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--- geary_patrick_j [2022/12/26 17:30]
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 [[https://onesearch.uark.edu/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma991035950266307336&context=L&vid=01UARK_INST:01UARK&lang=en&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine|Library Link]]
+====== 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.

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