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Page 3 of 4 Another Amazon Queen,Thalestris, was said to have been visited by Alexander the Great. For two weeks they hunted lions by day and made love by night. Unfortunately, she was soon killed after that so no queenly baby came out of this union.
The fifth century B.C. Athenian author, Lysias, called them the “daughters of Ares” because they worshipped this god of war along with Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, childbearing, adolescence, children and so on. He also wrote that they were the first in their area to be “armed with iron, and they were the first of all to mount horses, with which, owing to the inexperience of their enemies, they surprised them and either caught those who fled or outstripped those who pursued. They were accounted as men for their high courage, rather than as women for their sex; so much more did they seem to excel men in their spirit.”
The above quotation was not meant to be flattering. A woman of high spirits was considered despicable and non-feminine in Classical Greece. Greek women at the time had no rights. Upper class married women were to stay in the house and weave, make yarn, keep the house and servants in order and were not allowed to talk with anyone except other female relatives. They had to stay upstairs when guests came around, unless they were male family members. The only women who enjoyed any sense of freedom were the courtisans who were sponsored by the rich Greek upper class men. So, here we could have an answer to why the Amazons were so infamous. The Greeks created the myths and used the stories to keep their own women down. The violent and masculine Amazons were the antithesis of the demure and feminine Greek and later Roman women. The stories told of what could happen if women let themselves get out of control and copied these “she-devils”. Greek women could not possibly win over their unbeatable conquerors, Greek men, and they would just end up killing their male children, flirting with the enemy and hating men.
Lysias, in his “Funeral Oration” recounts the Amazons’ inevitable downfall. He tells of how they dared to try to invade Athens, not being content with conquering areas around their own country (which he claimed was Anatolia, the west coast and central part of Turkey). Unfortunately, they “met with valiant men” and “found their spirit now was like their sex”... losers; they lost terribly. He went on to describe more humiliation, “They stood alone in failing to learn from their mistakes, and so be better advised in their future actions; they would not return home and report their own misfortune and our ancestors’ valor (obviously he was upset about the latter); for they perished on the spot, and were punished for their folly, thus making our city’s memory imperishable for its valor; while owing to their disaster in this region they rendered their own country nameless.” In other words, they all died and so couldn’t go back to their own land and tell about the successes of the Greeks, much to Lysias’ annoyance. His last comment may also be an answer to why it is so hard to pinpoint their origin. Jeannine Davis-Kimball speculates that “Lysias’ words suggest that the Amazons’ land of origin might have been deliberately obscured by historians as punishment for their headstrong and ignoble actions.”
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