Hell Hath No Fury Read Online Free Page B

is evident from the recurrence of the Greek
hippos
(horse) in their names: three Amazons known by name were Hippolyta (stamping horse), Melanippe (black mare), and Alcippe (powerful mare).
    Most famous of all the Amazons was the queen Hippolyta, who became the target of the great hero Heracles around 1250 BCE , when he demanded her girdle, the symbol of her sacred and sexual power. The whole tribe of Amazons rose against him in anger, and Hippolyta met him in pitched battle, where she was thrown from her horse and lay helpless at Heracles’ feet. He offered to spare her life if she would submit to him, and she chose to die rather than yield. Heracles killed her, stripped her of her girdle, seized her battle-axe, and slaughtered all the other Amazon champions, one by one. Only when the tribe had been savagely reduced did the Amazon commander Melanippe seek a truce. Heracles granted it on condition that she, too, give up her girdle, symbolically handing all her power as queen and woman over to him. Heracles then raped her and let her go, knowing the humiliation would be worse than death.
    Heracles gave another of the surviving Amazons, Antiope, to his friend Theseus, who bore her off to Athens as his concubine. The remaining Amazons mounted a war party to rescue her and in the succeeding battle, Antiope was killed and the Amazon force was heavily defeated and driven off.
    The Amazons suffered many such assaults at the hands of the Greeks, who were bent on imposing their patriarchal rule on tribes who followed the older earth religion of the Great Goddess, a belief system honoring womankind and led by queens. Driven to revenge, the Amazon queen Penthesilea traveled to Troy around 1250 BCE to fight on behalf of the Trojans, who were also at war with the invading Greeks. She fought with great distinction on the Trojan side and more than once drove the greatest champion of the Greeks, Achilles, from the field.
    But in their final encounter, Achilles ran her through. Stripping the dying body of its armor, Achilles realized for the first time that his enemy was a woman and, falling in love or lust with her as she died, had sex with her body while it was still warm. Another Greek, the troublemaker Thersites, taunted Achilles for his sexual perversion and boasted that he had gouged out Penthesilea’s eyes with his spear while she was still alive. Achilles promptly killed him, and in revenge one of Thersites’ kinsmen dragged Penthesilea’s body around the battlefield by the heels and threw it into the River Scamander (the modern-day Menderes), before it was finally rescued and buried with great honor. Penthesilea was the last true Amazon, and the tribe died with her.
    Astonishing stories—but are they truth or myth? Later historians, writing in more strait-laced times, puzzled over the anomaly of women who chose to fight. The word “Amazon” was taken apart and interpreted as deriving from the Greek
a
(without) and
mazos
(breast). This paved the way for the explanation that these fighting women cut off their right breasts to improve their skill at arms.
    This fanciful derivation of the Amazons’ name is now known to be linguistically spurious as well as anatomically ridiculous: how many women have a right breast so unmanageable that they cannot swing a sword or draw a bow? It also implies that women who want to fight must be so perverted and unnatural that they would mutilate themselves. This detail adds a thrill of violence and horror to the eternal fascination of male-dominated societies with women’s breasts. Perhaps this explains why this piece of nonsense has passed into common currency and remains the only “fact” many people know about the Amazons.
    Faced with this fiction, traditional historians have been able to dismiss the Amazons as pure myth. Feminist historians, too, have been uncomfortable with the Amazon story, finding it an all-too-convenient reinforcement of the inevitability