Amazonomachy

      There was a piece in the news this week about ancient Greek vase-paintings of Scythians. To sum it up quickly, there are a dozen Greek vase paintings with words on them that have historically been considered nonsense phrases in Greek; because these vase paintings feature characters in Scythian costume (such as Amazons), a museum curator finally made the connection that the so-called nonsense words might actually be words in ancient languages of the Caucasus, and an authority in languages of the Caucasus was called in to read the words, which turned out to be real ancient Caucasian words, such as nicknames for the Amazons. This discovery raises a whole pile of questions in my mind--who were the Greek painters consulting to get authentic foreign names for these characters? what was the purpose of writing Caucasian words in Greek script on a painting for a Greek or otherwise non-Caucasian audience?--but for today I want to focus on those Amazons.

      Amazons, you probably already know, are members of a mythical all-female warrior society. For purposes of reproduction, they empress men from neighboring societies into sex; female children are raised as warriors, and male children, depending on whose version you read, are either abandoned, cast off to neighboring societies, or raised as slaves. While evidence has been found for female warrior graves in the Scythian area, the Greeks were never able to substantiate the existence of an all-female warrior society; the Amazons in Greek lore were used as a cautionary example of the horrifying possibilities of life outside the civilized (i.e. Greek) world.

      The novelty of a female-dominated society makes them a favorite subject in Greek myth, but they’re usually not depicted as terribly foreign. They certainly don’t conform to standards of Greek female behavior, but their depiction, in terms of dress and behavior (particularly in early texts and art) runs closer to Greek warriors (i.e. men) than any identifiable foreign group. Mythological texts preserve the names of at least three particularly famous Amazons, all of whom have obviously Greek names: Penthesilia, Hippolyte, and Antiope. It reminds me of the way language is handled in the Iliad: even though the Trojans are ethnically distinct from the Greeks, the Trojans usually have Greek names, and they all speak Greek, both when they talk to the Greeks and to each other. There’s a narrative understanding that the Trojans are foreign, even though in practical terms they behave exactly like the Greeks. The Amazons, after the Persian War, are generally painted in Attic vase-paintings wearing Scythian leggings instead of Greek-style armor, as a nod to their surface otherness. But even though they live in a topsy-turvy female-run society, they still tend to be able to integrate into Greek society: Theseus brings home an Amazon concubine, and Penthesilia falls in love with Achilles.

      But where do the Amazons come from? Well, it’s hard to say. The Greeks were sure they were out there somewhere, but they had trouble finding them. As Greek history advances, and the Greeks get more and more reliable information about more and more distant places, the Amazons tend to move off into the distance since they can’t be substantiated within the known world. Although legend has it that certain cities (and that wonder of the world, the temple of Artemis at Ephesus) were founded by Amazons, evidently the Amazons didn’t stick around to run the places; certainly the cities labeled with this distinction are part of the ordinary male-run world.

      But even though they were hard to pinpoint in reality, the menace of Amazon warriors lurked all the same. One of the great stories from Athenian myth, depicted on the metopes of the Parthenon, was the Amazonomachy. Here the Amazons actually invaded Athens, setting up camp on the Areopagus (actually between the Agora and the Acropolis!) and terrorizing the Athenians on their home soil. The mythological pretext for this invasion is to regain the concubine Theseus brought home. As it turns out, Theseus handily defeats the foreign menace and drives them out of Greece (yaaay patriarchy!). What puzzles me is whether there’s a historical pretext for this invasion--no source I’ve read has identified a plausible invasion of Athens by non-Greeks that could be written up as a conflict with Amazons. The unsubstantiated nature of the myth suggests to me that the Athenians had an irrational fear of invasion, particularly a humiliating invasion by inferior women, and composed some self-aggrandizing mythology to illustrate how glorious they were. But I suppose I’m wandering too far into speculation. The Amazons, in any case, were described as a foreign menace with alien customs, and their incursion into the heart of Greece is a convenient way for Greeks to talk not only about the danger of a foreign invasion, but the natural Greek valor that they could use to defeat it. It makes a convenient analogy for the Battle of Marathon, and led to piles and piles of Greek vases with pictures of Amazons dressed as Persian archers, a true nightmare for the Athenian patriarchy.

The Exotic Eastern Queen

[I thought I could write up this post fairly quickly, but as I went along I realized that it had been a few years since I had read the scholarship on this character, and I didn’t have all the sources conveniently on hand, and it was harder to track down the information than I expected. Anyway, that’s why this is appearing so late.]

      There’s a certain character floating around the edges of classical myth, a near eastern queen who represents something magnificent and exotic when described by Greeks and Romans: Semiramis. She was a historical person, a queen of Babylon, although when related in Greek and Roman accounts she’s transformed into a mythic figure, the Good Queen or the Bad Queen or the Enchanted Queen or the Raglan Queen--it depends on who you’re reading, and what sort of narrative point he’s out to make. Her story is difficult to summarize because she just skirts the edge of the classical consciousness, and the stories told about her vary wildly.

      I’ll start with the historical side of Semiramis, before looking at how she’s been distorted and exaggerated by people who only heard about her fourth-hand. There is a known historical Assyrian queen by the name of Shammuramat, who held power as her son’s regent for a few years after the death of her husband. She lived in a culture that had a well-established writing system (thousands of years old, even then!) and a government that employed plenty of scribes, so we have records of her reign produced during her lifetime. She was not the founder of Babylon, as you might hear in Ovid, but you can find a few major works attributed to her. We still have a memorial stone that was set up for her, and Herodotus credits her with building a series of dykes (which he says are “remarkable to see”--bordering on faint praise since he only devotes a few sentences to her). It’s not a lot of material--she did only reign for a few years, until her son reached maturity--but it’s noteworthy to see a queen holding power over Assyria.

      So today you can study this queen as a historical person, based on the Assyrian evidence. Ancient Greeks and Romans, however, generally didn’t have access to this evidence, and when they mention her, her biography tends to take on mythic elements. You can find her in that highly accessible work of classical myth, which was after all where I first heard of Semiramis, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which there is a fleeting reference to her. Someone is narrating a story of the exotic east, and to establish the location, notes that the story takes place “where Semiramis built her lofty city,” i.e., in Babylon. This should call up an image of one of the Seven Wonders, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Here the series of dykes and the memorial stone aren’t important; what matters is the vague, fantastic flavor she gives the story.

      In fact there’s another, garbled reference to Semiramis right nearby in the Metamorphoses, when a character considers telling the story of Semiramis’ mother, Dercetis (also known as Derceto). The character decides against telling the story, but does in the process mention that Dercetis was changed into a fish, while Semiramis was changed into a dove. This seems to be a reference to a miraculous story of Semiramis’ birth (described by Diodorus Siculus), in which Semiramis was (in typical heroic fashion, like Romulus and Remus who were nursed by a wolf) abandoned in the wild to die but rescued by wild animals, in this case doves, who fed her tidbits of food until she was discovered by a shepherd. If Ovid’s audience has heard Diodorus’ story, they might question whether Semiramis was saved from exposure by doves, or was actually turned into a dove herself (one of these may be less reversible than the other). Her mother, Derceto or possibly Dercetis, according to Diodorus threw herself into a river and drowned after giving birth, but Ovid says she turned into a fish. There seems to be a fictionalizing process going on here: we start with a historical person with a mundane biography, but as the oral tradition gets passed along the person’s biography acquires legendary elements (exposed as a baby, raised by doves, melodramatic suicide). Later Ovid comes along writing a collection of imaginative mythic stories, and the legendary elements become the miraculous transformations that are the primary interest in the Metamorphoses. The real queen is being turned into a fantasy queen. 

      Speaking of contamination from legendary tropes, please note that as Semiramis’ character morphs to acquire characteristics of a typical fictional independent queen, she becomes more and more evil. Diodorus’ account largely shows her as the villainous queen who gains power through sex and then terrorizes men by means of sex. According to Diodorus she slept her way to the top (in the style typical of Bathsheba, Jezebel, Potiphar’s Wife, Cleopatra, Theodora…)--she was originally married to a nobleman, until she caught the eye of king Ninus, at which point she and Ninus forged their own alliance and her old husband was pressured to commit suicide. After her marriage to Ninus, she either killed him herself or arranged for him to be killed, at which point she gained power as regent. There are Armenian legends (several centuries later) that show her as a lust-crazed monster: as queen of Assyria, she hears a rumor that the king of Armenia is breathtakingly gorgeous, so she wages war on their country for the sake of subjugating the king (and, by that means, sleeping with him). As it happened, he was killed in the course of the battle, but she covered up this problem by disguising another beautiful man as the king and claiming that the king had been raised from the dead.

      Still, not all the re-casting of her life in legendary terms makes her look so bad. There is a Greek adventure story known as the Ninus Romance, which was lost during the middle ages, and partially reconstructed based on papyrus fragments, to the extent that we can see that it stars Semiramis and her (legendary) husband Ninus as sentimental teenagers falling in love for the first time. It’s very treacly. One of the two fragments we have is a speech in which Ninus tries to persuade Semiramis’ mother (his aunt) to let him marry his cousin Semiramis. This speech fortuitously preserves a lot of “as you know” style exposition (as if it were taken from the very beginning of the work?). Addressing Semiramis’ mother (here called Derceia), he runs over a lot of facts she probably ought to know: that he is seventeen, that he is the king, that he just returned from a victorious military campaign, that he driven to distraction by love of Semiramis. He also makes Semiramis’ age clear (she’s thirteen) and rails against a tradition that prevents them from marrying until she reaches the age of fifteen. (Even though Semiramis is established in this passage to also be in love with him, his argument that she should marry as soon as possible just because it’s already physically possible for her to become pregnant is pretty creepy.) In my opinion he comes off as a typically impatient teenager who thinks that two years are an interminable wait and worries too much that something terrible might happen to the object of his desire before he gets access to her. Semiramis, when she goes to make the same case to Ninus’ mother, is so overcome with the shame of expressing romantic desires that she is totally unable to speak, and her aunt praises her for being so modest--hardly the same lust-crazed monster queen described by Diodorus.

      Semiramis, in the more gracious legendary accounts, was a standout figure in many ways. She broke gender barriers not only by holding the office of regent while her son was underage, but in her independent career as well--one of the accomplishments attributed to her is the invention of non-gendered clothing. Although these stories of power are quickly exaggerated into erotic tyranny by men hostile to women in power, she still gets a positive spin in the works of Ovid, cited as a city-builder and local hero.

      What seems strange to me is that I’m not aware of many appearances of Semiramis in modern popular culture. As far as eroticized ancient queens go, Cleopatra remains perennially popular (and even Olympias was portrayed by Angelina Jolie on the silver screen nine years ago), whereas Semiramis seems to be forgotten--although I hear “Semiramis” can be used as a derisive nickname for any queen with a reputation for an uncontrollable libido. If you like, you can scan the “In Later Traditions” section of Semiramis’ Wikipedia page for some obscure references, although I came away pretty unimpressed. Just like I’ve always said about the Aeneid, we need a good film interpretation of Semiramis’ life.

A Serious Anti-Hero

      Mythic narrative is a funny thing, sometimes. You can go in with all these expectations that the good people will be rewarded and the evil will be punished and the heroes will marry the princesses and they’ll all live happily ever after…and that’s often not how myth works. Myths may follow folkloric conventions of promoting honor and virtue, but then again they may spin off in unexpected directions and provide endings that are difficult to understand as satisfying. In my opinion, Ino is one of the most extreme examples of a character rewarded who I didn’t want to see rewarded.

      Ino started her career as an evil stepmother. She married a king who had two children (a boy and a girl) from a previous marriage, and, as is often the case with stepmothers in folktales, she was eager to get her stepchildren out of the way and advance her own children in their place. To this end, she committed a crime so heinous I can’t even think of an appropriate word to encompass its atrocity (but please feel free to offer suggestions). She caused a famine by sabotaging seed corn to prevent it from sprouting. Let’s take a moment to appreciate the full scope of her evilness: she was so intent on killing her stepchildren, she deliberately destroyed a year’s food supply for an entire kingdom of people who depended on her as a leader; her ambitiousness almost certainly caused the death of many people who couldn’t afford food when the famine hit. After that, when the grain wouldn’t sprout, Ino staged a false oracle to report that the famine could only be ended by sacrificing the king’s children (her stepchildren). The children found themselves in the same predicament as Isaac or Iphigenia, all trussed up for sacrifice, but were saved at the last minute by (what sounds like something out of My Little Pony) a magic, golden, flying sheep. The sheep was sent by the gods to save the king from the sacrilege of needlessly killing his own children.

      The children went on with their own adventures: the boy landed safely in a distant kingdom and took up a new life. He married a princess and gained fame as one of the glorious heroes of old. In gratitude for saving his life, the boy killed the sheep in sacrifice (his gratitude was directed toward the gods who sent the sheep, of course, not toward the sheep itself, which he found expendable), and its golden pelt became a treasured artifact in the kingdom where he lived--you can find it again in the myths of Medea and Jason. At least, in some accounts he marries the princess; in other accounts the king of the distant kingdom kills him on arrival. The girl fell off the sheep while it was flying, landed in the sea and drowned, a misfortune that doesn’t seem to bother ancient authors nearly enough (there’s a clear narrative pressure to rescue her from the threat of being sacrificed, and the deus ex machina does intervene to whisk her away from that threat, but no one seems to care when she dies anyway in the rescue attempt). In my opinion, the stepmother Ino’s subsequent story deserves more attention, though, because she gets away with everything. She was the archetypal evil stepmother, plotting to kill her stepchildren and replace them with her own children; she engineered a famine to the detriment of her own populace; she arranged for her stepchildren to be killed; and in the end, one of the stepchildren certainly died, while the other was taken away to an impossibly distant kingdom and never bothered her again (or may have been murdered by someone else far away). Hurray, the evil stepmother goes home victorious! It seems like it would be much more satisfying (to me anyway), and more true to folklore conventions, for the evil stepmother to be found out and brought to justice. Yet in the versions we have, she gets her way and comes out as the hero of the story.

      Ino has some further changes in fortune, though. After she gets rid of her stepchildren, she and the king have two sons of their own and carry on as if those earlier children never existed. But their cozy new nuclear family is interrupted when Ino’s sister undertakes the sexually deviant practice of…extramarital sex. Apparently the guys who wrote these stories thought that extramarital sex was destructive enough to tear a woman’s entire extended family apart, at least in this case, because the one Ino’s sister was having extramarital sex with was none other than Zeus, king of the gods and husband of a famously jealous wife, Hera. Hera not only killed the young woman Zeus was having sex with, she also visited extraordinary horrors upon the woman’s sisters and nephews and brothers-in-law, but Ino was subject to an especially ghastly horror, for a specific reason. After Hera killed Zeus’ young mistress, Zeus handed the baby (the young god Dionysus) over to Ino to raise. Therefore Hera harbored a special grudge against Ino, and, after a substantial interval, one morning Ino and her husband suddenly panicked when their home was invaded by lions. In truth it was a delusion; the “lions” in question were actually their sons, and the king managed to kill one of them while trying to fend them off. (If this sounds suspiciously similar to the climax of the Bacchae, when Agave kills her son under the delusion that he’s a lion, it’s not a coincidence--in fact, Ino herself is one of the bacchae in the play.) Ino attempts to save her remaining son from her husband’s violence, and ends up running off a cliff.

      Surprisingly, this is not the end of her story. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the gods get together for a little conference as Ino and her son are plummeting down the side of the cliff. Venus begs Neptune to save Ino and her son. She doesn’t say why--you might assume it’s repayment for raising Bacchus, which probably makes more sense than anything else--but she pleads persuasively, and Neptune agrees to save them. In fact, he turns them into two sea gods, and they crop up in the Odyssey to save Odysseus from drowning by lending him inappropriately gendered clothing. At any rate, they become gods in their own right and live forever among the blessed.

      You can even find more beyond that, because Ovid continues on in a different work, the Fasti, to talk about how Ino traveled to Italy and became a local goddess there. She was known as Mater Matuta, worshipped by the Roman state, and had an annual festival celebrated by aunts, which, true to Ino’s nature, included the ritual harassment of an innocent slave woman. (Next time you’re in Rome, check out the two well-preserved temples in the Forum Boarium, one of which is sometimes identified as a temple to Hercules Olivarius but is more conservatively called “the round temple by the Tiber”--the rectangular temple next door is probably dedicated to Ino’s son, the one who wasn’t killed by his father). In fact, Ino’s story as related in the Fasti strongly resembles the stories of various founder figures who came over from the Greek world and established their own cities and cults in Italy: Aeneas, Diomedes, Hercules, Evander, the list goes on and on. (I feel a little bad for Evander, since he came all the way over from Greece to found a new city, and had these small-time hero conferences with Aeneas and Hercules, and yet his proud Greek settlement apparently disappeared before Romulus could meet his descendents. Certainly nobody mentions any Greeks hanging around on the Palatine when Romulus opened the Asylum on the Capitoline.) It’s tempting to think that at one point Ino might have been identified as a founder figure of some Italian city, and that we’ve lost any trace of it beyond Ovid’s legends of Ino in Italy; I’d like to believe that Ino is a rare female founder figure in the company of Dido (as opposed to women like Aegina or Europa, who are raped by gods and abducted to some locale distant from their homeland, where their sons go on to found cities). But then again, I hesitate to hang my hopes for female glory on someone so reprehensible as Ino.

      And I can’t read over Ino’s life story and hide my disbelief. She started out as an evil stepmother, an ABOMINABLY evil stepmother. She succeeded in getting rid of her stepchildren by means of starving her subjects. She never made any atonement for this crime and was rewarded for it when her own children became the king’s heirs. It’s like a sinister version of the Cinderella story where the stepmother is the hero, one of the stepsisters marries the prince, and Cinderella dies on the street. Later on Ino’s sister engages in deviant behavior that destroys the entire family, except that Ino alone is saved and promoted to divinity. If there is any story in classical mythology to show that you can be a completely reprehensible person and impose all sorts of terrible punishments on the people who depend on you and still be rewarded for it, this is it. Classical mythology isn’t populated by a lot of simple morality fables in which kindness and justice are rewarded; reading myth can be sobering in terms of how the endings you want to find are often thwarted for no apparent reason. I wish Ino’s story were more satisfying.