21 – Monstrous Females and Female Monsters – Classical Mythology (Vol 22) by Elizabeth Vandiver
Run time: 31:41 / 2011-01-04
(Transcribed with the help of AI – S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 – Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)
Elizabeth Vandiver – Hello and welcome to lecture 21. In the previous lecture on Oedipus and Sophocles’ treatment of the Oedipus myth, among other things, I pointed out some of the traditional folk tale elements that exist in the narrative of Oedipus’ birth and childhood, and his ascension to the throne of Thebes. In this lecture, we’re going to look at one particular narrative element that is common to many hero stories, the idea that heroes encounter anomalous and dangerous female creatures as part of their heroic tasks. We’re going to look specifically at the Amazons, Medea, and at some of the many dangerous female monsters who appear throughout Greek myth.
Now, the greatest Greek heroes all have an encounter with the Amazons at some point in their careers. Heracles, Achilles, and Theseus all meet with and defeat an Amazon queen in one way or another.
So who are these Amazons and why was encountering them, in some sense, a test of hero status? The Amazons, as I’ve mentioned before, were a race of warrior women. They supposedly lived somewhere near the remote edges of the world. Most accounts of the Amazons put their homeland somewhere near the Black Sea, sometimes in ancient Scythia, although some traditions placed them in Ethiopia instead.
Now that seems like a remarkable divergence, either near the Black Sea or in Ethiopia. What those two ideas have in common is that wherever the Amazons live, they live near the edge of the known world. Greek myth reflected a very strong sense that the further you got away from the center of the world, and the center of the world was of course Greece, the further you got away from the center of the world, the stranger cultures, customs, and creatures all became. So that by locating the Amazon’s society at the very edge of the known world, whether to the north or to the south, the myth stresses the idea that the Amazons are extremely peculiar creatures.
And indeed they are. There may be some historical basis to the myth of the Amazon, surprisingly enough. Now, it’s very unlikely that there was ever actually a female society that lived entirely self-sufficiently with no men at all. But many versions of the Amazon story, as I already said, place their homeland in Scythia, an area near the Black Sea. And ancient Scythian women
were part of a nomadic society in which the women as well as the men rode horses, rode astride on horses, lived a nomadic existence, and the two sexes in Scythian society dressed very, very similarly. Women in Scythian society were given a degree of autonomy and power, so far as we can tell, that was much greater than what they were given in Greek society.
And so it is at least possible that the Amazon story reflects or incorporates travelers tales, tales told by Greek traders who had gone to the Black Sea to buy and sell goods about the Scythians and their extremely man-like, according to the Greek view of things, women. But for our purposes, the most important thing to observe about the mythical Amazons, whether their myth reflects some memory of Scythian women or not, is that they invert or reverse or turn upside down just about every standard assumption that Greek society makes about proper roles for women. First of all, the Amazons are warriors. That’s the main defining characteristic of the Amazons. They’re warriors who meet men on the battlefield on equal terms, and they are very good warriors.
It would not be any test of heroic prowess to overcome an Amazon if the assumption were not that most times when Amazons meet men in battle, the Amazons are triumphant. They were very, very good warriors indeed.
Secondly, they are women who are sexually active outside the bounds of marriage. In fact, they’re women who reject the idea of marriage entirely. The Amazons were a self-sufficient female society in Greek myth. The one thing they could not do, being human and not goddesses, was to produce children parthenogenically. So, supposedly, once a year or so, the Amazons would go around to neighboring tribes, would kidnap a certain number of men, force the men to have sex with them, and once they had become pregnant, they would either kill the men, enslave them, or perhaps just let them go again.
So, the Amazons used men for sexual purposes, but their sexuality was outside the bounds of marriage, and marriage was not part of their culture at all.
Another way in which they invert the standard assumptions of Greek society is in their preference of female children to male children. Although I haven’t specifically talked about this before, you know enough now about Greek society as reflected in myth that it should not come as a surprise that male children were much more highly valued than female children. But in the Amazon society, that picture is precisely reversed.
The Amazons would, of course, sometimes bear male children, but supposedly when they did, they either killed the babies, the baby boys, castrated them and or sold them into slavery. So again, male children are undervalued, female children are valued in Amazon society. This is a point by point reversal of all the most important Greek assumptions about women and women’s roles.
Now, Greek culture very frequently makes a symbolic equivalency between sexual defloration for a girl and a boy’s first wounding in battle as a moment of maturity for either gender. So a girl becomes mature sexually and in other ways when she is married and when she has her first intercourse with her husband.
A boy becomes mature, at least in one way of looking at it, when he is first wounded in battle. And if you want to press the point, the idea seems to be that bodily penetration sexually for a girl and by a weapon for a male is necessary for full maturity. The Amazons pretty clearly combine elements of maturity of both sexes. Or another way of putting it is that this symbolic equivalence that Greek culture sees between marriage and resulting sex for girls and battle for boys helps to explain why the Amazons, women who reject marriage, are conceived of as warriors, if they reject the proper maturation required for women they’ve got to have some sort of maturation so they go through the maturation required for men instead they reject marriage, therefore they must take part in battle and yet they are also sexually active, though outside of marriage, and they remain sexually attractive to Greek males, including Greek heroes. Thus, they’re a kind of hybrid.
They partake of characteristics of both genders, of adult females and adult males, and this hybrid nature, the fact that they act like men but remain very sexually attractive as women, makes them extremely disturbing in Greek myth. It’s hard to know how to deal with them. It’s hard to know how to categorize them. The interactions of Greek heroes with Amazons can, among other things, be seen as reasserting the proper, quote unquote, order of things in the Greek mind. On the simplest level, when a Greek hero confronts an Amazon, the hero defeats the Amazon. This happens with Achilles, this happens with Theseus, this happens any time a major Greek hero encounters the Amazon, the Amazon is defeated.