Embodying Foreign Bodies: Amazon Monument & Myth in Attica

Stella J. Fritzell (Bryn Mawr College)

This paper examines reports of Amazon monuments in Attica to argue that these features of the local landscape not only promoted military might, but furthermore fomented civic cohesion while reinforcing social separation. Discussions of Amazons generally take one of two approaches. The first aims to find the true meaning of a fictional story, wherein the Amazon is typically interpreted as an allegorical “Other” and negative exemplar of female behavior (Lefkowitz 1986). The second seeks the historical reality of Amazons preserved in archaeological sites and artifacts of the Eastern Mediterranean (Rotroff & Lamberton 2014; Mayor 2016). I draw upon both approaches to demonstrate that the Amazon memorials in Attica identified by Pausanias (1.2.1, 1.41.7), although not factual burials of warrior women, nevertheless served as physical embodiments of the Amazon myth that was also expressed in civic art of the Athenian Acropolis (e.g., Parthenon metopes) and Agora (e.g., Stoa Poikile). Each of these monuments is explicitly linked to the story of the Amazonomachy, characterized by Pausanias as the first significant action taken by the Athenians against a foreign threat (5.11.7), and the positioning of Amazons as a foreign “Other” is clear in 5th century BCE visual art that promoted Athens as a stalwart defender of Greece (Castriota 1992). These same depictions of Amazons additionally reflected civic anxieties related to the Periclean citizenship laws (Stewart 1995). I expand on Stewart’s work to demonstrate that Amazon monuments reflected not only the concerns of Athenian citizens, but also those of non-citizens. Inclusion of Amazons in the festal calendar alongside Theseus (Plut. Vit. Thes. 27.6-7) served to temporarily incorporate citizen and non-citizen groups into one celebratory body, yet Amazon tombs ultimately stood not only as the burials of enemies, but moreover as the resting places of foreign women far from home.

Bibliography:

Castriota, David. 1992. Myth, Ethos, and Actuality. University of Wisconsin Press.

Lefkowitz, Mary R. 1986. Women in Greek Myth. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Mayor, Adrienne. 2016. “Warrior Women: The Archaeology of Amazons”. Women in Antiquity, eds. Stephanie Lynn Budin & Jean Macintosh Turfa. Routledge. 969-985.

Rotroff, Susan & Robert Lamberton. 2014. “The Tombs of Amazons”. Approaching the Ancient Artifact: Representation, Narrative, and Function, eds. Amalia Avramidou & Denise Demetriou. De Gruyter. 127-138.

Stewart, Andrew. 1995. “Imag(in)ing the Other: Amazons and Ethnicity in Fifth-Century Athens”. Poetics Today, 16.4: 571-597.