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====== Chapter 1 ======


p9 

This is by no means an unreasonable suggestion. As we shall
see in greater detail in chapter 2, Amazons figure prominently
not only in classical ethnographic accounts and origin legends
from the time of Herodotus through the Middle Ages but also in
Roman and medieval accounts of campaigns against “barbarian”
Celts, Germanic enemies, and Steppe peoples.5 Moreover, ar-
chaeological evidence of women buried with weapons occurs in
ancient and medieval tombs from the area of the Black Sea.6 In
light of such evidence, perhaps descriptions of Amazons are sim-
ply reflections of reality.

p13

The mixoparthenos, the snake woman of the Pontic Greeks’
origin account, is particularly interesting because it is, as the
French classicist François Hartog has argued, a way for Greeks
to “think nomadism,” that is, to conceive of an origin appro-
priate to a people who are, if not in their own minds, at least in
the minds of the Greeks, the archetypical nomads.13 Heracles is
the father of many cities and barbarian peoples.14 In this particu-
lar origin story, he is father of a people at the extreme ends of
the world. Herodotus tells us that he arrived in Scythia from
Geryon, who lived outside the Pontus at the edge of the world.
The geographic marginality of the Scyths is paralleled by their
marginal relationship to the human race. Their mother is only
part human: she belongs to the same order of half-human, half-
serpent creatures as Echidna, who in Hesiod’s Theogony, is born
of Phorkys and Keto. Echidna too has offspring, but they are
themselves monsters: Orthus (the dog of Geryon), Cerberus, the
Hydra of Lerna, and the Chimera, the Sphinx, and the Nemean
Lion. The Scyths are, like these monsters, utterly different from
the Greeks, that is, from full humanity.

p15

Roman accounts do not deny female origin legends, but these
tend to be negative or sacrificial. The most significant is that
of Carthage, the city founded by Dido. Antiquity knew various
versions of Dido, just as it knew various versions of the origins
of the Scyths and other peoples. While in both traditions Dido
flees Tyre after her brother murders her husband, founds Car-
thage, and initiates its rise, the two accounts diverge greatly in
recounting her fate. In one version, Dido is an excellent queen
who only kills herself because, as an exemplary widow, she re-
jects the demands of her followers to marry a local prince. In
the other, which derives largely from Virgil, she commits suicide
out of mad and hopeless love for Aeneas, who has abandoned
her.18 In Virgil’s account, in the words of Christopher Baswell,
the “dominant version of the myth (the Aeneid), produced for a
dominant class,” Dido’s intelligence and shrewdness are sup-
pressed as part of a systematic suppression of Dido as model of
clever, mercantile and specifically feminine power.19 Not only
does she change into a mad, sex-crazed suicide from a chaste
widow who prefers death to a forced marriage, but her cleverness
and ingenuity in the foundation of Carthage disappears as well.
The alternative Dido survived in a shadowy existence, in ac-
counts by minor historians and Virgilian commentators, to
emerge only at the end of antiquity, and she would not receive
a major voice until the Middle Ages.

p16

Lucretia is the archetype: her rape, accusation against King
Tarquin the Proud, and suicide are the essential preludes to the
Republic.21 Parallel to the story of Lucretia is that of Verginia,
the daughter of Verginius, lusted after by the judge Appius
Claudius, the most powerful man in Rome. Claudius arranged
for one of his clients, Marcus Claudius, to claim her as his slave
and to bring the claim before his court. Her father, unable to
resist the powerful judge, asked a moment alone with her, only
to plunge his dagger into her heart, telling her, “In only this
way, daughter, can I defend your freedom.”22 Just as Lucretia’s
death gave birth to the Republic, Verginia’s death gives birth to
law.23 When Roman women are present at the beginning, they
do not live long.

====== Chapter 2 ======


p26

Well into his history of the Goths, Jordanes, the sixth-
century author who claims to be summarizing a lost history by
Cassidorus, enters a long excursus on the valor of Gothic women
who, according to his tale, were actually the Amazons. He ex-
plains that after their menfolk had left on a military expedition,
they were drawn into battle by neighbors.1 Having been taught
by their men, they strongly resisted and defeated the enemy. Em-
boldened by their victory, they chose two among them, Lampeto
and Marpesia, as leaders. While Lampeto remained to defend
the borders of their own patria (a peculiar choice of words under
the circumstances), Marpesia led her army of women to conquer
Asia. Then follows a long account drawn primarily from Orosius
and Justin of the deeds of the Amazons up to the time of Alexan-
der the Great. Jordanes breaks off this narrative abruptly, how-
ever, to ask, “Why does an account concerning the men of the
Goths pay so much attention to women?”2 This is indeed an
interesting question, but Jordanes himself provides no answer:
instead he returns to the great and praiseworthy deeds of men.

p27

An alternative response, not as naive as it may sound, is that
there actually were female warriors among the barbarian peoples
encountered by the Romans and Byzantines. Thus, as good eth-
nographers, Roman and post-Roman authors simply described
them. We mustn’t dismiss this possibility out of hand: Not only
do Amazons figure prominently in classical ethnographic ac-
counts and origin legends from the time of Herodotus through
the Middle Ages, but Roman accounts of campaigns against
Celtic and Germanic enemies regularly mention women on the
battlefield. Later, Avar and Slavic armies reportedly included
women.9 Warrior women figure in vernacular oral traditions and
emerge in both Scandinavian literature and in Middle High Ger-
man texts such as the Nibelungenlied and histories such as Saxo
Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum.10 Finally, archaeological evi-
dence of women buried with weapons occurs widely. In Sauro-
matian-Sarmatian burials from the sixth to fourth centuries
B.C.E., archaeologists have found tombs of women buried with
swords and daggers and at least one skeleton of a young woman
bow-legged apparently from riding, supplied with a quiver con-
taining forty bronze-tipped arrows, an iron dagger, and hanging
around her neck, a leather pouch containing a bronze arrow-
head.11 From the early Middle Ages, some sixteen Avar women’s
graves were excavated in southern Slovakia that contained none
of the usual female ornaments and grave goods but instead
horses, normally typical of high-status men.12 Such finds have
led historians and archaeologists to conclude that women in no-
madic societies may well have had a military role that led to or
reinforced legends of Amazon warrior maidens.

p40

However, Cosmas’s emplotment of the Amazons does not
simply adopt the classical tradition on which it draws. Unlike the
Amazonomachia—or indeed the grizzly slaughter in the Czech
language, the Dalimil Chronicle of 1314—the violence is re-
strained: the Amazons are not killed; they are married, albeit
with the violence of rape. The foundation of male rule is thus
more reminiscent of the Roman rape of the Sabine women than
the destruction of the Amazons. Nor is Libuše destroyed or even
condemned. Her power may be suspect, but she works for the
good of society. This is in a real sense Cosmas’s dilemma: wom-
an’s power may not conform to the proper order of the world,
but it both can be potent and can advance the cause of justice.

p42

In conclusion, we see how malleable was the motif of Ama-
zons at the origins of peoples: Although firmly established as
part of the prehistory of peoples, what this prehistory meant
could change. It could be employed to criticize weak lordship,
but it could also criticize a society that because of its failings
needed stern authority. As its uses shifted with different social
and cultural motivations, the texture of misogyny also varied:
Cosmas is much less unambiguously opposed to the public role
of women than most previous or subsequent authors. His pow-
erful women belonged, unlike those of the third century, to a
world that was genuinely attractive even if it, in the end, had to
be destroyed in order for divinely willed order to be created.