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Ancient Amazons ‘ Heroes, Outsiders or Women?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Lorna Hardwick
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Extract

The network of associations of the word Amazon still plays a part in the shorthand of modern discourse. Its connotations may vary from a slightly comic praise of sporting excellence in women to underlying insinuations that Amazons are not quite feminine. When applied by politicians and journalists to the women in the Peace Camp at Greenham Common during the 1980s, for example, the epithet Amazon carried the implication that these women rejected men and had developed a society apart (therefore (sịc) they must be subversives, lesbians, communists, hippies – etc. etc.). Modern usage perhaps emphasizes the unusual or even threatening associations; Amazons are, for whatever reason, outside the ‘normal’ parameters of life-style and achievements. Ancient usage presupposed an additional element, Amazons as a subject for artistic and poetic interest. The reasons why this was so do much to explain how and why the image of the Amazons communicated certain associations and how these in turn relate to underlying assumptions about the framework of Greek society and its values.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , April 1990 , pp. 14 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1990

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References

Notes

1. ‘Women in charge: the function of alternatives in early Greek tradition and the ancient idea of matriarchy’, Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967), 1–35. Pembroke argues that the similarities in structure in the examples of customs of marriage and sexual intercourse attributed by Herodotus to non-Greeks do not suggest a historical relativism but indicate rather the construction of an image of foreigners, with practices and values alien to those of Greeks, and in symmetrical tension with themCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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3. Discussed in Humphreys, ibid., pp. 265–75 with reference to B. Bernstein, Class Codes and Control Vols. 1–3 (London, 1971).

4. Iliad 3.189.

5. Iliad 6.186.

6. Pindar, Ol. 13.87–90 (tr. J. E. Sandys).

7. Pindar Fr. 158 (Bergk) = 172 (Loeb).

8. Pindar, Ol.8.47.

9. 4.110–8.

10. 4.114 (tr. A. de Selincourt).

11. Fr. 16, 17 in F. Jacoby, F Gr H 3 B 45–46.

12. 4.117.

13. [Aeschylus], Prometheus Bound 410–5 (tr. P. Vellacott).

14. Ibid., 719–24.

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19. Ibid., 43.

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21. Compare the attitudes implicit in Shakespeare's Midsummer Nights Dream Act 1, scene 1, 16ff.: Theseus to the Amazon queen, ‘Hippolyta, I woo'd thee with my swoid/And won they love doing thee injuries.’

22. 2.5.1–4.

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26. Ibid., chapter 2.

27. Ibid., chapter 3.

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29. Oxford 1927. 4065. Bothmer, Plate LXVIII no. 6.

30. Athens 15002, signed by Pasiades as potter.

31. London B673. Bothmer, Plate LXXIII no. 3.

32. Paris, Louvre CA 1710. Bothmer, Plate LXXIII no. 7.

33. Bothmer, chapter 10.

34. Ibid., chapter 9, p. 147.

35. 10.11.5.

36. Discussed by Bothmer, op. cit., chapter VII, pp. 117–9.

37. 5.10.9.

38. 5.11.4.

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43. 1.1.

44. Nandy, Ashis, At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar explores (in relation to colonialist domination of India) the polarity of ‘warrior’ masculine and ‘passive’ feminine as ‘normal’ forms of gender, challenged by Gandhi. In a different context Cairns, D. and Richards, S., Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester, 1988) chapter 3, ‘An essentially feminine race’, discuss ascendancy attitudes to the Celtic tradition in IrelandGoogle Scholar.

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46. Lysistrata 678–9.

47. N.H. 34.53; Amazon statue (marble copy) Met. Museum, New York 32.11.4.

48. Aeschylus, , Eumenides 625–8Google Scholar.

49. Aristophanes, , Lysistrata 670ff. and cf. 404Google Scholar.

50. 5.455 (tr. H. D. P. Lee).

51. Women in Greek Myth (London, 1986), p. 27Google Scholar.

52. I should like to acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions made by members of the London Classics Seminar and the Women in the Arts Research Seminar at the Open University.