Greek legends of Amazons, warrior women who lived beyond the borders of civilization and inverted normal gender roles. According to legend, this tribe of female warriors was descended from Ares, Greek god of war, and the nymph Harmonia. They were devotees of Artemis, goddess of the hunt. The first mention of the Amazons appears in Homer’s Iliad, which tells that they assisted the Trojans in the Trojan War. Accounts of Amazons usually placed them even further back in a mythic past, and only the legends of Alexander the Great place them in historical time. The historian Arrian reports an account in which Alexander met Amazons, but adds that he does not believe it.
Most often, legends place the Amazons on the southeastern shore of the Black Sea, but as the Greeks explored and settled that region, the tales situated the Amazons still farther away, in Scythia or even North Africa, beyond civilization. There may have been a historic core to the legends of Amazons: archaeologists have discovered that in one Scythian tribe, which Herodotus called the Sauromatians, women hunted and fought alongside their men, and weapons have been discovered in their tombs. The legend was popular in Greece, however, as an exotic example of the "barbarous" world where all natural human law was overthrown.
The historian Strabo tells that the Amazons were an exclusively female tribe. They reproduced by visiting their neighbors each year and engaging in promiscuous sex. When the children were born, the women kept the female infants, but sent the males back to their fathers. This in itself is an inversion of normal Greek practice, which valued male children over females. Diodorus presents an even more inverted picture, one that was probably deeply shocking to Greco-Roman audiences. He tells that the Amazons did indeed live with men, but men who served as househusbands while the women were warriors, hunters, and rulers. The Amazons preserved this reverse gender discrimination, according to Diodorus, by dislocating the legs of their boy children, crippling them for life. Later writers depict Amazons even abandoning the nurture of their female children. Some authors write that, to keep their breasts from growing, the Amazons fed their daughters mares’ milk instead of breast-feeding them. More radically, later authors produced a spurious etymology for a-mazon, which can be interpreted as "without a breast." They report that the Amazons cut off or cauterized the right breasts of young girls, so they would not be discommoded when drawing a bow.
In legend, the Amazons are always gloriously defeated. Heracles defeated and killed the Amazon queen Hippolyta. The hero Theseus later married her sister Antiope, leading to an Amazonian invasion of Athens that was only repelled after a desperate struggle—the Athenian victory over the Amazons was carved on the shield of the great statue of Athena Parthenos on the Acropolis. Similarly, Queen Penthesilea brought her army to help Troy but was killed by Achilles in battle. Achilles falling hopelessly in love with Penthesilea as she died was a popular image in art. A recurrent theme was that the Amazon warriors were wild and had to be tamed by Greek men, who were endowed with the superior gift of reason. The ultimate purpose of these tales was to reinforce Greek ideas of gender, not to overturn them.
Fascination with Amazons—with the possibility that women could fight and triumph in the men’s world of the battlefield—continues to the present, as attested by Wonder Woman and Zena the Warrior Princess. Legends of the Amazons have also been used to explain fighting women in other cultures, and it is thus that the Amazon River in Brazil got its name after explorers saw women fighting there alongside men.
