On the simplest level, this means that the Greek is defeating the barbarian foreigner. Barbarian in Greek was just a term for foreigner, by the way, originally, before it had any pejorative connotations. Supposedly, the word comes from the fact that foreigners, people who can’t speak good, clear Greek, make sounds that sound like bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, so they’re called barbaroi or barbarians. That supposedly is the etymology of the word.
So when a Greek defeats an Amazon, on the simplest level, the Greek is defeating the barbarian, the male is defeating the female. In both cases, the proper order of things is reasserted. And here we can remember that when Theseus kidnaps the queen of the Amazons, the Amazons come and besiege Athens to get her back. Theseus and the Athenians defeat the Amazons, that is pretty clearly seen in Athenian myth as a paradigmatic defining moment in the Athenian construction of their self-image. When they turn the Amazons back, they are both asserting the hegemony of Greek culture over foreign cultures and they’re asserting or validating the role of males in their society as superior to females.
But the encounter between a Greek hero and an Amazon works on more than just the surface level of male defeating female. It also always entails a re-feminizing or re-sexualizing in an overt way of the Amazon. Most obviously Theseus marries Hippolyta. He kidnaps her, takes her back to Athens and marries her. Heracles, you’ll remember, steals Hippolyta’s girdle or belt. Now, you may wonder where is the re-feminizing, where is the sexualizing of Hippolyta in that? Well, the answer is that to loosen a woman’s girdle was a standard metaphor in classical Greek for having sex with the woman. Just as we will use the metaphor he slept with her to mean that he had sex with her.
Greek would use the metaphor he loosened her girdle or he took off her girdle to mean he had sex with her. He took off her belt. The belt or girdle held the woman’s robe closed. If you untied the belt the robe fell open. The assumption is there would only be one reason why a man would open a woman’s robe and there you have the underlying reason for the metaphor.
So, although the myth does not say that Heracles actually did have sex with Hippolyta, just by saying Heracles took the girdle off Hippolyta, you have the implication that Heracles sexually dominated Hippolyta. Perhaps most interestingly, is that when Achilles has his encounter with an Amazon named Penthesilea, this happens supposedly right after the action of the Iliad, Achilles falls in love with Penthesilea as she is dying from the wound that he has inflicted on her. This shows up in various examples of ancient Greek art.
Achilles stabs Penthesilea with a spear or a sword. She lies dying at his feet. Their eyes meet and he is smitten by sexual passion for her. There you see pretty clearly the idea that wounding in battle in some way is the symbolic equivalent of sexual intercourse.
Achilles wounds Penthesilea and falls in love with her at the same moment. So in each of these examples, Theseus, Heracles and Achilles, we have the encounter with the male hero re-feminizing the Amazon and re-asserting what the Greeks would see as her proper sexual role to be sexually dominated by the Greek male. The story of Hippolytus, who you’ll remember is the son of Theseus and the Amazon Queen Hippolyta, reflects many of these same ideas in a very interesting and unusual way since Hippolytus is himself male. Hippolytus is the son of an Athenian father and an Amazon mother.
And as I mentioned briefly when we were talking about Theseus, Hippolytus shuns sexuality. That’s why Aphrodite is angry at him. And in his story, as the playwright Euripides tells it, it is the anger of Aphrodite at Hippolytus, her anger because Hippolytus does not honor her appropriately, that leads to the whole story of Hippolytus’ stepmother Phaedra falling in love with him and the resultant deaths of both Phaedra and Hippolytus. In the account that the playwright Euripides gives us, all of this is Aphrodite’s revenge against Hippolytus because he does not honor her appropriately. Why doesn’t he honor her appropriately? Because he shuns sexuality. He refuses to take part in any sexual activity whatsoever. Instead, Hippolytus devotes himself to the goddess Artemis.
To understand what’s going on in the story of Hippolytus, we have to set aside any assumptions that we may have about chastity or the eschewing of sexuality as being somehow purifying or ennobling or good for the soul.
In classical Greek culture, a young man who eschewed sexuality would not be seen as pure or noble, he would be seen as weird. Furthermore, he would be seen as selfish, because by eschewing sexuality, by refusing to be sexually mature, Hippolytus is refusing the duties of an adult male citizen. In a society with high infant mortality and many enemies, it was the absolute, unambiguous, unarguable duty of every male citizen to marry and beget children, whether he wanted to or not. That was his duty as an Athenian citizen, as a Greek citizen.
And so when Hippolytus refuses to take part in the area supervised by Aphrodite, he’s not just failing to show respect to an important goddess, he’s also refusing to be an adult male, his devotion to Artemis means that he is in effect acting like a young girl because as you’ll remember Artemis is the patron goddess of young unmarried girls. So Hippolytus too, like the Amazons themselves, is a kind of bizarre hybrid. He is male, but he devotes himself to a goddess who is appropriate for a young unmarried girl, and he refuses to become an adult male. He refuses to take his part in society by marrying and begetting children. In his case, however, his hybrid nature seems to involve refusing to become an adult of either gender.
The Amazons, I said, are hybrids who share traits of adults of both genders. Hippolytus is frozen in a kind of pre-adolescence let alone pre-adulthood, in which he will not or cannot become an adult of either gender. He’s devoted to Artemis, the goddess to whom young girls are devoted up to the time of their marriage, but he can’t marry as a female. That’s simply not open to him, so he can’t move beyond devotion to Artemis, and he refuses to be an adult male.
Apparently, he, the offspring of an Athenian father and an Amazon mother, is a hybrid who simply cannot exist in Athenian society. There’s no place for Hippolytus. He’s a hybrid that just simply doesn’t work.
Now, the Amazons are not the only interesting females in Greek myth who in many ways invert or at least call into question the assumptions that Greek myth makes about the proper roles of women. One of the most obvious such females in Greek myth is Medea, who is herself the subject of a play by her name, written by the same playwright, Euripides, who wrote Hippolytus. Medea, in many ways, parallels the Amazons. Her story highlights many of the same points we see in the story of the Amazons. In fact, she almost is a pseudo-Amazon herself in various different ways. First of all, she comes from the same neighborhood as the Amazons. Medea comes from a town called Colchis near the Black Sea, and this is where Jason sailed on the Argo to get the Golden Fleece.