AMAZON
WOMEN WARRIORS PART - 7
Note
:
The
given information is taken from google books and hence, many pages
are missing. It is from the book given below :
Post
colonial Amazons
Female
Masculinity and courage in ancient Greek and Sanskrit Literature
Walter
Duvall Penrose, Jr.
Introduction
:
And since the god had delegated to the woman the duty of guarding
the produce that had been brought into the house, he measured out
a greater portion of fear to her than to the man. And knowing that
the man, working outdoors, would have to defend [the homestead]
against in-truders, he gave him a greater share of courage.
(Xen. Oec. 7.25)
With these words, Xenophon justified the fourth-century BCE Athenian
prescription of housework to women and military service to men.
According to Xenophon, men have more courage than women. This sentiment
is echoed again and again in Greek literature, but it is also undermined
in story after story where brave women are shown to be very capable
of taking military and other matters into their own hands. The Greeks
recorded the deeds of courage-ous women, women who fought to defend
their cities, homes, and families. Thucydides, for example, discusses
the women of Corcyra throwing rooftiles at enemy soldiers, yet in
the same breath labels their actions "contrary to nature"
(3.74.1). Numerous Greek authors discuss women warriors and warrior
queens, women who seemed to exhibit the kind of bravery that Xenophon
reserves for men. We must ask ourselves: If the Greeks thought women
were so incapacitated by fear, why did they record these stories?
Why is there such a contradiction between Greek gender ideology
and the histories recorded by the Greeks?1
The
typical answer has been that women did not really take part in battles.
In this line of thought, stories of women fighting men are simply
that, stories—not history.2 Legends of Amazons, other women
warriors, and warrior queens are usually interpreted using a traditional,
Athenian point of view, and thus dismissed. But what if we decenter
Athenian understandings of gender in our reading of Greek literature?
Might we come to different conclusions in so doing? In this book,
I will employ a postcolonial methodology to provincialize Athenian
thought and to rethink the veracity of warrior women in a broad,
comparative context. Furthermore, while the Amazons of Greek lore
were exaggerations, I will demonstrate that they were based upon
a Greek under-standing of other cultures wherein women fought and
held power. While the Amazons were the quintessential representation
of female masculinity in ancient Greek thought, they were by no
means the only example of manly/ courageous women. Women whom the
Greeks considered to be masculine were masqueraded on the Greek
stage, described in the Hippocratic corpus, took part in the struggle
to control Alexander the Great's empire after his death, and served
as women bodyguards in ancient India and Persia. Looking from
the outside in, it is possible to rethink the ancient history of
bold and warlike women. In this book, I will seek to excavate the
evidence of those women upon whom the Greek phenomenon of the Amazons
was based. I will demonstrate that the Amazons were an Orientalized
distortion of historical women warriors and warrior queens, and
analyze how the Amazons fit into larger paradigms of Greek thought
with regard to female masculinity, warrior women, and matriarchy.
The
Amazons :
The Amazons, the formidable foes of the ancient Greeks, were the
most notable example of warlike women in ancient Greek literature.
According to the Athenian orator Lysias, the Amazons were smarter,
faster, and better than men:
The Amazons were the daughters of Ares in ancient times who lived
beside the river Thermodon. They alone of those dwelling around
them were armed with iron, and they were the first of all peoples
to ride horses, and, on account of the inexperience of their enemies,
they overtook by capture those who fled, or left behind those who
pursued. They were esteemed more as men on account of their courage
than as women on account of their nature [phusisj. They were thought
to excel men more in spirit than they were thought to be inferior
due to their bodies. (2.4)
Whereas
Homer (Iliad 3.189, 6.186) considered the Amazons to be the equals
of men [antianeirai], Lysias thought that they were even better
than men. Despite having inferior strength, they used ingenuity
and technology to subdue all of the nations around them, but finally
met their match, at least according to Lysias, when they decided
to attack Athens (2.5). Lysias asserts that the Athenians put the
Amazons in their place by defeating them, and established, finally,
that they were indeed women. Plutarch tells us that not even
the Athenians could defeat the Amazons, however, but had to make
a peace treaty with them (Thes. 27). Furthermore, Plutarch indicates
that differing tales of the Amazon invasion of Attica had been circulating
for centuries before his time. The legend of the Amazons has inspired
awe and sparked the imaginations of countless persons over several
millennia. The idea of women fighting and defeating men and living
independently of them lies at the heart of this fascination with
the Amazons. Aeschylus calls the Amazons "man-hating"
[stuganores] and "man-less" [anandroi] (Prometheus Bound
723-4; Suppliant Women 287).
According
to the Greek author Ephorus, who wrote in the fourth century BCE,
the Amazons of Themiscyra opted out of compulsory patriarchy in
the first place because they were ill-treated by men: "The
Amazons were treated insolently by their husbands, and, when some
of the men went to war, the Amazons killed those left behind and
refused entrance to those returning" (FGrHist 70 F 60a).3
In the Roman period, Pompeius Trogus relates that the Amazons, seeing
the ills of their previous marriages, decided to avoid marriage
permanently: "They had no desire to marry their neighbors,
calling this slavery, not matrimony" (apud Justin 2.4). As
single women par excellence, the Amazons did not die out: instead
they found ways to procreate by either crippling males and turning
them into sex slaves who performed domestic labor (Diod. 2.45),
or, in another version of the story, by meeting the men of the Gargarians
once a year to copulate (Strabo 11.5.1). In this scenario, male
offspring were given to the Gargarians, and the Amazons raised the
females. In yet a third version of the story, the Amazons copulated
with the men of neighboring tribes, raised female infants, and killed
male infants. Hence they were called "man-loving" [philandros]
yet "male-infant-killing" larsenobrephokontosj by the
Greek author Hellanicus (FGrHist 4 F 167).
In the Greek mindset, Amazons were unmarried women. Generally
speak-ing, when Amazons do wind up marrying men (or at least becoming
their consorts), they cease to be Amazons. When the Amazons marry
the Scythians, as in a version of the Amazon legend told by Herodotus
(4.110-17), they become Sauromatians. Likewise, when the Amazon
Antiope marries Theseus of her own free will, she defects from the
Amazons and fights on the side of the Athenians against her sisters
(Paus. 1.2.1).
4
Amazons, it would seem, could not exist unless they were sexually
independent of or masters of men, although they do ally with men
to fight, including Trojans and Scythians (Arctinus Aithiopus, apud
Proclus Crestomathia 2; Dictys of Crete The Trojan War 4.2, ed.
Eisenhut; Isoc. 12.193; Diod. 2.45, 4.28.2; Just. 2.4, ed. Seel).
5
Of course, Greek legends tell us more about who the Greeks thought
the Amazons were than they do about the actual women who formed
the basis of the Amazon myth. Nevertheless, lurking behind the myths
there is an "historical core."6 In a number of texts,
the Amazons are associated with the Scythians, a historical, nomadic
people who lived in the Eurasian steppes. Writing some 300 years
after Lysias, Diodorus added a new twist to the story of the Amazons
attacking Athens. According to Diodorus, the Amazons did not attack
Athens alone. Rather, they did so with the Scythians at their side
(4.28.2). In other texts, the Amazons are seemingly interchanged
with the Scythians. Whereas Lysias asserts that the Amazons
were the first in their region to harness iron to make war, Hellanicus
tells us that the Scythians were the first to make iron weapons
(Lys. 2.4, Hellanicus FGrHist 4 F 189). Accor-ding to Diodorus,
the Amazons conquered all the way from Thrace in the north to Syria
in the south, whereas the Scythians conquered from Thrace to Egypt
(2.44-6)7 Just as the Amazons engaged in warfare according to Lysias
(2.4), Scythian women trained "for warfare like the men"
according to Diodorus (2.44). As mentioned above, according to Herodotus,
the Amazons eventually even married the Scythians, but in so doing
formed a new tribe, the Sauromatians (Hdt. 4.114-117).
It
is starting to sound more and more as though the Amazons and the
Scythians were conflated in ancient thought. One could perhaps argue
that the Amazons were Scythians,8 The problem with this hypothesis,
however, is that the Amazons were associated with other peoples
as well. In Greek literature, Amazons allegedly behave like the
Sauromatian women, for example in cauterizing their breasts, engaging
in warfare, and dominating men.9 Then again, they wear Thracian
outfits on Greek vases, and the Amazon Penthesilea is described
as "Thracian by race [genos]" (Arctinus Aithiopus, apud
Proclus Crestomathia 2).10 In early legends, the Amazons lived along
the river Ther-modon, a place where Asian Thracians apparently also
lived.11 But then again, in a later version of the myth, the Amazons
lived in the same place as the Libyan tribe of the Auseans, near
Lake Tritonis (Diod. 3.53; Hdt. 4.180). Like Amazons, the young
women of the Auseans fought.
While
the Amazons are an "other" to the Athenians, among whom
women were delegated roles as housewives, they seem to have comparable
customs and a similar history to more historical women warriors.
Archaeology has opened new windows onto these issues. In the
past century and a half, archaeologists have excavated graves of
Scythian, Sauromatian, and Thracian women buried with weapons, women
whom they have labeled "Amazons." 12 Meanwhile, Western
art historians and literary scholars largely came to the consensus
that the Amazons were a fabrication of the Greek imagination. These
diverging disciplinary perspectives can be brought together, however.
In this book, I will demonstrate that women were taught to wield
weapons and did in fact fight in numerous locations known to the
Greeks. I will explore the ways in which various warlike and powerful
women were turned into Amazons and matriarchs by the Greeks. I will
resituate "Amazons," matriarchs, and various other courageous
warrior women within the very social contexts from which they all
too often have been extracted. By extending the geographical scope
of analysis beyond Athens to the wider world known to the Greeks,
I hope to show that Athenian gender norms were not shared by others.
The legend of the Amazons may be exaggerated, but the customs that
fostered it have bases in historical truth. The Amazons, I will
argue, are a conglomeration of the customs of a broad swath of peoples,
peoples that can be described largely as nomads.13 We are left wondering
how and why the Greeks conflated all of these different customs
and peoples into the Amazons. The answer must be related to the
Greek tendency to mythologize, as well as to Greek discom-fort with
what they perceived to be masculine women.
Orientalism
and Amazons :
The
Greek understanding of the Amazons as masculine is, ultimately,
an Orien-talist interpretation. The Greeks did not understand a
way of life that necessitated women riding, herding, and fighting.
We do not know what nomadic women warriors would have thought of
themselves, but we can and do see inconsistencies in Greek literature
that describes such "barbarians." Whereas archaeological
evidence of warrior women in Scythia and Central Asia suggests that
women had more equality with men than in Greek societies, the Greeks
understood such differences from within their own interpretive framework.
Even the evidence that the Greeks provide does not necessarily reinforce
their seemingly biased claims of dominant, matriarchal women effeminizing
weak, "barbarian" men. Some level of ethnocentrism is
involved in the discrepancy between the facts recorded by the Greeks
and their interpretation of them.
According
to Said, "The Orient was almost a European invention, and had
been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting
memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.14 Nevertheless,
Said himself warns that "it would be wrong to conclude that
the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding
reality."15 The Occident and the Orient exist, to some extent,
as reflections of one another. Just as Said notes that "Orien-talism
derives from a particular closeness experienced between Britain
and France and the Orient" in the modern period,16 so too did
ancient Greek Orientalism derive from a closeness experienced between
Greeks and "bar-barians," with whom the Greeks traded
and on whose land they founded colonies, many of which began as
trading posts.17 The Greeks filtered their understandings of non-Greek
customs through their own misogyny, however, and, due to their own
binary, polarized gender ideology, took the figure of the barbarian
woman warrior and recast her as the Amazon.
To
the Greeks, the term "barbarian" initially simply meant
"non-Greek," but over time the word took on negative connotations.
By the fifth century BCE, "barbarian" men were increasingly
seen as effeminate by Greeks, and, in this view, were dominated
by strong women.18 Because Athenians and other Greeks could not
understand a society where men allowed women to fight or hold power,
they assumed that women warriors either murdered or dominated men.
Like
the modern Orient of Said, however, the barbarian world known to
the Greeks had a basis in historical truth. While Orientalism, or
the theory of the "other" more generally, may have much
to tell us about Greek views of other peoples, another approach
might be more useful in unearthing barbarian histories.19 Said has
been criticized for theorizing an overly simplistic divide between
the Occident and the Orient.20 In a similar fashion, analyses of
ancient Greek texts and artwork have all too often been over-reliant
on a binary division between self and other, theorizing a rigid
division between Greeks and barbarians.21 A quotation from a recent
work by Robin Osborne illustrates how this tendency continues to
hold sway in the profession of classics in the twenty-first century.
When describing the aspirations of Athenian vase painters, Osborne
makes the following comment:
Foreign bodies are good to think with and worth thinking about,
but not worth thinking about absolutely. They are worth thinking
about only when the foreign-ness of the other offers insight into
what it is for the self to be Greek.22
Indeed,
vase-painters, like any other past peoples, may have been ethnocentric.
That said, cannot Greek images, and correspondingly texts, tell
us more about others than just what it meant to be Greek? Were the
Greeks completely self-absorbed, or have we ourselves as modern
classicists been completely absorbed in the Greeks at the expense
of other historical peoples with whom the Greeks were fascinated?
As some critics have recently suggested, problematizing the binary
relationship between Greek self and other may be fruitful.23
In
this vein, I will differentiate between Athenian and other Greek
(e.g. Argive, Halicarnassian) gender ideologies (Chapters 1 and
4), as well as problematize the binary relationship between Greeks
and others, particularly Amazons and "barbarian" warrior
queens (Chapters 2-6)24 Although the Greeks certainly did engage
in binary thought, I will strive to make clear that the Greek legends
of the Amazons rely upon much more than just a binary inversion
of Greek norms.25 The legends of the Amazons are cultural constructions
that draw upon stories and customs of many barbarian peoples, including
Scythians, Sauromatians, Thracians, and Libyans.26 Thus it is my
claim that the stories of the Amazons are more than just an "other"
through which the Greeks defined themselves, as has often been argued;
they are facsimiles of narratives of numerous other peoples among
whom women fought.27 As Otto Brendel once wrote to Larissa Bonfante:
"We take the Greeks as our model, forgetting that the Greeks
did everything differently from everyone else."28 "Barbarians"
had different customs than the Athenians, even if these customs
were exaggerated by the Greeks. Thus, a binary "other"
approach towards studying the Amazons oversimplifies the system
of thought used by the Greeks.
Whereas
structuralists theorized systems of thought as an "array of
binary oppositions (pairs of opposites that structure and provide
stability to systems), post-structuralists, also known as deconstructionists,
saw everything as mul- tiple," and understood systems of thought
as "endlessly mobile and unstable." 29 Deconstructionists
thus noted the oversimplifying tendency of structuralism. Postcolonial
studies has appropriated these post-structuralist points of view:
whereas Said largely theorized the Occident and Orient as binary
oppositions, recent postcolonial theorists, following post-structuralists,
have rethought the framework through which we analyze self and others,
Greeks and barbarians. 30 Similarly, whereas modernist discourse
focused upon metanarratives, post- modernist analyses have focused
attention upon the fragmented nature of such master narratives,
and emphasized local variations as opposed to singular or overly
systematic world views.31
In
antiquity, Amazon narratives shifted and changed over time. Furthermore,
there were multiple Greeks and multiple others. In this perspective,
the legends of the Amazons are products of cultural interaction
among multiple Greeks and multiple others. Past analyses of Amazons
have been largely conducted in a binary fashion, where the "other"
defines the Greek self through a complete inversion of norms. Blok
argues that despite the systematic discourse of the theory of the
other, "Amazonology remains internally inconsistent. Even the
procedure of inversion ... is anything but consistently present"
in the Amazon myths. "The distinction between the group of
Amazons (women) and Gargarians (men with their own women but available
as sexual partners for the Amazons) has no inverted precedence in
the Greek context." 32 In another sense, the segregation of
the Amazons from the Gargarian s is more similar to the isolation
of Athenian women from men than it is opposite. Furthermore, as
I will demonstrate, the usage of the word "Amazon" was
not fixed—the term was a Greek label that was used to refer
to others in an inconsistent manner. It was used for other, more
historical peoples, and could mean different things to different
authors. For all of these reasons, I will utilize a post-structuralist,
postmodernist, postcolonialist approach that problematizes and rethinks
the received "theory of the other" that has been so prevalent
in the filed of classics for the past forty or more years.
Orientalism
and Matriarchy :
The Amazons were the prototypical example of female masculinity
to the Greeks of the archaic and classical periods, but by the Roman
era they had also become the prototype of matriarchy. The Amazon
societies of Themiscyra and Libya were cast as matriarchies that
inverted Greek gender roles by Diodorus Siculus (2.45, 3.53) 33
Sauromatian society was also called a matriarchy by Ephorus (70
F 160). The Greeks, especially Athenians and Ionians, could not
understand a society where some women might be equal in status to
or even hold power over men, so they turned such societies into
total matriarchies. Effeminate "barbarian" men were dominated
by women in this view. The ancient Greeks called matriarchy gunaikokratia
(gune,gunaikos = "woman" + kratia = "rule")
or gynecocracy, and seemingly defined gynecocracy as any situation
where women held power. Aristotle (Pol. 1269b24) even called Sparta
a gynecocracy, because the women there acted as mistresses of the
estates while their husbands were away at war. Even societies ruled
by one woman for brief periods of time were singled out and equated
with matriarchies by Greek authors, just as a warrior queen could
be equated with an Amazon. Queen Artemisia I of Halicarnassus,
who fought against the Greeks at Salamis in 480 BCE, is compared
to an Amazon by Aristophanes (Lys. 671-9), while her later, fourth-century
BCE counterpart, Queen Ada I, is described by Arrian as representive
of an Asia where women ruled over men (1.23.8). Both queens ruled
the same place, at different times. Their histories, along with
that of Artemisia II, Ada's sister, illustrate the blurred lines
that existed in Greek thought among the categories of Amazon, matriarch,
and warrior queen.
Historical
warrior women, ranging from nomads to warrior queens to Greek women
defending their homes from the onslaught of invaders, root Greek
legends of the Amazons in some historical reality. While women
who fought or were otherwise courageous were considered masculine
by the Greeks, the truth may be that they were simply responding
to the daily needs of their own lives. War was a way of life in
the ancient past, and women were not immune to it.
On
the one hand, the Amazons are representations of female masculinity
and matriarchy—phenomena that were troubling to some Greeks.
As a result, the Amazons are usually killed off in Greek literature
and art to restabilize patriarchy, which they upset. On the other
hand, "Amazons" and matriarchs are Orientalized distortions
of real women warriors and warrior queens, women who may have viewed
themselves differently from the way they were seen by the Athenians.
They may not have been called masculine by their immediate peers,
but, due to a lack of written records, we may never know for sure.
Female
Masculinity :
Greek, especially Athenian, men tended to think that bravery, intelligence,
outspokenness, and loyalty were male traits. When a woman exhibited
these traits, she could either be called a "man" [aner]
or "masculine" [andreia, andrike]. Because the ancient
Greeks held so tightly to a gendered paradigm where these kinds
of traits were considered "masculine," when they observed
such traits in women, they labeled these women as masculine. While
the Amazons were the prototypical example of female masculinity'
in ancient Greek thought, there were numerous other examples of
masculine women paraded in Greek art and literature, and there is
some evidence to document the existence of historical women who
were perceived to be masculine.
35
While effeminacy in Greek men, barbarians, and even slaves has been
a hot topic of discussion in recent scholarship on ancient Greece,
perceived mascu-linity in women has received far less attention.
Part of this may stem from the fact that male gender variance "is
more frequently culturally emphasized than female gender variance....
In patriarchal societies, the social status gained by" male-to-female
transgender individuals "appears less threatening to society
than the social status lost by" female-to-male transgender
persons, "and helps account for the cultural focus on male
gender nonconformity."' But there is another reason for this
lack of scholarly focus on female masculinity. The term "masculinity"
is derived from a set of behaviors, norms, and customs expected
of men. Masculinity and masculine behavior have been noted in women
for thousands of years; however, the study of masculinity in women
has been stymied by a false understanding that masculinity is the
product of men only and, therefore, is tied integrally to the study
of men, but not women.37 Nonetheless, a social construction of masculinity
in women can be traced back at least to the ancient Greeks.
Even
the very category upon which the term masculinity rests, "men,"
has been perceived as socially constructed.38 This phenomenon can
also be detected in Greek literature. When a Greek woman is called
"masculine" [andreia] or an Amazon "equivalent to
a man" [antianeira], we might say that there is still some
distinction drawn between sex and gender; but when Antigone, Oedipus'
daughter in Athenian tragedy, is called a "man," the binary
distinction drawn between the sexes is destabilized (Hipp. On Reg.
1.29.1; Hom. IL 3.189, 6.186; Soph. Ant. 528, Oed. Col. 1368). If
sex is to be read as a signifier in language, then it must signify
something else besides biological difference when Oedipus refers
to Antigone as a man.
When
Creon, Antigone's tyrannical uncle, refers to her as a man, he marks
her defiance against male authority, her refusal to be submissive
(Soph. Ant. 528).39 In this context, Antigone is like an Amazon.
In a different context, when Oedipus, Antigone's father, calls her
a man because of her loyalty to himself, Antigone has risen above
the expectations that men held for women (Soph. Oed. Col. 1559-63).
Generally speaking, when women are equated with men or called masculine,
they exhibit behavior or characteristics that, in a misogynistic
milieu, were more expected of men. As I will demonstrate in Chapter
1, such behavior could be viewed both positively and negatively.
In Attic tragedy, Antigone's "masculine" loyalty to her
father is viewed favorably whereas the "manly" boldness
of Clytemnestra, who kills her husband Agamemnon and usurps his
power, is viewed unfavorably, despite the fact that she did so to
avenge Agamemnon's sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia, to the
goddess Artemis.
Furthermore,
an investigation of behavior perceived to be masculine in ancient
Greek women reveals that variance from ancient Greek gender norms
cannot be understood in the same way that gender-queerness is theorized
today. There is a need to develop historical models to gauge gender
variance in women, and such models, particularly with respect to
the ancient Greeks, have been lacking. Generally speaking, theoretical
models of gender
further
pages are missing.......................
politics and in related issues of gender. From a Greek perspective,
only barbar-ians would be slaves to kings, or dare I say queens?
Towards
the end of this same epoch, the Hellenistic period, Egyptian soldiers
proclaimed Arsinoe IV pharaoh of Egypt and ultimately commander
of its armed forces. In both Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Syria,
royal women found them-selves in positions of leadership, garnering
a kind of power that would have never been available to women in
Athens and Sparta. With that power came the responsibility to lead
armies, to be a general. Women from Arsinoe II to Cleopatra VII
displayed their courage and garnered power in the tumult of political
turmoil. Ptolemaic queens such as Berenice II, Arsinoe III, and
Cleopatra III rallied troops and led them to victory. These women
and others exhibited the kind of bravery in both warfare and revenge
that was limited to men in Athens.
Daniel Ogden has convincingly argued that "amphimetric strife"
between contenders for the throne ultimately destabilized the Hellenistic
kingdoms.185
The
term amphimetor is defined by Hesychius (s.v. amphimetor) as "sharing
the same father, but not the same mother."186 Ogden defines
amphimetric strife as "disputes between the mother-and-children
groups" who fought for Hellenistic thrones.187 Polygamy, Ogden
asserts, lay at the root of amphi-metric, Hellenistic power struggles
between the sons of different wives of the deceased king.188 In
this chapter, I have expanded upon the idea of "amphi-metric
strife" by identifying both Olympias and Adea Eurydice as participants
in such conflict after Alexander's death.189 Furthermore, I have
confirmed that not all royal rivalry can be reduced to a pattern
of "amphimetric strife" alone. Full-sibling rivalry also
played its role, as the histories of Ptolemy IX and Ptolemy X illustrate
well. Powerful, courageous, warlike women, such as Cleopatra II
and HI, were at the center of such strife. Cleopatra III led
an army against one of her sons, Ptolemy IX, and defeated him (Josephus
Al 13.13.1-2). Ptolemy IX engaged in what might be best called
"metric" strife with his own mother, Cleopatra III, but
he could not stop her from playing kingmaker: she put his brother,
Ptolemy X, on the throne in his stead.
Berenice
II is another example of a warrior queen who played "kingmaker."
She succeeded in quelling rebellions and in wresting her dowry,
the Cyrenaica, from Demetrius the Fair and handing it to Ptolemy
III, a far better husband (and king). In the end, she ultimately
failed in handing the throne to her son Magas, however, and paid
the ultimate price, death, for favoring one son over another.
Whereas
the circumstances of warrior queens and nomadic "Amazons"
may have been different, they had one thing in common: a need to
defend themselves from enemies. The same could be said for kings.
Civilized
"Amazons": women bodyguards and hunters in ancient India
and Persia :
Women
bodyguards and hunters in ancient India and Persia :
Greeks
who came into contact with the ancient courts of India and Persia
commented not only on the seclusion of women in harems but also
on yet another custom that would seem strange to Greek ears: female
bodyguards and hunting companions of kings.' At the turn of the
fourth to third century BCE, a Greek ambassador named Megasthenes
was sent by Seleucus I Nicator to visit the court of his rival,
the great Indian emperor Chandragupta Maurya.2 Megasthenes recorded
what he saw in his Indica, preserved today only in fragments. In
particular, he noted that the Indian monarch was surrounded by armed
women who served as his intimate hunting companions:
The
care of the king's body is committed to women who have been purchased
from their fathers; outside the gates are male bodyguards and the
remaining army. A woman who kills the drunken king holds a position
of honor and consorts with his successor. Their children succeed
him. The king does not sleep during the day, and at night he is
forced to change beds periodically on account of the plots [against
him] ...
A
third [type of outing] is a Bacchic hunt, with a circle of women
surrounding [the Icing], and outside of them a circle of [male]
spear-bearers. The road is roped off and any man who passes inside
to the women is killed. The drumbeaters and bell carriers advance
[first]. The king hunts in enclosed areas shooting arrows.
Comparison
of Megasthenes' text to Sanskrit treatises and literature, ancient
Indian art/iconography, and a host of later documentation reveals
that South Asian monarchs were indeed guarded by women from at least
the Mauryan period until the nineteenth century. Likewise, Heracleides
(FGrIlist 689 F 1; c.350 aa) relates that the Achaemenid Persian
kings were also guarded by women "concu-bines."3 In both
cultures, the women bodyguards also hunted with the king.
In
this chapter, I will demonstrate that the custom of arming women
as bodyguards and hunting companions was not limited to ancient
India, but seems to have been a widespread Indo-Iranian practice."
I will also argue that women bodyguards were imported from Central
Asia, from the same places where Greek authors located Amazons and
other warlike women. After a detailed investigation of the ancient
evidence of Indian women bodyguards, I will turn to later descriptions
of royal life in the Indian subcontinent. I will use this evidence
to demonstrate the longevity of the custom of arming women as guards
of South Asian kings and queens, and also to attempt to fill in
the blanks of what we do not know about such customs in earlier
times. Finally, I will analyze evidence from Achaemenid Persia,
where the documentation is more fragmentary but nevertheless suggests
customs similar to those found in ancient India.
Marvelous
women in Megasthenes' Indica :
Megasthenes
presents the oldest extant account of an Indian king's female bodyguards.
Strabo (2.1.9=FGrHist 715 T 2c) tells us that Megasthenes was sent
as an ambassador to the court of Sandrakottos at Palimbrotha.5 San-drakottos
is a Greek variant of the Sanskrit Chandragupta, the powerful first
Greek visiting India such as Megasthenes. Strabo tells us about
the Sydracae who lived near the Indus river.
They
were apparently thought to be the "descendants of Dionysus"
by the Alexander historians, "judging from the vine in their
country and from their costly processions, since the kings not only
make their expeditions out of their country in Bacchic fashion,
but also accompany all other processions with a beating of drums
and with flowered robes, a custom which is also prevalent among
the rest of the Indians" (Strabo 15.1.8). As I will discuss
later in this chapter, the Indian king did model himself after gods.
Royal expeditions were held with pomp.
The
Roman-era author Quintus Curtius Rufus describes women accom-panying
an unnamed Indian maharaja (a contemporary of Alexander the Great)
hunting: "The hunt is [his] greatest exercise, in which he
shoots shut-in animals in a preserve among the prayers and songs
of his concubines" (8.9.28).13 We are left wondering if singing
would attract or scare off prey, but in an enclosed hunting ground
the animals did not stand much of a chance in either silence or
song. Curtius used Megasthenes, but also had other sources!' Curtius'
idea of a concubine may be flavored by his own cultural ideology
of gender.
Megasthenes
asserts that the king's women attendants were purchased from their
fathers (FGrHist 715 F 32). This statement is compatible with the
customs described in the Sanskrit Laws of Manu, wherein the groom
pays a price to the bride's family for her hand (8.204, 366, 369;
9.93, 97, ed. Olivelle).15 Traffic in women also involved the purchase
of girls to become servants, whose families would have most likely
been compensated with the equivalent of a bride price. Additionally,
the laws (7.125) prescribe that a king's minister should provide
a living to the women employed in the king's service.16
Women
guards in influential Sanskrit texts : from Kautilya's Arthshashtra
to Vatsyayana's Kama Sutra and beyond :
Megasthenes' description of women bodyguards in the Indian court
can be verified in ancient Sanskrit texts, including the Arthatastra
of Kautilya and the Kama Stitra of Vitsyiyana. Kautilya's Arthafastra
is a treatise on state man-agement. It is prescriptive in nature,
although some aspects of it may be viewed as descriptive.17 Kautilya
was familiar with the security system of monarchs contemporary to
his time, and relates anecdotes of kings who were killed by their
own wives or sons.
To
protect the king from plots against his life, Kautilya prescribes
that he be guarded "by women archers" [striganair dhanvibhily]
at night. Kautilya describes an elaborate system of security, which
is directly correlated to the king's reception in the morning: "Upon
rising from bed, he should be sur-rounded by female attendants armed
with bows [striganair dhanvibhih],in the second chamber by eunuch
clothiers and hairdressers, in the third chamber by humpbacks, dwarves,
and Kiratas, and in the fourth chamber by advisors, kinsmen, and
doorkeepers armed with lances" (Arthatastra 1.21.1, ed. Kangle).
Kautilya designates the task of guarding the king's body within
his inner chambers to women, not eunuchs. Although the Sanskrit
term labels the women as archers [dhanvibhih, instrumental plural
of dhanvij, they probably had daggers or some other kind of close-range
weapons as well.
One
of the extant Sanskrit manuscripts reads vandibhily or "bards,"
instead of dhanvibhih (1.21.1, ed. Kangle). This is probably a corruption,
but an interesting one. As mentioned above, women are noted as being
guards, bards, hunting companions, and concubines in Greek and Latin
texts describing India.
Here we see in the Sanskrit what may be the slip of a scribe, who
writes vandibhify, "by bards," instead of dhanvibhih or
"by archers." Perhaps the same women per-formed both duties.
A text of Heracleides (FGrHist 689 F 1) describes Persian concubines
as both guarding the Persian king and singing to him at night.18
Traditionally,
the Arthattistra has been dated to the reign of Chandragupta Maurya.
If this date is correct, the text would be contemporary with Megasthenes.
An Indian legend asserts that Kautilya was none other than the first
minister of Chandragupta Maurya.19 Furthermore, the author signs
each chapter "Kautilya," and ends the ArthaIastra with
a pronouncement that he overthrew the Nanda dynasty. The last
king of the Nanda dynasty was allegedly slain by Kautilya, who put
Chandragupta Maurya on the throne. The Vishnupurana (4.24) confirms
this story of Kautilya, who is also called Vishnugupta and Chanalcya.20
The
dating of Kautilya is controversial, however; scholars have recently
rejected the idea that the Arthakistra is a Mauryan text and instead
date it to the early centuries of the Common Era.21 Passages containing
information about foreign products, such as Alexandrian coral and
Chi'n silk, have been used to argue against an earlier date.22 T.
R. Trautmann has done extensive computer stylistic modeling on the
Arthailistra and has concluded from the variety of Sanskrit "potential
discriminators" (commonly used particles) that the text has
more than one author.23 Further, he asserts, "The Arthakistra
presumes the use of Sanskrit in royal edicts in any case, and Sanskrit
inscrip-tions do not become general in northern India until the
Gupta period" (4th-early 6th c. cs).24 At that time, the final
text was perhaps recensed by one individual from earlier texts.25
Most texts were altered when copied over, up until the Gupta period,
when standardization became more important.26 Thus the text contains
information that post-dates the Mauryan era. Although the text as
received is not contemporary to Megasthenes, the origin of its central
ideology probably dates back to at least Mauryan times.27
In
any event, women guards were part of an elaborate court system described
by Kautilya, which provided the king with everything he might need
from security to a top-end turban salon. There is no mention of
eunuchs holding or using weapons in Kautilya. Instead, the eunuchs
are described as kancuki-s and usnisi-s. Mitra translates these
terms as "grooms" and "hairdressers," respectively.
Likewise, Shamasastry renders these words as "presenter of
the king's head-dress" and "presenter of the king's turban."
A more literal rendering of the Sanskrit by Kangle describes the
eunuchs "as wearing jackets and turbans? Although Kangle's
translation is truer to the Sanskrit, the other translations of
the text make more sense, given the context. The second chamber
from the king's bedroom, the ctiatitharabhami, is de-scribed in
Sanskrit texts as the place where the king was dressed and his turban
fashioned.28 The king was richly groomed and jeweled by his eunuchs,
and his adornment was ritualized.
Hence, eunuchs were not necessarily guards in ancient India.
This may have been the case in Istanbul, but not in South Asia,
where women were the intimate bodyguards of the king. In the third
chamber, the king is surrounded by dwarves, humpbacks, and Kiratas,
or "wild mountain men." It has been suggested that these
characters would not have been attractive to the women of the palace,
and hence made "safe" guards who would not father illegitimate
children on the king's wives.29 Finally, the king is greeted in
the fourth chamber by ministers, relatives, and "doorkeepers
armed with lances." The spatial arrangements described by Kautilya
are more elaborate than those of Megasthenes. Of interest, however,
is that Megasthenes' sketch mirrors what Kautilya tells us: that
women guarded the king in the inner environs of the palace, while
male bodyguards/doorkeepers were stationed outside of the royal
apartments. Comparison to later evidence suggests that there
was a point in the royal apartments past which no man entered, not
even eunuchs.30
Hence,
women bodyguards were employed primarily to ward of other women
attackers, although any kind of danger could lurk within the inner
apartments. In tandem with Megasthenes, Kautilya (1.20, ed. Kangle)
describes the danger presented by queens, princes, and other relatives.
He writes:
When in the interior of the harem, the king shall see the queen
only when her personal purity is vouchsafed by an old maid-servant.
He shall not touch any woman (unless he is apprised of her personal
purity); for hidden in the queen's chamber, his own brother killed
Bhadrasena; hiding himself under the bed of his mother, the son
murdered king Kara§a; mixing fried rice with poison, as though
with honey, his own queen poisoned laiiraja; with an anklet painted
with poison, his own queen killed Vairantya; with a gem of her zone
bedaubed with poison, his own queen killed Souvira; with a looking-glass
painted with poison, his own Kautilya advises that all packages
coming and going in and out of the palace be thoroughly inspected,
that no one inside the palace be allowed to establish contact with
those outside, and that the inhabitants of the palace not be allowed
to move freely. All of these security precautions were protections
against plots designed to kill the king or overthrow him.
Queens
represented danger, and caution was to be employed in their presence.
Sons are described as equally untrustworthy, for princes could quickly
rebel against or assassinate their fathers to secure the throne
for themselves. The urgency of protection at home is stressed in
a section of the Arthatastra entitled "Protection from princes":
"A king can only protect his kingdom when he is protected from
his own enemies, first and foremost from his own wives and sons"
(1.17.1, ed. and trans. Kangle). Special attention needed to be
paid toward princes, for they, "like crabs," had "a
tendency of devouring their begetter" (1.17.5). It is advised
that those sons who lack in filial affection be punished secretly
(1.17.6).
An
Indian king was unsafe even with his own wives and sons. Women guards
were a necessary component of palace life.
Vatsyiyana,
the author of the Kama Sutra, also describes women guarding the
compartments of the royal queens and princesses. The Kama Sutra
was probably written in the third century CE, but is a compilation
of other, earlier works. Vatsrayana cites numerous ancient authors
to legitimize his text (e.g. 1.5.22-5, ed. Dvidevi).32 Vatsydyana
gives instructions for a male interloper to obtain access to the
harem, even though he acknowledges that such behavior is dangerous
and taboo. in so doing, he mentions the women in charge of the harem.
Part of the process of obtaining illicit access to the harem involves
befriending and tipping guards and others who worked in the female
apart-ments: "They (interlopers] are assisted in their entrance
and exits by the nurses and other harem women, who desire gifts"
(Kama Sutra 5.6.7, ed. Dvidevi).33 The Jayamangala commentary on
this passage, written around the twelfth century a by Yaiodhara,
provides further description: "In order to be let in among
the women of the harem and allowed out again, citizens distrib-ute
tips to the women guarding the entrance, who thus derive a profit
from their visits" (ed. Dvidevi).34 Vitsyiyana asserts that
it is wrong for a citizen to enter the harem, even though he provides
instructions on how to do so (5.6.6-48). Likewise, he establishes
that guarding the harem was serious work not to be taken lightly,
considering the penetrability of the inner chambers: "For these
reasons a man should guard his own wives. Scholars say: `Guards
stationed in the harem should be proved by the trial of desire.'
Gonikaputra says Tut fear or power may make them let the women use
another man; therefore guards should be proved pure by the trials
of desire, fear, and power'" (Kama Sutra 5.6.39-42).35 Kautilya
(1.10.1-20) describes various loyalty tests for ministers of the
king and notes that bodyguards must also be tested.36
The
Indian royal women's quarters, called the antahpura or strinivela
in Sanskrit, was a homosocial institution where women were generally
secluded from all men except their husband: For security reasons,
no one may enter the inner apartments. There is only one husband,
while the wives, who are often several, therefore remain unsatisfied.
This is why, in practice, they have to obtain satisfaction among
themselves. (Vitsyayana Kim Sutra 5.6.1)37
The
Kama Sutra further suggests women servants took on a masculine role
in sex with the secluded wives:
The nurse's daughter, female companions, and slaves, dressed as
men, take the men's place and use carrots, fruits, and other objects
to satisfy their desire. (5.6.2)38
Additionally,
"virile behavior in women" (purusayita) is also discussed
and prescribed by the Kama Sutra (2.8), the Jayamatigala commentary
on the Kama Sutra (2.8), and the approximately twelfth-century CE
Ratirahasya of Kokkoka, more popularly known as the Kokaiastra (9).
In the Mughal period, a seventeenth-century Persian translation
of the Sanskrit Kokalastra was illus-trated with a painting of a
woman holding a bow and arrow (see Fig. 6.1). At the tip of the
arrow, a dildo is poised to be inserted into another woman. Unfortu-nately,
this manuscript is now lost at the Bibliotheque nationale de France,
and the exact context of the illustration, photographed years ago,
is not known.39
This
scene may have illustrated the Purustlyita ("Virile behavior
in women") chapter of the Persian translation of the Kokagastra—this
would be the most fitting location for it. The earlier Sanskrit
version of the Kokalastra, the Ratir-ahasya, is extant and does
contain a chapter entitled Purusayita (9). Alex Comfort interprets
purusayita in the Kokakistra as the woman sitting on top of a man,
in the same manner that Burton's Victorian English translation of
the earlier Kama Sutra explains this behavior.40 There is a problematic
issue of agency with Burton's Victorian English rendition.41 A literal
translation of the Sanskrit reveals that purusayita in the Kama
Sutra refers to the use of an artifical phallus, with a woman taking
an active role in sex with both males and females.42 The intensity
of the sexual act illustrated here is mirrored in various descriptions
of purufayita in the Kama Sutra (2.8.25), particularly a practice
called "The Cruel" in which the dildo is "brutally
driven in" and "pressed forcefully" in and out for
a long period of time.
![](womenwithdildo.jpg)
The
woman shown in the illustration would appear to be a female guard
given her attributes of bow and arrow. She is dressed differently
than her more feminine counterpart. As such, she may be the type
of servant that Vatsyayana mentions as servicing women while dressed
as a man. In the Indian court, we see variation in female masculinities—some
women guards were potentially conceived of as "masculine"
due to their fighting abilities, others due to their sexual inclinations,
which could be used to satisfy queens or other harem women. Some
women might have been perceived as masculine for both of these reasons,
or have slipped from one category to another. As Halberstam argues
for the modern West, the material surveyed for precolonial India
calls for us "to think in fractal terms about gender geometries,"
and to "consider the various categories of sexual variation
for women as separate and distinct from the modern category of lesbian.43
The woman guard illustrated in the Persian Kokalastra might also
be labeled a "stone butch" who, "in her self-definition
as a non-feminine, sexually untouchable female, complicates the
idea that lesbians share female sexual practices or women share
female sexual desires or even that masculine women share a sense
of what animates their particular inasculinities.44 The main complication
with such a reading of the image, however, is that which plagues
all of the various female masculinities discussed in this book.
As Spivak argues for modem Indian women, these women are subaltern
and hence muted. The literary and artistic representations of them,
although made by male authors, nonetheless suggests a different
sexual climate in premodem India than that of the modem West. Whereas
our society is "committed to maintain-ing a binary gender system.
45 (even if such a system is ultimately challenged again and again),
what we see in precolonial India suggests more fluidity.
Halberstam
notes that "few popular renditions of female masculinity under-stand
the masculine woman as a historical fixture who has challenged gender
systems for at least two centuries."46 I have demonstrated
that female mascu-linity has existed for more than two millennia.
In the ca. 1st century CE Carakasarnhita (4.2.19, ed. Acharya) and
Suirulasarphita (3.2.43, ed. Acharya and Acharya) Sanskrit medical
texts, the narisandha [masculine lesbian] is described as the product
of either the mother taking an active, masculine role during procreation,
or of embryonic damage. Sweet and Zwilling note that, like the Western
Amazon, the masculine lesbian is further described as "breastless"
[astani] and "man-hating" [rydvesini] (Caraka sarphitti
6.30.34).
Women
bodyguards, goddesses of dawn : The Buddhist companions of the Sun
God Surya :
Depictions of masculine women, in particular women guards, are
found in ancient Buddhist artwork and texts as well. A relief on
a railing at Bodhgaya, India, where the Buddha delivered his first
sermon outlining the four noble producing "the greatest number
of sculptures illustrating the life of the Buddha.74 This evidence
is late, coming 500 or more years after the Buddha's death. Thus,
the representations of the antalipura [women's quarters] may tell
us more about the customs of the Kushan period than about those
contem-porary to the Buddha himself.
![](siddharth.jpg)
Fig.
6.4 Siddhartha's renunciation. Courtesy of the Department of Archaeology
and Museums, Government of Pakistan
Native versus Yavani :
A
Kushan-era statue from Gandhara may also represent a female guard,
who is dressed in native Indian (as opposed to Greek) dress and
is armed with both a spear and a shield (see Fig. 6.5).75 The statue
has been dated to the period of Kushan rule, sometime after 60 CE
but before c.110 CE. Like other representations of female guards,
the woman holds a spear. The shield she holds is more unusual, and
perhaps shows some influence coming from Bactria or another region
of Central Asia.76 This natively clad female warrior can be instructively
compared to another statue from the Gandhara region, thought to
be either a yavani [foreign/Ionian/Greek] female guard or a representation
of a warlike goddess, either Athena or Roma (see Fig. 6.6).77
The
Greek chiton and helmet are directly telling of the Hellenistic
influence found at Gandhara.78 Her left arm is broken off, but it
is thought that she once held a spear.79 The way in which the remaining
arm is raised is suggestive of this. The piece dates to c.50-150
CE.80 Although the helmet is considered by Ingholt to be an attribute
of a warrior goddess, Block argues that the sculpture represents
a female guard or yavani.81
The
term yavani refers to a stock character in Sanskrit drama who was
a palace attendant, not only assisting the king with weapons but
also hunting with hint In Kalidasa's sakuntula (c.4th-5th c. CE),
a woman called a yavani attends the king by carrying his bow and
arrow so that he may reach for it at attends the king by carrying
his bow and arrow so that he may reach for it at any time (act 2,
prelude, act 6) and in another drama, also by Kalidasa, the Vikramorvafiyam
(act 5) a yavani brings the king's bow to him.82 The Sanskrit term
yavani is a feminine variant of yavana or yona [Ionian or Greek],
but may actually refer to women of both Greek and other origins.
"The term Yavana [Greek] was gradually extended to include
not only the local Greeks, but any group coming from west Asia or
the eastern Mediterranean. Much the same was to happen to the term
saka-s with reference to central Asia, but
Refrences
of The Amazons , Orientalism and Amazons, Orientalism and Matriarchy
and Female Masculinity :
1 The ideology of male superiority is, ultimately, ideology, "not
statement of fact." Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives,
and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity, 2nd edn (New York: Schocken
Books, 1995), 97. On the contradiction between Greek gender ideology
and "some Greek narratives," see also Stella Georgoudi,
"To act, not submit: women's attitudes in situations of war
in ancient Greece," in Jacqueline Fabre-Serris and Alison Keith
(eds), Women and War in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2015), esp. 203-4.
2
See e.g. Fritz Graf, "Women, war, and warlike divinities,"
ZPE 55 (1984), 245-54; Jean Ducat, "La femme de Sparte et le
guerre," Pallas 51 (1999), 159-71; Pasi Loman, "No woman
no war: women's participation in ancient Greek warfare," Greece
Rome 51(1) (2004), esp. 36-8; Mauro Moggi, "Marpessa detta
Choira e Ares Gynaikothoinas," in Erik fostby (ed.), Ancient
Arcadia: Papers from the Third International Seminar on Ancient
Arcadia (Athens: Norwegian Institute at Athens, 2005), 139-50.
3 Themiscyra was situated near the mouth of the Thermodon river
on the south shore of the Black Sea near modern Terme, Turkey.
4 Isocrates (12.193) says that Hippolyte was the Amazon who fell
in love with Theseus, not Antiope (Hippolyte and Antiope seem to
be interchanged as the Amazon turned wife of Theseus). See further
It L. Fowler, Early Greek Mythography, vol. 2: Commentary (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013), 486; Adrienne Mayor, The Amazons:
Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 259-70.
5
The 9th-c. CE scholiast Theognotus, who writes "as in Callimachus,
'where the Amazon men are'," suggests that some authors may
have included men among the Amazons. Callimachus, Fragmenta (incertae
sedis) no. 721 (although elsewhere Callimachus uses the term Amazonides,
modified by the adjective epithumetherai, to obviously refer to
a group of women only (Hymn to Diana 237). Extant texts (e.g. Diodorus
2.45, 3.53) suggest that if males were thought to be part of an
"Amazon tribe" by Greeks, they were seen as submissive
to the women.
6
On 18th-c. and 19th-c. attempts to find an "historical core"
of the Amazon myth, see Josine H. Blok, The Early Amazons: Modern
and Ancient Perspectives on a Persistent Myth, trans. Peter Mason
(New York: E. J. Brill, 1995), esp. 21-143.
7
Although I made this comparison independently in a paper entitled
"Female masculinity plus: iron, Amazons, and Scythians"
presented at the Jan. 2014 American Historical Association Conference,
Adrienne Mayor, in a book published in Sept. 2014, also notes the
similarities in the Amazon and Scythian conquests. The Amazons,
269.
8 According to Mayor, "Amazons were Scythian women" (ibid.,
12).
9
Hellanicus (FGrHist 4 F 107) tells us that the Amazons cauterized
their breasts, whereas Hippocrates (Airs 17) tells us that the Sauromatian
women did so. Diodorus (2.45, 3.53) calls the Amazon ethnos gunaikokratoumenon
"ruled by women," whereas Ephorus (FGrHist 70 F 160) calls
the Sauromatians gunaikokratoumenoi.
10
H. A. Shapiro, "Amazons, Thracians, and Scythians," GRBS
24 (1983), esp. 105-10; Blok, The Early Amazons, 148, 216-17; Mayor,
The Amazons, 96-8.
11
See "Epic Amazons and Thracians" in Ch. 3.
12
On the usage of the term "Amazons" by archaeologists to
simply mean warrior women, see Askold Ivantchik, "Amazonen,
Skythen und Sauromaten: Alte unde moderne Mythen," in Charlotte
Schubert and Alexander Weiss (eds), Amazonen zwischen Griechen und
Skythen: Gegenbilder in Mythos und Geschichte (Berlin: de Gruyter,
2013), 73. Recent literature on this subject, and the debates entailed
therein, is discussed in "Archaeological evidence: Scythians,
Sauromatians, Thracians, and 'Amazons" in Ch. 2. Recent overviews
of the evidence are provided in English by K. Linduff and K S. Rubinson
(eds), Are All Warriors Male? Gender Roles on the Ancient Eurasian
Steppe (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2008) and Mayor, The Amazons,
64-83, as well as in German in the catalog Amazonen Geheimnisvolle
Kriegerinnen (Munich: Historisches Museum der Pfalz Speyer, Minerva,
2010).
13 Graves of warrior women in the Caucasus pre-date any known representation
of an Amazon in Greek art or literature by more than a century.
See "Amazons in Colchis" in Ch. 3. Cf. Askold lvantchik,
"Amazonen, Skythen und Sauromaten: alte und modern Mythen,"
in Charlotte Schubert and Alexander Weiss (eds), Amazonen zwischen
Griechen und Skythen: Gegenbilder in Mythos und Geschichte (Berlin:
de Gruyter, 2013), 73-87.
14
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York Vintage Books, 1979), 1.
15
Ibid., 5. 16 Ibid., 4. 17 E.g. Pithekoussai, Emporiai, Naucratis.
18 S On the dichotomy between masculine Greeks and effeminate barbarians
in Greek litera-ture, see Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek
Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989);
Page duBois, Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-history of
the Great Chain of Being (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1982), esp. 4, 86.
19
Theories of the "other" do not stem directly from postcolonial
theory, but have rather been appropriated from or at least have
a relationship to the 20th-c. "French school" of thought.
See further Beth Cohen, Introduction to Not the Classical Ideal:
Athens and the Construction of the Other in Greek Art (Leiden: B.
J. Brit 2000), 6-8. Said nevertheless "popularized the dialogue
of the other in America," according to Beth Cohen, "and
called specific attention to fifth-century B.C. Greece, and Classical
Athens in particular, as having first articulated the 'us' versus
'them' opposition of the West and the Orient." Cohen, Introduction,
8.
20
See further Dennis Porter, "Orientalism and its problems,"
in The Politics of Theory: Proceedings of the Essex Conference of
the Sociology of Literature, July 1982 (Colchester: Univer-sity
of Essex, 1983), esp. 181-2; Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism:
An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 389-92.
21
See further Peter Stewart, review of Beth Cohen (ed.), Not the Classical
Ideal: Athens and the Construction of the Other in Greek Art, BMCR
(2000.01.08), bmcr.brynmawr.edu/ 2001/2001-01-08.html, retrieved
May 26, 2014; Erich Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), esp. 1-5; Mac Sweeney, Foundation
Myths and Politics in Ancient Ionia (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), esp. 1-6, 129, 152-5, 198-203.
22 Robin Osborne, The History Written on the Classical Greek Body
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 130.
23 See e.g. Shelby Brown, ' ' 'Ways Of seeing' women in antiquity.
an introduction to feminism in classical antiquity and ancient art
history," in Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow and Claire Lyons (eds),
Naked Truths: Women, Sexuality, and Gender in Classical Art and
Archaeology (London: Routledge, 1997), 12—42; Irad Malkin,
Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1998), esp. 17—18; Cohen, Not the Classical
Ideal, 11; Irad Malkin, "Postcolonial concepts and ancient
Greek colonization," Modern Language Quar- teriy 65(3) (Sept.
2004), 341-64; Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity.
24
On the cultural differences among the Greeks, see Carol Dougherty
and Leslie Kurke, "Introduction: the cultures within Greek
culture," in Dougherty and Kurke (eds), The Cultures Within
Greek Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp.
1—2, 6—13; Carla Antonaccio, "Hybridity and the
cultures with Greek culture," in the same volume, 57-74; Malkin,
"Postcolonial concepts," 346.
25
Malkin, ibid., 343—6, discusses both the tendency Of Greeks
to engage in binary thought and the plurality of difference among
the Greeks themselves.
26
Lebedynsky suggests that the legend Ofthe Amamns may have been inspired
by Greek contact With the Cimmerians, yet another people of the
Eurasian steppes, around 640 NC". The Amazons are associated
with the Cimmerians in a late source, OrosiLLs (Adversus paganos
historrarum I _21-2), but there is no archaeological data to prove
the existence of warrior women among the Cimmerians at this time.
laroslav Lebedyn sky, Les A mazones: mythe et réalrté
desfemmes guerriéres chez les anciens nomades de steppe (Paris:
Errance, 2009), 13—14.
27
See the summary of scholarship on Amazons provided in Ch. 2.
28
Otto Brendel, personal communication to Larissa Bonfante. Larissa
Bonfante, "Classical and barbarian," in Bonfante (ed.),
The Barbarians of Ancient Europe: Realities and Interactions (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 201 1), 7, 25 n. 16.
29 Robert Dale parker, Introduction to Critical Theory: A Reader
for Literary and Cultural Studies (New York: Oxford University Press,
2012), 3.
30
E.g. Makin, "Postcolonial concepts"; Tamar Hodos, Local
Responses to Colonization in the Iron Age Mediterranean (London:
Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2006), esp. 11-12
31
Tamar Hodos, "Local and global perspectives in the study of
social and cultural identities," in Shelley Hales and Tamar
Hodos (eds), Material Culture and Social Identities in the Ancient
World (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 2010), 9, 23.
32
William Blake Tyrrell, Amazons: A Study in Athenian Mythmaking (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); Blok, Early Amazons, 133-4.
33 Susan Deacy, "Athena and the Amazons: mortal and immortal
femininity in Greek myth," in Alan B. Lloyd (ed.), What is
a God? Studies in the Nature of Greek Divinity (London: Duckworth/Classical
Press of Wales, 1997), 154-5.
34 "Female masculinity" is a term used by Judith Halberstam
to refer to the modern history and culture of "women who feel
themselves to be more masculine than feminine." Female Masculinity
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), xi.
35
See Chs 1 and 4.
36
Serena Nanda, Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations (Prospect
Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 2000), 7, citing Vern L. Bullough
and Bonnie Bullough, Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 46. See also Julia Serano,
The Whipping Girl: A Transsexual on Sexism and the Scapegoating
of Femininity (Emeryville, Calif.: Seal Press, 2007), esp. 5.
37 See further Halberstam, Female Masculinity, esp. 1-9,13-15.
38
Judith Butler asserts that "[w]hen the constructed status of
gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself
becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man
and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male
one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one."
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (repr. with
new preface, New York Routledge, 1999), 10.
39
See "Female masculinity, defiance, and loyalty: Electra and
Antigone" in Ch. 1.
deviance
as developed in the field of queer theory have tended to be ahistorical,
tied closely to modern, Western notions of gender dichotomy.40 There
is a strong historical component to gender, however, and the historian
of gender must account not just for linear change but also for numerous
other factors, including race, ethnicity, and class.41
Thus,
we must recognize that women who would have seemed "masculine"
to Athenians or other Greeks may not have seemed so to the locals
among whom they lived or over whom they ruled. Gender roles are
constituted uniquely in different contexts and periods, through
a repeated performance that "is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing
of a set of meanings already socially established.42 Such a set
of meanings is not constituted in the same manner at all times,
but changes as societies evolve, and varies among different societies
existing at the same time. Whereas the Athenians conceived of masculine
behavior and masculinity in women, their assessments were pro-duced
and reiterated in a society where strong binary oppositions were
drawn between men and women. This does not appear to have been the
case within some non-Greek and even some mixed Greek/barbarian societies.
The day-to-day needs of nomadic life fostered less of a gendered
division of labor than in Athens, and monarchical or tyrannical
governments in other Greek-ruled locations allowed elite women to
hold power that would have been impossible for women to attain at
Athens.
Halberstam
argues that "the challenge for new queer history has been,
and remains, to produce methodologies sensitive to historical change
but influ-enced by current theoretical preoccupations."43 The
commonly held mod-ern assumption that female masculinities "simply
represent early forms of lesbianism denies them their historical
specificity and covers over the multiple differences between earlier
forms of same-sex desire. Such a pre-sumption also funnels female
masculinity neatly into models of sexual deviance rather than accounting
for meanings of early female masculinity within the history of gender
definition and gender relations."44 There are many female masculinities,45
and those which we can recover from classical.
40 See Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 46. It is generally preferable
to speak of gender "variance" as opposed to "deviance,"
but when one is historicizing, deviance may better encap-sulate
the zeitgeist.
41
According to Butler, "gender is not always constituted coherently
or consistently in different historical contexts... gender intersects
with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively
constituted identities. As a result, it becomes impossible to separate
out `gender' from the political and cultural intersections in which
it is invariably produced and maintained." Gender Trouble,
6. See also Sarah B. Pomeroy, Spartan Women (New York Oxford University
Press, 2002), 131.
42
Butler, Gender Trouble, 178.
43
Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 45. " Ibid.
45
Ibid., 46, 57-9; See also Sheila Deasey, "After Halberstam:
subversion, female masculinity, and the subject of heterosexuality"
(Ph.D, University of Salford, 2010).
185
Ogden, Polygamy.
186
See A. H. Sommerstein, "Amphimitores," CQ 37 (1987), 498-500.
187
Ogden, Polygamy, X.
188
Ibid., esp. ix-xxv.
189
While Ogden mentions both Olympias and Adea Eurydice, he does not
discuss their direct rivalry with one another in detail, but rather
focuses on Olympias' hatred of Arrhidaeus. Ibid., 25.
Refrences
of Women
bodyguards and hunters in ancient India and Persia, Marvelous
women in Megasthenes' Indica, Women guards
in influential Sanskrit texts : from Kautilya's Arthshashtra to
Vatsyayana's Kama Sutra and beyond, Women
bodyguards, goddesses of dawn : The Buddhist companions of the Sun
God Surya and Native versus Yavani :
1.
Herodotus (3.69) comments on the seclusion of Persian royal women
under a particular regime. Just how shut-in Persian women were in
general is not entirely clear. See further Maria Brosius, Women
in Ancient Persia 559-331 sc (New York Oxford University Press,
1996), 83-93. When citing Megasthenes, Strabo (15.1.56) notes that
the customs of the Indians described by Megasthenes would seem nethia
[strange] to his audience.
2
See further Hartmut Scharfe, "The Maurya dynasty and the Seleucids,"
Zeitschrift far Vergleichende Sprachforschung 85(2) (1971), 216-17.
Klaus Kartunnen suggests that Mega-sthenes may have been sent by
Sibyrtius, the satrap of Arachosia, where Arrian (5.6.2) and Curtius
(9.10.20) tell us that Megasthenes lived. Klaus Karttunen, India
and the Hellenistic World (Helsinki: Finnish Oriental Society, 1997),
70.
From
a platform (two or three armed women stand beside him), and he also
hunts in open hunting grounds from an elephant; the women [also)
hunt, some from chariots, some on horses, and some on elephants
and, as when they join a military expedition, they practice with
all types of arms. (FGrHist 715 F 32)
3 Date derived from OCIY, 686.
4
Royal women bodyguards can be identified in Chinese and Thai courts
of the 19th c. as well. See further Guy Cadogan Rothery, The Amazons
in Antiquity and Modern Times (London: Francis Griffiths, 1910).
83-4. Women buried with weapons have been identified in the graves
of ancient Cambodia (lst-5th c. a). Noel Hidalgo Tan, "'Warrior
women' unearthed in Cambo-dia" (Yahoo News, Nov. 15, 2007),
southeastasianarchaeology.com/2007/11/15/war-rior-women-unearthed-in-cambodia,
retrieved Apr. 15, 2015. Further investigation of this phenomenon
in Fast Asian history could be fruitful.
5
Little is known about the life of Megasthenes. It has been assumed
on the basis of his name that he was of Greek origin. Arrian (5.6.2)
mentions his subordination to the Seleucid satrap of Arachosia,
Sibyrtius. Arachosia bordered on Mauryan dominions. See further
Karttunen, India and the Hellenistic World, 70-1.
13 The exact date of Curtius' composition of the Histories of Alexander
is unknown, but it is certain that he composed them after the reign
of the first emperor, Augustus. J. E. Atkinson assigns a terminus
post quem of 14 a and a terminus ante quem of 22617 CE for Curtius'
writings. Commentary on Q. Curtius Rufus' Historiae Alexandra Magni
Books 3 and 4 (Amster-dam: J. C. Gieben, 1980), 19-23.
14
Karttunen, India and the Hellenistic World, 73-4.
I5
Although the treatise of Manu at one point decries the taking of
a bride price as loathsome and tantamount to selling a daughter
into prostitution (3.51-4; 9.98-100), it also provides clear guidelines
for the taking of a bride price. In general, the laws attributed
to Manu are full of such contradictions, perhaps because they represent
a compilation of varying traditions. Wendy Doniger with Brian K.
Smith, introduction to The Laws of Manic With an Introduction and
Notes (London: Penguin Books, 1991), xliv-Iii.
16
The Laws of Manu is a compendium of Hindu thought that was a principal
text of the religion by at least the early centuries of the common
era. See further Doniger and Smith, intro. to The Laws of Mona,
xvii. ]
17 Kumkum Roy, "The king's household: structure and space in
the Sistric tradition," in Kunikum Sangari and Uma Chakravarti
(eds), From Myths to Markets: Essays on Gender (New Delhi: Manohar,
2001), 20.
18
See 'Female guards, hunting companions, and concubines in Achaemenid
Persia" in this chapter.
19
See further S. R. Goyal, Kautilya and Megasthenes (New Delhi: Kusumanjali
Prakashan, 1985), esp. 1-4.
20 Preface to It Shamasastry, Kautilya's Arthaiastra (Mysore: Mysore
Printing & Publishing House, 1915), esp. vii-ix; d T. Burrow
“CaMakya and Kautilya; Annals of the Bhandakar Oriental Research
Institute 47-9 (1968), 17-31. Burrow argues that Kautalya (a variant
spelling of Kautilya) and Canakya should be distinguished.
21 Karttunen, India in Early Greek Literature, 146-7; India and
the Hellenistic World, 13; Goyal, Kautilya and Megasthenes: A. A.
Vigasin and A. M. Samozvantsev, Society, State, and Law in Ancient
India (New Delhi: Sterling, 1985), 1-27; R. P. Kangle, The Kautiliya
Arthatastra, pt 3: A Study (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986), 59-115.
22
Karttunen, India in Early Greek Literature, 146-7; India and the
Hellenistic World, 13; Romila Thapar, Atoka and the Decline of the
Mauryas: With a New Afterword, Bibliography and Index, rev. edn
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).
23
Thomas R. Trautman, Kautilya and the Arthaiastra: A Statistical
Investigation of the Authorship and Evolution of the Text (Leiden:
E. ). Brill, 1971), esp. 83-130,186-7. See also Thapar, Atoka and
the Decline of the Mauryas, 292-3.
24
Trauttnann, Kautfiya and the Arthedastm, 5, citing 0. Stein, "Versuch
einer Analyse des lasanadhikara," Zeitschrift fiir Indologie
and Iranistik 6 (1928), 45-71.
25
Trautmann, Kautilya and the Arthaastra, 186-7. On the dates of the
Gupta period, see Thapar, Early India, xiii-xv, 280-7.
26
See Thapar, Atoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, 294-5.
27
Ibid., 218-25.
28 Ali, Courtly Culture, 166.
29
Mid. Dwarves, like women bodyguards, are shown in the company of
the god Surya on a relief from Niyamatpur. Two "female figures
on either side" shooting arrows are among the "essential
features of the common variety of North Indian Sun icons."
Jitendra Nath Banerjea, "Surya," JISOA 16 (1948), 62-3.
See "Women bodyguards, goddesses of dawn: the Buddhist companions
of the sun god Surya" in this chapter.
30
See "Domingo Paes in south India' in this chapter.
31
Queen killed Jalutha; and with a weapon hidden under her tuft of
hair, his own queen slew Viduratha.
31 ' Based upon the translation of Kangle.
32
On the date of the Kanto Sutra, see Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar,
introduction to Kama Sutra: A New Translation (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), xi.
33
Based upon the translation by Alain Danielou, found in The Complete
Kama Satra, 378.
34
Ibid.
35 Based upon the translation of Doniger and Kakar.
36
See further Doniger and Kakar, Kama Sutra, 205-6, note on 5.6.41.
37
Based upon the translation of Danielou.
38
Translation Danielou.
39
Image derived from James Saslow, Pictures and Passions: A History
of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts (New York: Viking Press, 1999),
125. I am grateful to Dr Saslow for his explanation of the history
of this illustration and the lost manuscript, as well as to the
staff of the Bibliotheque nationale de France, Departement des manuscrits
orientaux, for their assistance in this matter. The manuscript has
been missing since 1984.
40 Kokkoka, 77w Illustrated Koka Shastra: being the Retirahasya
of Kokkoka and other Medieval Writings on Love, trans. Alex Comfort,
preface by W. G. Archer, 2nd edn (London: Mitchell Reazley, 1997),
101.
41
Ruth Vanita, "Vatsyayana's Kama Sutra," in Vanita and
Saleem Kidwai (eds), Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature
and History (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 48-50.
42
The layamaigala commentary reinforces this reading, and also prescribes
the use of the hand for the masculine woman, the svairini, to penetrate
the other woman (2.9.19).
43 Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1998), 21, 57. 44 Ibid., 21. 45 aid., 27. 46 Ibid., 45.
74 Karetzky, The Life of the Buddha, second page of intro.
75 The piece is now housed in the Peshawar Museum, but its exact
provenance is not known. Sir John Marshall, The Buddhist Art of
Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, Its Birth, Growth, and
Decline (Cambridge: University Press for Dept. of Archaeology in
Pakistan, 1960), 40, 47, pl. 41, fig. 64.
76
Ibid., 40-47.
77
Ingholt, Gandluiran Art in Pakistan, 168-9, pl. 443.
78
Western influence in Gandharan art is variously interpreted as directly
Greek, Hellenistic via Bactria, or Roman. See further Shashi Asthana
with Bhogendra Jha, Gandluira Sculptures of Bharat Kala Bhavan (Varanasi:
Bharat Kala Bhavan, Banaras Hindu University, 1999), 1-5; Ingholt,
Gandharan Art in Pakistan, 168-9.
79
Ibid., 168.
80
Benjamin Rowland, Jr, "A revised chronology of Gandharan sculpture,"
Art Bulletin 18 (1936), 392 n. 24.
81
Ingholt, Gandharan Art in Pakistan, 168-9, no. 443; T. Block. A
List of the Photographic Negatives of Indian Antiquities in the
Collection of the Indian Museum (Calcutta: Government Printing,
1900). 50, no. 1195.
82
Karttunen, India and the Hellenistic World, 91, no. 108.