The Amazons by Adrienne Mayor

Author:Adrienne Mayor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

THE AMAZON INVASION ROUTE

An alternative Amazon invasion route from the northern Black Sea was first proposed by Hellanikos (fifth century BC). It was repeated by Diodorus and Lycophron, who wrote that the Amazons drove their Scythian mares across the Danube and sacked and burned the Attic countryside. Plutarch, however, doubted this route; he assumed that the Amazon army originated in Pontus on the southern Black Sea coast. If so, why would they have traversed the frozen Cimmerian Bosporus (between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea), crossing the Danube and descending south into Thrace and Greece? But this northern route indicates how Amazons and Scythians were merged in Greek thinking: it was probably the path taken by historical Scythian armies into Thrace.15 Hellanikos’s treatise is no longer extant, but perhaps he described how the Scythian cavalry led by Panasagoras, son of Sagylus, took the northerly route and met up with their Amazon allies from Pontus as they entered Thrace over the Bosporus strait at the Sea of Marmara (map 2.2).

The northerly invasion route also suggests another logical scenario, which may have been clear in the missing sources but left out of the surviving accounts. As we know, the Amazons were described as ceaselessly moving around the Black Sea, back and forth between their northern and southern strongholds (chapters 2 and 3). Several writers stated that after the depredations of the Greeks, represented by the myths of Heracles and Theseus, the Amazons of Pontus were vulnerable to the attacks of neighboring barbarians and lost their power in the region. It would make sense for Greeks to imagine that the remaining Amazons led by Orithyia left Pontus to return to their original Scythian homeland on the steppes, where they personally enlisted the aid of King Sagylus. Pausanias knew of another story that some of the Amazon survivors of Heracles’s attack fled to Ephesus (the site of their ancient sanctuary) and settled in the countryside there.16 This dispersal scenario also suggests that the Amazons under Queen Orithyia might have been only a small contingent, perhaps the advance shock troops, of a larger army of steppe Scythians allegedly recruited and “led by the Amazons.” This Amazon-Scythian alliance brings up another lapse in the myth as we have it. Whatever became of the Scythian portion of the invasion force? Why is there no mention of Panasagoras and his Scythian cavalry in the actual fighting in Athens?

The Scythian allies are missing from the action in Athens in all the surviving sources. What happened? The historian Justin explains. “A disagreement arose before the battle” and the Scythians did not continue on to Athens. “Abandoned by their Scythian allies, the Amazons were defeated in the field by the Athenians.”17 The Scythians apparently remained in Thrace. This story suggests a possible historical influence on the myth of an Amazon assault on Athens. As noted above, the Greeks were aware that Scythians did in fact conquer parts of Thrace, although Scythians never invaded Greece itself. Greek artists began to depict Scythians in vase paintings and sculpture in the sixth century BC.

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