The Amazonomachy

The army on the Hill of Ares

The Amazons reach Athens and establish a camp opposite the Acropolis. In Aeschylus’s Eumenides, Athena says that they raise a rival citadel on the rock later called the Areopagus and sacrifice to Ares there. Their grudge is against Theseus, and the army has entered the city before the battle begins.

Aeschylus uses the invasion while establishing the Athenian court that will judge Orestes. The fighting itself stays outside the play, but its ground is precise: the Amazons held the Hill of Ares during an attack on Theseus. That scene fixes one Amazonomachy to Athens more firmly than any general tale of Greeks fighting women from beyond the Black Sea.

Which battle the name covers

Amazonomachy means a battle against Amazons, and ancient art applied the subject to more than one heroic cycle. Heracles fights them while seeking Hippolyta’s belt. Penthesilea later comes to Troy and dies fighting Achilles. The Athenian version is different: Theseus brings an Amazon away, and her people carry the war into Attica.

Plutarch preserves incompatible accounts even before the invasion. In one, Theseus accompanies Heracles and receives Antiope as a reward. Other writers have him sail separately and take her prisoner; another says he draws her aboard his ship by deceit. The woman is called Antiope in some accounts and Hippolyta in others. The disagreement is part of the arc because the cause of the war changes with it.

How the fighting crosses Athens

Plutarch’s sources bring the Amazon army inside the city. One account extends its line from the Amazonion to the Pnyx. It has the Athenians attack from the Mouseion on one side and from the Palladium, Ardettus and Lyceum on the other. The Amazons first drive part of the Athenian force back to the sanctuary of the Eumenides, while the second Athenian attack pushes their right wing into its camp.

Theseus sacrifices to Fear before fighting. Plutarch dates the battle to the month of Boedromion, when Athens still celebrated the Boedromia, and says one account let the struggle continue for three months before Hippolyta arranged a treaty. Other versions kill her during the fighting. The sources preserve no single ending, but they agree that the war reaches Athenian ground.

Why Athens repeated the war

The battle did not remain one episode in a biography of Theseus. Pausanias saw the Athenians and Theseus fighting the Amazons on the middle wall of the Stoa Poikile. He found another painting in the sanctuary of Theseus and wrote that the same war appeared on the shield of Athena and the pedestal of Zeus at Olympia.

On the Parthenon, the Amazonomachy occupied the fourteen metopes of the west side. The Acropolis Museum dates the carving to 445–440 BC. Each panel stages a separate encounter, alternating mounted Amazons over fallen opponents with pairs fighting on foot. The west metopes turn an invasion of Athens into the subject that faces anyone approaching the temple from that side.

What remains of the two Parthenon versions

West metope 2 gives neither fighter an easy victory. An Athenian youth raises his shield while an Amazon lifts her sword to strike. The museum identifies the Areopagus as the scene. Four original west metopes, numbers 1, 2, 13 and 14, are in the Acropolis Museum; nine remain on the Parthenon, with casts used in the gallery where possible.

Athena Parthenos and her shield do not survive. Pausanias’s account is therefore evidence for what the shield represented, not an object that can now confirm its own decoration. The Amazonomachy that remains on the Acropolis is the west metopes, divided between the museum and the temple.