“Achilles Kills Penthesilea,” depicted in the tondo of an Attic red-figure kylix, 470-460 B.C.
Stanford research scholar Adrienne Mayor – a National Book Award finalist for “The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy” – has a new book out, “The Amazons: Lives & Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World” (Princeton University Press, 519 pages, $29.95).
It blows the lid off the myth of the one-breasted she-males who kidnapped men for sex, abandoning any resulting male offspring, to paint a portrait of those Eurasian women who once and still live like men.
Nicolaus Knüpfer’s “Hercules Obtaining the Girdle of Hippolyta,” oil on panel from the first half of the 17th century.
But as per the 1962 film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” In this case, it’s a lot more fun, all those bare right-breasted, sexually voracious women mixing it up with the likes of Hercules, Achilles and their very real descendent, Alexander the Great.
The thread through all these stories is the raw deal the women get in them. (What a surprise.) Hercules kills Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, in the act of gaining her girdle, or belt, in his Ninth Labor. Antiope, another queen, marries Theseus, with whom she has a son, Hippolytus, only to be abandoned by him for Phaedra, who develops a yen for her stepson that ends badly for everyone. Penthesilea is killed in combat during the Trojan War by Achilles, who promptly falls in love with her. (Too late, Achilles.)
Johann Georg Platzer’s “The Amazon Queen Thalestris in the Camp of Alexander the Great,” an 18th century oil on copper.
The only Amazon queen to make out well was Thalestris, who stayed with Alexander the Great for 13 days to make sure she had been impregnated by a world conqueror and then went on her way with a few other lovely parting gifts.
In Shan Sa’s novel “Alexander and Alestria,” Thalestris, or Alestria, becomes his chief wife, Roxane – proving that all’s fair in love and war.