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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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W ell 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.
