The Amazonomachy

A battle with more than one hero

Amazonomachy means a battle against the Amazons, a people of fighting women from beyond the Black Sea. Ancient art used the subject for more than one hero. Heracles fights the Amazons when he goes to fetch the belt of Hippolyta, one of their number. Later, the Amazon Penthesilea comes to Troy and dies fighting Achilles.

The Athenian version is different. In it, the hero Theseus carries an Amazon away from her people, and they bring the war to Attica, the land around Athens. Athens tied this war to particular places on its own ground, and it is the one this entry follows.

How Theseus took the Amazon

The ancient biographer Plutarch, in his Life of Theseus, collects accounts of how the war began, and they cannot all be true. In one, Theseus sails with Heracles and receives the Amazon Antiope as a reward. Other writers have him sail on his own and take her prisoner. Another says he tricks her into coming aboard his ship.

The woman herself has two names. Some accounts call her Antiope, and others call her Hippolyta. The disagreement matters, because the cause of the war changes with each version.

The camp on the Hill of Ares

The Amazons come for Theseus. Their army reaches Athens and enters the city before the battle begins. They set up camp opposite the Acropolis, the citadel of Athens.

The playwright Aeschylus describes this camp in his play the Eumenides. There the goddess Athena says the Amazons raised a rival fortress on the rock later called the Areopagus, the Hill of Ares, and made sacrifices to Ares there.

In the play, Athena tells this story as she sets up the Athenian court that will judge the hero Orestes. The fighting itself stays outside the play. But the place is exact: the Amazons held the Hill of Ares during their attack on Theseus. That scene ties one Amazonomachy to Athens more firmly than any general story of the Amazons.

The fighting inside the city

Plutarch’s sources bring the battle inside Athens. One account stretches the line of the Amazons from the Amazonion to the Pnyx. The Athenians attack from the Mouseion on one side, and from the Palladium, Ardettus and Lyceum on the other. At first the Amazons push part of the Athenian force back to the sanctuary, or holy ground, of the Eumenides. Then a second Athenian attack drives their right wing back into its camp.

Before the fighting, Theseus makes an offering to Fear. Plutarch places the battle in Boedromion, a month of the Athenian year, when Athens still held a festival called the Boedromia. One account says the struggle went on for three months, until Hippolyta arranged a treaty. In other versions she is killed in the fighting. The sources give no single ending, but they agree that the war reached Athenian ground.

Painted and carved in Athens

The battle did not stay a single episode in the life of Theseus. The ancient traveller Pausanias saw the Athenians and Theseus fighting the Amazons in a painting on the middle wall of the Stoa Poikile, a public building in Athens. He found another painting of it in the sanctuary of Theseus. He wrote that the same war was shown on the shield of Athena and on the base of the statue of Zeus at Olympia.

On the Parthenon, the temple on the Acropolis, the war filled the 14 metopes of the west side. Metopes are the carved panels set high along the outside of a temple. The carving dates to 445 to 440 BC. Each panel shows a separate fight. Mounted Amazons riding over fallen enemies alternate with pairs fighting on foot. So anyone who approached the temple from the west saw the invasion of Athens.

What survives

West metope 2 shows a fight that neither side is winning easily. A young Athenian raises his shield while an Amazon lifts her sword to strike. Modern scholars place the scene on the Areopagus.

Four of the original west metopes, numbers 1, 2, 13 and 14, are in the Acropolis Museum. Nine remain on the Parthenon.

The statue of Athena Parthenos and her shield do not survive. So Pausanias’s account is evidence for what the shield showed, but there is no object left to confirm it. The Amazonomachy that remains on the Acropolis is the west metopes, divided between the museum and the temple.