.

• 19:17Tristan Hughes?

  Ah.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  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,

• 19:59Speaker 02

  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's 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.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  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 the Greek male, and particularly perhaps the young Greek male looking to be, in inverted commas, a hero, an Achilles, a Heracles even. And at the same time, these are potentially first class again. And it's kind of difficult to talk about this without being a bit sort of,

• 22:08Speaker 02

  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,

• 22:49Speaker 02

  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 and and I think really rather astonishing version of that is in the so-called duel between an Amazon queen and the famous Achilles. Where um actually, nobody survives Achilles. Achilles just kills anybody in front of him. And so when the Amazon queen comes across Achilles,

• 23:33Speaker 02

  I'm afraid we all know what's gonna 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 of passion. Love, as it's often called, it's slightly odd in this context, but nevertheless.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  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. Men 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 a 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.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  And are flagged as such in the ancient texts. And we've 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 a belt, her battle belt. And they seem to go 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 in fur and all kinds of boots and things.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  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. Oh God. To get away with the belt that he'd 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.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  And I think that's why they're part of this complex fantasy. And so powerful for Greek society because Greeks in general were.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  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 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 the least about, which is the private everyday world.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Well, yes.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  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 kind of female take on Amazons as distinct from the male take on Amazons. So clearly, in experiential ways, there will be obvious differences.

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• 29:38Tristan 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?

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:15Tristan Hughes?

  And do we know much about the whole Amazon society? What do the Greeks tell about that?

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Right, yeah. No, the Greek culture's pretty clear about this, actually, though there are one or two loose ends. In terms of their earliest origins and their ethnicity, for want of a better word, Greeks regarded the Amazons as coming from Thrace.

• 30:37Tristan Hughes?

  Ah.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  In other words, roughly the area between northern Greece, that's Larnike, et cetera, 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, et cetera, along what is now the south coast of the Black Sea and northern Turkey. They often have a story

• 31:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  One of the greenest and most fertile areas around the whole coast of the Black Sea. And this is in what is now a north-east Turkey, on the shores of the Black Sea, immediately east of the modern town of Samson, 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 epicenter of all of this,

• 32:47Speaker 02

  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 a pretty patriarchal society, really, around those parts. So again, there's a kind of a mirror image of what's going on with ancient Greece, perhaps. But that area is known in the ancient world, and in a way today too, as the plain of Themyscira.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  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 south-eastern 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 spent 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,

• 34:12Speaker 02

  Heracles rather reluctantly smashes the whole society. It never really recovers. But i- 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,

• 34:55Speaker 02

  you know, teenagers in their early twenties, 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 fourth, third century B.C. 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 Amazons' sex with either neighbors,

• 35:38Speaker 02

  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 mainline traditional myth. The mainline traditional myth is much more interested in, for example, Heracles smashing the Amazon culture that's there.

• 36:01Tristan Hughes?

  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 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?

• 36:28Speaker 02

  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 or 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

• 37:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 37:33Tristan Hughes?

  We get a 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?

• 37:45Speaker 02

  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 side saddle, which is also quite important.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  And that they're doing things that in general in Greek society, women did not do, particularly the more wealthy, 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.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  We find, for example, 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 who does it, Atalante, who manages to hit it.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  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 Rhodias, 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 going to face who knows what.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  You're just gonna cause mayhem. And again, partly because women like this, from a Greek male perspective, are by and large, very attractive. So poor 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,

• 41:16Speaker 02

  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.

• 41:47Tristan 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?

• 42:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  And indeed, they're also particularly connected with Thrace. So in Amazons, 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.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  Heracles, for example, got a lot of stick by using a bow and arrow by 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 the standard Greek battlefield, if we can call it that, is all about a kind of rugby

• 44:40Speaker 02

  game in a way, a rugby game with spears and shields, where each side forms a sort of thick phalanx and charge into each other as if in a rugby scrum. Now, OK, 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 is a bit of a dry stick, he holds forth on

• 45:23Speaker 02

  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? You know, they can 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.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  There is a kind of internal logic to all of this from a Greek perspective.

• 46:12Tristan Hughes?

  Thracian warfare as well, where they have that, you know, the kind of the javelin and the mounted warrior idea, with the 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?

• 46:33Speaker 02

  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?

• 46:46Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's explore something else now. I want to 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?

• 47:10Speaker 02

  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 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

• 47:50Speaker 02

  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 we go around, you know, you see the path and on,

• 48:35Speaker 02

  I've just come back from Sicily, you go to Agrippa, 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.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  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,

• 50:01Speaker 02

  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,

• 50:44Speaker 02

  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, is show us these Amazons who study the stars. They study the stars in a particularly female kind of way, which he doesn't develop a great deal, but nevertheless, it's there.

• 51:19Tristan Hughes?

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• 51:31Tristan Hughes?

  And me, Anthony Delaney. We are historians and love all things gloomy and macabre.

• 51:37Speaker 04

  From Tudor executioners and ancient Egyptian death rituals to witch trials and folklore, feel transported back in time on After Dark. Out every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 51:49Tristan Hughes?

  And guess what? We're also now on YouTube. After Dark, a podcast from History Hit.

• 52:09Tristan Hughes?

  Do we also get a sense, in the surviving myths and even with playwrights and so on, and historians, I believe I've got in my notes Herodotus here as well, that the Amazons also, one of their many traits and the legendary stories that become associated with them, is that they become linked to the founding of cities and the creation of new peoples and sanctuaries across the Greek world, and indeed, beyond the borders of the Greek world, too?

• 52:39Speaker 02

  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 Saramatians, Saramati, they have women who go out hunting with their husbands,

• 53:24Speaker 02

  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, because 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.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  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, they have punch-ups, et cetera, 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 we'll have some really good grandchildren, et cetera. And so the old Scythians send out the young ones, who meet the Amazons,

• 54:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  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 Saramatians. 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 Saramatians 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,

• 56:18Speaker 02

  the genetic mix is the Saramatian 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 emphasise that. It seems to me a huge pity that through this obsession with Amazons fighting, we lose so often their incredible creativity. As you said, creating peoples, in this case as Saramatians, creating sanctuaries and so forth, and creating whole cities and much else besides. I happened to be talking to a lady in Izmir not long ago,

• 57:00Speaker 02

  who told me that the women of Izmir, which ancient Smirnay, 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 Smirnay. And they feel that they're descended somehow from Amazons. And the women of Turkish Ismir take a particular pleasure in that, rather as the women and others, I think, of northern Turkey around Samson that I mentioned earlier.

• 57:31Tristan Hughes?

  Is that the kind of the ancient city of Sinop or Sinope or that kind of area as well, which seems to, if it was like round that Black Sea area, is there a very strong link to Amazons that can endure even down to the present day?

• 57:43Speaker 02

  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 sanape to mean a woman that drinks too much. And the name is of Sinope is sometimes derived from that particular story.

• 58:23Speaker 02

  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 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 Ismir. Also a bit up the road at Ephesus. The situation there is quite remarkable. We, 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.

• 59:08Speaker 02

  And incidentally, also sometimes Dionysus.

• 59:11Speaker 02

  Dionysus in all of this has been outrageously ignored. And I'm trying to to say a bit about that and or maybe I'll come back to it in the future in the book. Dionysus also goes to war with the Amazons. And we we know we need to think about that, too. But the the temple there, the sanctuary of Artemis at Ephesus, is all about Amazons. And is about also the the 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

• 59:54Speaker 02

  so much, go out fighting or go out hunting. They're turned into a more normative female as priestesses and 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 of why these Amazons are so, what shall we call them? I want 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

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  to her twin brother, Apollo, 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 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.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  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. But she doesn't get on with with Amazons very much. I think that's helpful in trying to to see that Amazons are much more than women who fight.

• 1:01:45Tristan 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 that big presence of Amazons in in art and in the stories at great sanctuaries like Delphi and Olympia and their 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

• 1:02:26Tristan Hughes?

  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 fifth century? Why do the Athenians have such an obsession with the Amazons?

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  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 Iscalus in his trilogy, the Orystia. That's what 458 B.C. 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

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

  creating a fine city, which Theseus has done.

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  Antiope is one of those. She's sometimes called Hippolyte. 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, from her homeland. And there's certainly a good deal of that. Or whether she actually is entranced by Theseus.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  And incidentally, Theseus himself is the great lover of so much of, 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's partner, Theseus's 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.

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  Although, as always in these 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 Malpada, Malpada. In the end, both women die, and both women are commemorated in the landscape of Athens.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  So that in the fourth century B.C., 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 one Amazon fighting for Athens.

• 1:07:11Tristan 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.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  Okay, well, the Amazons-Persians thing is, I'm afraid, another red herring. I should say that I didn't set out to sort of disrupt these connections. It just doesn't work. And others before me, actually, a minority of people, have long since observed this. It's true that the Amazon homeland is just about in the Persian Empire, but it's a very, 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 Amazons that has anything Persian in it, as we've seen over and over again.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  The Thracians, it simply doesn't work. It was suggested because by 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, the painters themselves, they just produce something which looks sort of foreignish. And it's true that, you know, with some of these images, the Amazons

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  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's 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, the Stoa Poikile, painted in the middle of

• 1:09:34Speaker 02

  the 5th century B.C., 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.

• 1:09:52Tristan 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. We've won a 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.

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  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, from the mainstream beliefs of the archaic and classical Greeks that meant they wanted to put, wanted to put Amazons on their temples and so forth. And we're into a world where you can say what they had you like, really.

• 1:11:07Tristan 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. It is called

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:11:47Tristan Hughes?

  Well, David, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  My pleasure, Chris.

• 1:11:56Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Dr David Braun talking all the 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 favour. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.