So the viper woman, the snake woman, the echidna, is basically benevolent or at least not malevolent. She doesn’t want to harm Heracles. She doesn’t want to devour him. She wants children from him. And so Heracles sleeps with her, Herodotus says on that understanding, begets three sons with her. Herodotus doesn’t say if they’re triplets or if Heracles stays for a while. And after their three sons are born, the snake woman agrees to let Heracles go.
Now, this monster parallels the dangerous females in several ways. Like Medea and the Amazon, she lives near the Black Sea in Scythia. Like Scylla and Medusa, she’s partly snake. As I said, she’s a woman from the waist up and a snake from the waist down. Her youngest son is Scythes.
Scythes becomes the ancestor of the Scythians and a fascinating little connection with the Amazons. According to Herodotus, the Scythians later mate with the Amazons, with a few Amazons who decide they want to settle down and be normal human beings. They mate with the Scythians and produce a tribe called the Saramatai. So there’s a connection between the descendant of this snake woman and the Amazons, the snake woman is not a malevolent monster and to be honest I don’t quite know why this should be so I’m still thinking about the myth of the snake woman but it occurs to me at least that among other things that may be going on here is again the idea of reversal just as women don’t act like women at the edges of the world perhaps female monsters don’t act like female monsters at the edges of the world perhaps at the very far edges of the world you get monsters who are friendly rather than monsters who are dangerous
In any case, these various females, the Amazons, Medea, the monsters all seem pretty clearly to represent the Greek male’s anxiety about women’s power and particularly about women’s sexual power. This theme is most clearly encapsulated in Medea, whose name, believe it or not, means both genitals and clever plans. The idea that sexuality equals deceit, that sexual power involves deceit is encapsulated in Medea’s very name.
The theme of women bearing children only to kill them, I think pretty clearly reiterates the regret that we’ve talked about before, the regret felt by Greek men that women are necessary for the production of offspring. The fact that women bear the children means that in some sense women control men’s ability to have children, as we’ve talked about before. Mothers who kill their offspring, mothers who bear sons to their husbands only to kill those sons, are I think simply an exaggerated form of that control.
A woman can deny a man’s continuity through children either through not bearing the children in the first place or through killing them once she has borne them. The latter is exaggerated and unlikely but it’s the same general idea and reflects I think the same regret, resentment and anxiety over the fact that men can only produce children through sexual intercourse with women.
And it occurs to me that this may even help to explain the very frequent rape motif in Greek myth. Now I’m not trying to sanitize or reduce the horror of the rape motif.
It comes up very frequently and it is a very disturbing element in Greek myth for modern readers. But I think one way of viewing this might be to say that since such rapes always result in offspring, and they do, a raped girl in Greek myth always gets pregnant, this theme may have less to do with males seeking sexual pleasure than with males seeking control of fertility.
You still have to have access to a woman to beget sons, but in a rape story, the man is forcing reproduction on the woman with the slightest contact with her possible, and this may, I think, reflect the male desire to control reproduction as much as possible, more than it reflects anything about actual Greek sexual mores, per se. Well, that’s a tentative suggestion that I just wanted to throw out there for what it’s worth. Women’s ability to deny men continuity through offspring seems to be enlarged in these myths into a tendency on the part of women to destroy men entirely. And I think that’s a fairly clear progression. A woman can destroy a man’s continuity, can destroy his family if she does not bear children. It doesn’t take much of an imaginative leap to see that as women destroying the man himself entirely or females destroying him entirely.
And finally, the connection that we saw in the House of Atreus myth between illicit sexuality and illicit eating, specifically cannibalism, appears here as well, where many of these female monsters who became monsters because of sexuality now literally devour men. Don’t just destroy them, but actually eat them.
The hero’s successful encounters with Amazons and with female monsters, as we’ve seen in this lecture, seem to represent that whole nexus of male anxieties that we’ve talked about so much in the course about reproduction, about women, about women’s potential power in society. And so the whole reiteration of the idea of male dominance and female submission that comes up in these myths can serve as a reminder of the way myth both reflects and constructs the society in which it originates. In the next lecture, we’ll turn to looking at the other great society of classical myth, the Roman society, and see how they used and changed some of the same myths we’ve discussed so far.
(Transcribed with the help of AI – S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 – Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)