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Poetics Today
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Imag(in)ing the Other:
Amazons and Ethnicity in Fifth-Century Athens
Andrew Stewart
History of Art, UC, Berkeley
The following essay is a revised version of a paper presented at Tel Aviv University
onJanuary 18, 1994, in the context of a conference sponsored by the Moshe Dayan
Center and entitled "Knowledge, Power, and Society: Scholarship and Modes of In-
terpretation." I am most grateful to Professor Sally Humphries and Dr. Asher Susser
for their invitation to speak, to the faculty and staff of the center for their hospitality
and kindness during my visit, and to Professor Meir Sternberg for his invitation to
publish the essay in Poetics Today.
Poetics Today 16:4 (Winter 1995). Copyright ? 1996 by The Porter Institute for Poetics
and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/95/$2.50.
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572 Poetics Today 16:4
In the twentieth century, Amazons usually get a bad press. Every man
knows (or thinks he knows) what one looks like and what she represents.
Big, busty, butch, and bad-tempered, she challenges his ego on every
front. Yet this image is peculiarly modern; in ancient Greece, an Amazon
was young, trim, sexy, and by no means necessarily an implacable man-
hater. From the eighth century B.C.E., she occupied a central place in
Greek thought about the Other. Being female, "antimale" (an ambigu-
ous term, as will appear), and a non-Greek "barbarian," she was certainly
well placed to fill this role. In her, Greek ideas about polis and barba-
rism, ethnicity and gender, and knowledge and power coalesce, fracture,
and recombine in ways that are often revealing, sometimes unexpected,
and always stimulating. But this is a vast subject, so I want to begin with
the problem of who the Amazons were and what they stood for and then
move on to what became of them in fifth-century Athens.
The Question
Why did the Greeks need Amazons? What could the Amazons say about
otherness that Trojans, Giants, and the rest could not? What conceptual
niche, in other words, did they fill? Scholars have often tended either
to take them for granted, as a given (e.g., Bothmer 1957); or to explain
them in isolation, as fossils of ancient matriarchies (Bachofen 1861) or
Freudian figurations of Greek complexes about their mothers (Slater
1968); or to reduce them to one-dimensional antitypes of the Greeks
(Castriota 1992). One might label these three approaches the desexual-
ized, the hypersexualized, and the dichotomized. The first ignores the
role of gender in Greek society, the second theorizes it in unaccept-
ably anachronistic terms, and the third polarizes (and politicizes) it in a
crudely reductive way.
J. J. Bachofen (1861), who made the first serious attempt to probe
the meaning of the Amazon myth, regarded it as a relic of prehistoric
matriarchy. Though he grudgingly acknowledged the benefits of this pri-
mal state of affairs (peace, for one), his verdict upon it was unequivocal:
when women rule, the spirit remains earthbound. "The triumph of patri-
archy brings with it the liberation of the spirit from the manifestations
of nature, a sublimation of human existence over the laws of material
life" (Bachofen 1967 [1861]: 109). Picked up by Engels (1884), Bach-
ofen's thesis soon became extremely influential, and his negative judg-
ments upon it were often radically reversed; Marxists, feminists, Freudi-
ans, Jungians, and latter-day devotees of the Goddess all swallowed the
notion with gusto (Wesel 1980). Many still do, even though we now know
that the concrete historical value of the ancient testimonia on matri-
archy is precisely nil (Pembroke 1967). For example, Bachofen's theory
that the inexorable advance of patriarchy roused the priestesses of the
Goddess to become warrior Amazons has survived unscathed (Bachofen
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Stewart * Imag(in)ing the Other 573
1967 [1861]: 106; Graves 1955, 1:355; Stone 1976; Kirk 1987). Not sur-
prisingly, orthodox Marxist historiography subscribed to this idea, too
(Kanter 1926; Thomson 1961 [1949]: 180-83).
Early-twentieth-century scholarship, uneasy about Bachofen's thesis,
produced three new answers, which for convenience one might call the
positivist, the political, and the psychoanalytic. Walther Leonhard (1911)
was the first to propose a positivist reading. In his view, the Amazons
were actually a Greek reminiscence of clashes with the beardless Hittites
or, according to a recent version with unpleasantly racist overtones, with
"a beardless, small-statured race of bow-toting mongoloids" (Bisset 1971;
cf. Zografou 1972). Exactly who these mysterious bow-toting mongol-
oids were is not specified. The Athenian politicization of the Amazons
was most carefully spelled out by Roger Hinks (1939). Arguing that they
"preferred to conceal [their] memory of the great ordeal of Marathon
and Thermopylae and Salamis" through the "mythical transposition of
historical episodes," he saw the great fifth-century Amazonomachies as
illustrating a "symbolic situation" set up by the Persian invasions. They
represent the "moral conflict of which the political clash is the outward
and contingent expression" (ibid.: 65).
Amazon psychology, dominated by the Freudians, soon attained as-
tonishing precision. Schultz Engle (1942) thought the Amazons were
driven to fighting by the impotence of their Skythian menfolk, whose
hours in the saddle had given them orchitis; although she wrote her
paper in the Midwest, she had evidently never encountered a cowboy, let
alone a Turkoman or a Kirghiz. In her view, the Amazons derived mas-
turbatory satisfaction from riding (the horse being a phallus substitute),
while the Greek campaigns against them were motivated by castration
anxiety, as manifested in the myths of Herakles and Omphale, and of
Achilles among the maidens. More recently, Philip Slater (1968: 393)
viewed them as a projection of Athenian sex antagonism, of the general
"misogyny of Athenian thought," concluding that the myth "primarily
describes an event in the emotional life of each male child."
Slater's contemporaries were the structuralists of the Paris school and
the more sophisticated feminists. Though he shows no sign of having
read them, some of his ideas roughly coincide with theirs. For the
scholarship of the sixties and seventies achieved a rare consensus con-
cerning the Amazons. It was generally agreed, first, that Amazonian
society was a mirror image of the Greek polis, and second, that the
specter (already raised in the fifth century B.C.E.) of a gynaikokrateia or
"female tyranny" was also used to figure Greek notions about barbarian
despotism, particularly during and after the Persian Wars (Vidal-Naquet
1986 [1970]; Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988 [1972]; Carlier-Detienne
1980-81; Merck 1978). At this point the classical archaeologists rejoined
the fray. Using Dietrich von Bothmer's (1957) comprehensive catalog
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574 Poetics Today 16:4
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Stewart * Imag(in)ing the Other 575
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576 Poetics Today 16:4
in Russian Central Asia (between the Caspian and Aral Seas) should add
new fuel to the debate about whether Amazons ever existed--or, more
accurately, whether Herodotos's account of them (4.110-17) has any
basis in fact. Attributed to the Sarmatian and/or Sauromatian cultures,
rich in gold and other finds, and dating from the sixth to the fourth cen-
turies B.C.E., these burials included many females, some of whom were
furnished with bows and numerous arrows, of which only the arrowheads
have survived (Davis-Kimball, Yablonsky, and Bashilov 1995).1
What did the Greeks feel, think, say, and do about the Amazons? Roughly
speaking, the history of the legend before 400 B.C.E. divides into four
phases: the Homeric, the Archaic, the Persian War period, and the Peri-
klean. This section sketches the first two.
Homer calls the Amazons antianeirai or "antimen" (an ambiguous
term, since anti- can mean either "opposite to" or "antagonistic to"; cf.
Drew-Bear 1972). Using their reputation as formidable fighters to en-
hance the prestige of Priam and Bellerophon, he relates only that the
former fought them in Phrygia and that the latter slaughtered them in
Lykia (II. 3.182-90, 6.171-86).2 In this way Homer also establishes them
as liminal figures, living somewhat beyond the outskirts of the Greek
world: not the girls next door but the girls on the next block but one.
Thenceforth, as that world expanded, they withdrew; fleeing from Her-
akles, they settled in the Crimea, and Alexander the Great had to go
to Tajikistan to find them (Aesch. PV 415-19; Hdt. 4.110; Plut. Alex.
46; etc.).
Homer mentions no direct Amazon participation in the Trojan War;
this would have both contradicted the tradition of Priam's animosity to
Amazons and violated his own principle of never referring to events that
happened after the end of his poem, with the exception of the death of
Achilles, already predicted by the gods (II. 9.410-17). This left his sup-
posed pupil Arktinos of Miletos to fill the lacuna. Arktinos began his
Aithiopis (a continuation of the Iliad, allegedly composed around 700)
with the story of the Amazon Penthesileia. Only the first two lines and
a few other miserable scraps of the poem remain, but thanks to the
Byzantine scholar Proclus, the plot's outline survives. It begins as follows:
"The Amazon Penthesileia, daughter of Ares and a Thracian by birth,
arrives to aid the Trojans in war. As she is fighting valorously Achilles
kills her and the Trojans bury her. Achilles kills Thersites for slandering
him and carping at his alleged love for her; whence there is a division
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Stewart * Imag(in)ing the Other 577
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578 Poetics Today 16:4
northern Aegean, the Dardanelles, and the Black Sea. As already re-
marked, it also coincides with the fall of the Peisistratid tyranny in 510
and the beginnings of Athenian democracy: the quintessence of the
Greek men's club. Henceforth, under the slogan isonomia (equality of
rights), the city becomes a signifying space where decisions are placed
"in the midst" (to use a contemporary formula that is closely linked with
isonomia) and all citizens--all adult males, that is--have relations with it
that are both symmetrical and reversible (Hdt. 3.80, 142; Vernant 1988
[1974]: 92; Fornara and Samons 1991: 166). As not-males but definitely
people "of the city," women fit into this space in a most awkward way.
It is hardly surprising, then, to find late-sixth-century Athens suddenly
awash with images of women: courtships, abductions, explicit erotica,
courtesans, maenads, the Akropolis korai, and, of course, Amazons (see
Appendix). These images, and hundreds more like them, signal many
things about their male patrons and public: curiosity, anxiety, desire,
pride in possession, the need to control, and sheer brute macho sexism,
to name but a few. Not a few of them share a common denominator: the
fact that the women in them are oblivious to or heedless of what one
may call the "world's eye," the censorious gaze of men. Their combined
significance, however, is clear: by around 500, Athenians were vigorously
scrutinizing the proper place of women in their reorganized city.
Amazons occupied a special place in this discourse. Far from being "in
the midst," their society was at the margins: geographically and socially
a liminal place, the inverse of the polis. Yet obsessed with structural-
ist polarities, ancient matriarchies, psychoanalytic diagnoses, or feminist
political agendas, most discussions of it seem to have overlooked the
Amazons' most distinctive characteristic. Aischylos (PV 416), Hippok-
rates (Airs, Waters, Places 17), and Herodotos (4.114, 117) all call them
parthenoi or "unwed girls," and the last of these writers makes them de-
clare, "We are archers, javelineers, and riders-we have not learnt the
works of women." This does not mean that they were virgins in the tech-
nical sense of virgo intacta. For since the Greeks denied the existence of
the hymen (Sissa 1990), they had no means of telling whether a girl was
virgin in our sense or not. And in a traditional Mediterranean society,
then as now, this meant a lot of lost sleep for her parents.
Adolescents Abroad
Parthenoi, then, are nubile young women who have had no open sexual
relationship with a man. Their sexuality, or lack of it, is socially con-
structed, in that they are officially presexual beings, defined by public
knowledge of their virginity. In this respect, as in others, Greek notions
of sexuality are not congruent with our own and should not be conflated
with them. To quote Anne Carson (1990: 144), "Greek women have no
prime, only a season of unripe virginity followed by a season of over-
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Stewart * Imag(in)ing the Other 579
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580 Poetics Today 16:4
own convenience and pleasure and maim or kill the male infants born
of these promiscuous liaisons (Hippokrates, Articulations 53; Hellanikos,
FGH 323a F 17c). Far from the demure virginity prescribed by law and
custom, their sexual life is a continual series of flagrantly public one-
night stands. In this way they represent not only the threat that every
adolescent girl poses to her father's authority and to the stability of the
family, but the lure of forbidden fruit as well.
An anonymous Attic artist, the "Andokides" Painter, made their sexu-
ally ambivalent and socially liminal status (cf. Carson 1990; Sissa 1990)
explicit as early as around 520; on an amphora of his in the Louvre, Ama-
zons are arming on one side, while adolescent girls are exercising and
swimming on the other (Figures 1-2). We know that the latter are true
parthenoi because the Greeks believed that false ones drowned (Paus.
10.19.2); as in medieval Europe, water, the purest of liquids, is the litmus
test of feminine purity. But once an Amazon passed the test of killing
a man in battle (three men, according to Hippokrates) and decided to
marry, then she no longer rode, shot, or hunted unless compelled to
by a general mobilization. No longer a parthenos, she turned at last
to women's work at the side of her chosen man (Hdt. 4.117; Airs, Waters,
Places 17).
We can now understand why Amazons were so often paired with the
Centaurs. For the Centaurs too were agrioi, "wild," and instead of riding
horses they were themselves semi-equine. Offspring of the would-be
rapist Ixion, they too were undomesticated and unrestrained; indeed,
both kentron (goad) and tauros (bull) were frequent synonyms for the
phallus (Henderson 1975: 122, 127; duBois 1982: 31, 40). And the un-
tamed horse had long symbolized male sexuality on the loose; not for
nothing did Poseidon, its creator, rape Demeter in equine form. So, just
as Amazons represent the wild, untamed, unmarried, and potentially
lustful female, the bestial in woman, Centaurs represent the same kind
of male, more beast than man.
All this makes "matriarchy" a most inappropriate description of Ama-
zon society, as Bachofen (1967 [1861]: 105, 153) himself seems to have
recognized on occasion. They are more like a third sex, or like the agelai
or "herds" of Spartan adolescent girls described by Pindar (Pind. fr. 112
Snell; Calame 1977, 1: 372-78 and passim). It is clearly time that Bach-
ofen's ghost was laid to rest-though this plea will surely have no effect
on his followers, let alone on the cult of the Goddess and its devotees.
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Stewart ? Imag(in)ing the Other 581
Figures 1-2. Amazons arming and girls swimming, from an Attic amphora at-
tributed to the Amasis Painter. Ca. 520 B.C.E. Louvre, Paris (Bothmer 1957:
149, no. 34; Beazley 1963: 4, no. 13; Devambez and Kauffmann-Samaras 1981:
no. 710).
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582 Poetics Today 16:4
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Stewart * Imag(in)ing the Other 583
So why and how were the victories over the Persians mapped onto
these preexisting gender conflicts? How was a contemporary supposed
to read the Amazon-Persian comparison implicit in the Theseion fres-
coes (where Theseus's victory was crafted into a precedent for those of
490 and 480-479) and explicit in those for the Painted Stoa? First, the
Amazons satisfy one obvious requirement for a representation of an alien
but nevertheless human enemy: they look and are different from nude
Greeks without being bestial, monstrous, or grotesque.4 For whether
nude or armored, Trojans and Giants in archaic and early classical Greek
art are basically indistinguishable from their Greek and Olympian oppo-
nents. Furthermore, Centaurs and other freaks were at best only one-
dimensional symbols of human desires and antagonisms. Amazons, on
the other hand, were all too obviously human, conveniently located be-
yond the Greek world's eastern borders, formidable fighters, and sexu-
ally intriguing to boot. All this made the Amazonomachy a far more
subtle symbol of Greek male prowess in action than, say, the grossly phal-
lic herms dedicated after the victory at Eion in 476 (Aeschin. Ctes. 183;
cf. Stewart 1990: 51, fig. 234) or the picture on a little jug made after
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584 Poetics Today 16:4
Kimon's victory at the Eurymedon in 465 (Kilmer 1993: no. R1155, with
ill.). The herms were the standard stone pillars sporting a huge, erect
phallus and topped by a bearded head, and on the jug, a Greek armed
only with his penis approaches a trousered, bent-over Persian as if to
bugger him, saying, "I'm Eurymedon"; while the Persian says, "I'm butt-
first!" In both cases the message is brutally clear: "We really screwed
them over!"
But though the Amazon-Persian analogy feminizes and so denigrates
the Persians to a certain degree, it should now be quite clear that it by
no means stigmatizes them as simply a bunch of cowardly women. For
the Amazons were daughters of Ares, sacrificed to him, and fought like
tigers; and, strictly speaking, they were not (yet) women. As the early-
fourth-century orator Lysias (2.4-6) remarked, "The Amazons were
counted as male for their bravery rather than as female for their nature,
so much more did they seem to excel men in spirit than to be at a
disadvantage in their form." In the vase paintings (Figure 3), they are
often shown in brutal hand-to-hand combat with the Greeks and are
always sexually mature, just as Lysias suggests. Contrary to popular
lief, though, the bared right breast is not a standard feature of archaic
early classical Amazon iconography: I know of only two examples in
vase painting of the period (for one of them, see Figure 3), and in e
case it is the violence of their movement that has caused their tunics to
slip. Pheidias was apparently the first to thematize the motif, on his great
shield for the cult statue of Athena Parthenos (Figure 9; completed in
438), but even so it did not become standard until the Hellenistic period
(see Stewart 1990: figs. 365-71, 388-96, 448-49, 461-65, 529-32).
These Amazons, then, challenge the cultural stereotype of a docile
femininity by exhibiting not only an independent sexuality but also a vig-
orous and resourceful courage in battle. So far from simply reinforcing
the racist cliche of the craven barbarian and the heroic Greek victor, they
help question and problematize it. But, crucially, they do not know when
to stop, nor can they learn from their mistakes (Lysias 2.6); immature,
wild, and unrestrained-characteristics that Pheidias registered in his
brilliantly chosen motif of the bared breast-they lack the quintessential
classical virtue, sophrosyne. Sophrosyne is the self-knowledge that leads
to a measured self-control, a virtue that is conspicuously manifested in
such classical monuments as the Parthenon frieze and the Doryphoros
of Polykleitos (Stewart 1990: 155-57, 160-62, and figs. 327-46, 378-82).
But whereas Greek men can know their boundaries, can develop rational
self-control and resistance to excess, women and barbarians cannot.
A woman's sophrosyne consists in knowing that she must submit her-
self to male governance. When Antiope fell in love with Theseus and
married him, she showed that she had come to recognize this. In the for-
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Stewart * Imag(in)ing the Other 585
mula of the Greek marriage ceremony, she had left the bad and found
something better. Now domesticated within the polis, she had aban-
doned her wild state of partheneia, had learned sophrosyne, and had
submitted herself to the womanly "work" of marriage. The Persians, too,
lacked sophrosyne. The whole point of Aischylos's Persai of 472 is to show
how Xerxes' ambition knew no boundaries and how his hybris led him
and his people to disaster. For they were also adolescents of a sort. Since
barbarian society resembled that of Greece before the invention of the
polis (Hdt. 3.80-83; Thuc. 1.5-6), the Persians, like the Amazons, suf-
fered from a bad case of arrested development. Both races were ruled
by monarchies that could easily become tyrannies. They neither lived in
proper cities nor were ready for the self-discipline required by equality
of rights or isonomia, the cornerstone of Athenian democracy. Though
personally brave, they often fought with the bow, from long range, not
with the manly spear, and from horseback, like Greek aristocrats of old,
not on foot. They knew nothing of the democracy of the phalanx, where
all are equal and interdependent, and (because generals were elected
and campaigns decided upon by free vote) decisions were "in the midst."
So much for the Persian invasion and its aftermath; what of our final
phase? Perikles achieved political prominence at Athens in the 460s; by
449, when peace was made with Persia, he had become the city's most
powerful man, and his preeminence lasted until his death in the great
plague twenty years later. In 447 he persuaded the Assembly to inaugu-
rate a building program that was to make Athens the envy of the Greek
world. The first and greatest of its projects was the Parthenon (447-432),
dedicated to Athena in thanks for her help in the victory over Persia. It
included two monumental Amazonomachies, one on the fourteen met-
opes of the west front and the other on the shield of Pheidias's great gold
and ivory statue of Athena within the temple. The other metopal themes
were the now-familiar Centauromachy (south) and Sack of Troy (north);
on the east side they were joined by the Gigantomachy, which was also
repeated on the interior of the shield.
The metopes are too battered to reveal anything much beyond the
fact that, as in Mikon's paintings, the Amazons were mounted; unfortu-
nately, it seems that they generated no echoes in the minor arts. Yet the
shield was apparently very popular; though it is now totally lost, several
quotations from it turn up on late-fifth-century vases, and scholars have
been able to reconstruct it quite accurately from the numerous Roman
replicas in marble, some of individual groups (Figure 8) and a few of the
entire composition (see Stewart 1990: 157-58, figs. 364-71). It showed
the Amazons (about half of them with their right breasts bared) scaling
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586 Poetics Today 16:4
Figures 5-6. Amazons advancing and women fleeing to a bearded patriarch, from
an Attic red-figure bell-krater found at Spina and attributed to Polygnotos. Ca.
440 B.C.E. Museo Nazionale, Ferrara (Bothmer 1957: 198, no. 132; Beazley 1963:
1029, no. 21; Devambez and Kauffmann-Samaras 1981: no. 724).
the rock of the Akropolis and the Athenians, led by Theseus, attacking
them from above.5
5. As Gale Boetius reminds me, the Greeks identified the right side as the virile side:
in Hippokratic physiology, for example, male infants are associated with the right
side of the womb and the right breast (Hippokrates, Epidemics 2.6.15, 6.2.25, 6.4.21;
Aphorisms 5.38, 48); for other examples and discussion see Loraux 1990: 46.
6. Even though the striding Amazon in Figure 5 is labeled Peisianassa, for the right-
hand one is labeled Dolope; this refers to the Dolopian pirates destroyed by Kimon
on his Skyros expedition, after which he dedicated the Theseion. Since the painter is
surely not citing both frescoes, the most likely explanation is that he was only making
a verbal allusion to Mikon's pictures, perhaps with satirical intent: see below.
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Stewart * Imag(in)ing the Other 587
was not finished until 438, and its Amazons fought on foot. So what was
responsible for the surge?
One possibility is that this intensified interest in Amazons, and Ama-
zons alone, may have had something to do with the immigration crisis that
precipitated Perikles' Citizenship Law of 451. This extraordinary piece
of legislation, which has no known precedent in Greek legal practice,
stipulated that "no-one should share in the city who was not born of
native Athenians on both sides" (Arist. Ath. Pol. 26.4; cf. Plut. Per 33;
cf. Ar. Av. 1661-66; Ath. 577b-c).7 The law thereby defined any union
between Athenians and foreigners, both Greek and barbarian, as con-
cubinage and its offspring as bastards. By so doing, it proclaimed that
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588 Poetics Today 16:4
Athens's citizen body was now one big, endogamous family. Henceforth,
only pure Athenians would share in the benefits of citizenship and thus
of empire; they would constitute an imperial elite (Patterson 1981, 1990).
The actual word Perikles used for "native Athenians" is astoi, "people
of the city." This term not only got around the fact that in this context
he could not use the word politai, "citizens" (for Athenian women were
not citizens), but immediately brought to mind the Athenians' boast that
they alone among the Greeks were autochthonous (Thuc. 1.2.5-6 etc.).
All other Greeks were wanderers and immigrants, not least the metoikoi,
"metics" or resident aliens, who now thronged the streets of Athens itself
and were surely the law's prime targets.
Perikles' main purpose was probably to stop intermarriage between
Athenian men and metic women. For thanks to massive immigration
after the Persian Wars, metics now composed from one-fifth to an almost
incredible one-half of the free population (Thuc. 2.13.6-7, 31.2; Diod.
12.40.4; Gomme 1933: 5, 26; Duncan-Jones 1981; Rhodes 1988: 271-77).
They could not vote, own land, plead in court, or take part in most civic
festivals, and they could be expelled without notice, but they controlled
much of the city's industry and commerce. For the strains that such a
huge influx of deracinated foreigners would place upon the body politic,
one only has to consider the attitudes toward the far smaller numbers
of immigrant Turks and Eastern Europeans in present-day Germany, of
North Africans in Italy and France, or of immigrant Hispanics and Asians
in the United States.
But there is more. The life tables used by the scholars who have done
these calculations show that in the 450s, between 350 and 1,000 metic
parthenoi would be reaching marriageable age each year.8 Probably less
strictly closeted than their Athenian counterparts and encouraged by
parents eager to improve their position, these metic girls surely posed a
far more substantial threat than metic men to the local marriage market.
For in a traditional agrarian society, sons tend to remain at the pater-
nal farm or business whomever they marry, while daughters are usually
traded in alliances that improve the family's status; and in archaic and
classical Athens, this meant marrying an Athenian. So it is perhaps no co-
incidence that all our documentation about particular exogamous mar-
riages in sixth- and fifth-century Athens concerns Athenian men marry-
8. Low estimate (Gomme 1933): 6,000 metic hoplites = ca. 9,500 metic adult males =
ca. 17,600 metic males of all ages = ca. 17,600 metic females of all ages x 2% =
ca. 350 girls of fourteen years. Total citizen adult male population: ca. 43,000. High
estimate (Duncan-Jones 1981, assuming more nonhoplite, i.e., poorer, artisan-class
metics in the total metic population): 12,000 metic hoplites = treble all figures quoted
above x 2% = ca. 1,000 girls of fourteen years. Total citizen adult male population:
ca. 45,000-60,000.
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Stewart * Imag(in)ing the Other 589
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590 Poetics Today 16:4
women, and stalwart patriarchs. If so, they can only have heightened the
wave of xenophobia that must have both preceded and followed the law's
passage.
If this guess is correct, these Amazons would stand not merely for bar-
barian parthenoi but for non-Athenian parthenoi of any kind, Greeks
included. Though startling at first sight, this is perfectly congruent with
the kind of imperialist arrogance that Thucydides documents in Perikles'
Funeral Speech, the Mytilene Debate, and the Melian Dialogue (2.34-
46, 3.36-48, 5.84-113). After 451, endogamy now defined Athenian
identity and guaranteed Athenian racial, cultural, and military superi-
ority over Greeks and barbarians together. Measured against the city that
Perikles labeled an "education to Greece" (Thucydides 2.41), the law
implied that all foreigners-other Greeks included-were mere barbaroi.
Ironically, he soon felt its sting himself, for around 448 he took a metic
mistress, the Milesian Aspasia, was unable to marry her, and eventually
had to beg the people to legitimize his sons by her (Plut. Per. 37; Souda
s.v. "demopoietos" et al.; Fornara and Samons 1991: 162-65).
Several scholars have suggested that Euripides' Medea and Hippolytos
were responses to this law, proclaiming that exogamous unions and their
fruit must turn bad. The first was produced in 431, during the first few
months of the Peloponnesian War, and the second in 428, the year after
Perikles' legitimacy petition was heard and approved and he himself had
succumbed to the plague. Of the two, the Hippolytos is the more out-
spoken. At lines 304-8 the nurse (calling the Amazon queen Hippolyte
instead of Antiope) says to Phaidra:9
Your children will never inherit their father Theseus' palace-
No by Hippolyte, Queen of the horse-riding Amazons-
She has a son whom your boys will serve as slaves,
A bastard who thinks himself legitimate, you know him well:
Hippolytos.
So, more than two decades after 451 and three years into the Peloponne-
sian War, when the plague had strained Athens's manpower to the limit,
the old anxieties were still festering, and the terms of the debate were
still the same.
Coda
In the tumultuous years from around 520 to 450, the Athenians gen-
dered and mapped no fewer than three political and social issues onto
the Amazon myth. First, there was Peisistratid and Kleisthenic Athens's
expansionism, reaffirmation of the polis as a male preserve, and selection
of Theseus as its heroic paradigm; second, Kimonian Athens's conflict
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Stewart * Imag(in)ing the Other 591
with the socially adolescent and mortally dangerous Persians; and third,
Periklean Athens's immigration crisis, precipitated by imperial success
and intensified by unexpected military defeat. Each of them not only
added a new layer to the palimpsest but modified the one that went
before it, inflecting not only the Amazon legend but Athenian notions
about themselves as well.
It is suggestive, though, that among these crises only the Persian Wars,
the most obvious and straightforwardly political, have hitherto been
taken up by art historians. Yet in this case, the significance of the Amazon
metaphor has often been misunderstood as a straightforward effemini
zation of the Persians. This fact alone demonstrates that assumptions
about gender structure our own discourse about the Greeks as much as
they structured Greek civilization itself, and that the two sets of ideas -
ours and theirs-are by no means congruent. Of course, our attitudes
themselves are hardly free of contradiction: the art historian, heir to
the nineteenth-century positivism that gave birth to the discipline, ha
tended to deny gender, the social historian to acknowledge it but to
interpret it in anachronistically modern terms.
It is appropriate to conclude, then, with a Greek viewpoint. In 411,
twenty years into the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes produced his
comedy Lysistrata. There, he conjures up the specter of an Athenian
woman leading a women's peace movement and seizing the Akropolis in
order to get her way. The male characters call the women's revolt hybris
no fewer than three times during the play (at 399-401, 425, and 658-
59), and shortly after the third of these outbursts, they turn to the past
(672-80):
But if we give an inch, they'll take a mile!
They'll get themselves all sorts of fancy skills:
Like Artemisia, they'll build a fleet,
And try to sail, to challenge us at sea.
And if they learn to ride, forget the Knights.
For they know how to horse around in style,
To mount up well and then sit firm and tight.
Just look at Mikon's painted Amazons,
All riding high and battling men. No way!
Let's grab 'em all and chuck 'em in the stocks!
A yoke around the neck-that's what they need!
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592 Poetics Today 16:4
tion in the whole of Attic erotic vase painting (Figure 6); all the rest show
the man on top, or entering from the rear.
So, to Aristophanes as to the painters, uppity women of any kind are a
mortal threat to Athenian manhood, and Amazons are the worst threat
of all, for they endanger his position on top, in both senses of the word.
For them and for most other Athenians, the ideal would surely have been
the dutiful young Athenian wife of Xenophon's Oeconomicus and the dig-
nified yet submissive women of the Parthenon frieze (Figure 7). The long
folds of these women's peploi closely recall the furrows left by the plough:
suggestively, "ploughing a woman" is a traditional Greek metaphor for
marital sex (Pind. Pyth. 4.254-57; Aesch. Sept. 750-55; Soph. Ant. 569;
Trach. 31-33; OT1207-12, 1255-57, 1484-85, etc.; see Henderson 1975:
166; duBois 1988: 65-85; Carson 1990: 149). This modest but evocative
clothing contrasts starkly with the thin, see-through chitoniskoi of the
Amazons on the shield of Athena Parthenos (Figure 8). The former re-
pels, the latter invite the attentions of the "eye's hand," positively teasing
the male viewer to caress the Amazons' trim, lithe bodies, to possess
them from afar. If painted like these, Mikon's Amazons would have only
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Stewart * Imag(in)ing the Other 593
Figure 8. Maidens and marshals, on a slab from the east frieze of the Parthenon
at Athens. 442-438 B.C.E. Louvre, Paris.
Figure 9. Athenian and Amazon, Roman marble copy of a group from the
shield of Pheidias's statue of Athena Parthenos. 447-438 B.C.E. Piraeus Museum,
Piraeus.
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594 Poetics Today 16:4
625-575 778
575-550 752 30 21 51 5 56 7.45
550-525 2,343 24 3 40 67 6 73 3.12
525-500 4,478 64 2 29 95 4 47 146 3.26
500-475 8,819 96 2 47 145 4 143 292 3.31
475-450 5,115 4 2 32 38 15 53 1.04
450-425 3,754 13 1 67 81 31 112 2.98
425-400 932 4 4 6 10 1.07
400-325 1,838 27 27 46 73 3.97
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