Of Greek myth and murder

A tragic tale of Amazonian sisters

According to author and historian, Natalie Haynes, the Greeks were fascinated by Amazon women.¹ They are depicted on vast numbers of vase paintings, many times with names. Here’s an example from the Met Museum in NYC:

Amazon women at work. Met Museum

I’ve zoomed in here to take a good look at what these warrior women are wearing. One is on horseback with a man at her mercy below her, hiding behind his shield. Another two Amazon women are on the right, battling a man with his spear raised. These two are wielding axes, the Amazonian weapon of choice, and, like their compatriot on the horse, sporting some pretty fancy patterned clothing. Nice leggings, ladies.

Amazons appeal to me on two ‘sister’ levels. They were a sisterhood, perhaps one of the first, living in a woman only colony at Themiscyra on the Black Sea (think Turkey in modern geography). Their most famous Queen was Hippolyta and a range of stories offer different possibilities for her life and death. In one, Hercules killed her for her wondrous war belt, a gift from her father, the god, Ares, (ticking off number 9 in the 12 labors of Hercules). In another, she hands over the belt but she/or perhaps her sister Antiope, is then stolen/goes willingly to Athens with Theseus. Theseus, of Minotaur killing fame, has traveled to Themiscyra with Hercules/or separately, and falls for the Amazon Queen/or kidnaps her/or her sister, as a prize after the Greeks killed Hippolyta/or didn’t. Clear? If you’ve ever read one of those choose-your-own-adventure novels, you will have no problem with Greek myths.

Hippolyta wearing the prized belt. Met Museum.

But it’s really Hippolyta’s death at the hands of one of her sisters that I was left wondering about after reading these two novels, both retelling parts of the Amazon myths and both worth reading:

In both Hannah Lynn’s Queens of Themiscyra and Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships, Hippolyta is killed by her own sister, Penthesilea. Here’s Natalie Haynes’ take on the tragedy:

They were so alike, the Amazon girls, that when Hippolyta died, Penthesilea felt she had been deprived of more than a sister. She had lost her own reflection.

A sister killing a sister is hard to imagine. Did it happen? What do the sources say? Haynes seems to me to stick closer to the few historical fragments of information about the Amazons that have survived over the centuries. Quintus Smyrnaeus, writing in roughly the 4th century AD tells us:

Then from Thermodon, from broad-sweeping streams, came, clothed upon with beauty of Goddesses, Penthesileia - came athirst indeed for groan-resounding battle, but yet more fleeing abhorred reproach and even fame, lest they of her own folk should rail on her because of her own sister’s death, for whom ever her sorrows waxed, Hippolyte, whom she had struck dead with her mighty spear - not of her will - ‘twas at a stag she hurled.²

An accident then. A hunting expedition that ended in tragedy. Haynes paints the hunting scene slightly differently, preferring a game with arrows gone wrong, but the spirit of the thing is the same. Lynn, however, has a whole different take on Hippolyta’s death at her sister’s hand. In A Thousand Ships, Haynes’ focus is squarely on the Trojan War. Penthesilea arrives after the death of Hector (where the Iliad ends) and is determined to seek a glorious death in battle to make amends for her sister’s death. Hannah Lynn follows the same end game in Queens of Themiscyra, but her whole novel is centered on the lives of these warrior sisters, beginning long before Penthesilea arrives in Troy. In this novel we have Lynn’s take on Hercules and the belt, and the machinations of Theseus, and it’s Hippolyta, not Antiope, who ends up in Athens. It’s there, in Athens, that Penthesilea kills her sister, still by accident, although it’s a much more complex event.

But whichever version you like (and they both worked for me) it’s the devastation of taking her sister’s life that becomes the defining tragedy of Penthesilea’s story. Grieving, sleepless, wracked with guilt, she seeks a warrior’s death at the hands of Achilles. And, no surprise, she gets it.

Achilles and Penthesilea, British Museum.

1. Pandora’s Jar, women in the Greek Myths, Natalie Haynes (2020)

2. The Fall of Troy, Quintus Smyrnaeus