Imagining the Other: Amazons and Ethnicity in Fifth-Century Athens

Imag(in)ing the Other: Amazons and Ethnicity in Fifth-Century AthensAuthor(s): Andrew StewartSource: Poetics Today, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Winter, 1995), pp. 571-597Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773366Accessed: 19/12/2009 07:07

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Imag(in)ing the Other: Amazons and Ethnicity in Fifth-Century Athens

Andrew Stewart History of Art, UC, Berkeley

Abstract In this paper, I reconsider the polysemic figure of the Amazon in Greek art, thought, and society during the period circa 750-400 B.C.E., with particular attention to her role as a gendered figuration of the Other. After briefly tracing the development of Amazon scholarship from Bachofen (1861) to the

present, and the evolution of the Amazon legend in Greek literature and art from Homer through the Persian Wars, I turn to the Amazons' most distinctive, yet often overlooked, characteristic: their status as parthenoi or unwed females. Wild and unrestrained, they offered a perfect metaphor for the Persian enemy, enabling the Athenians to relegate the "barbarian" Other to the role of moral and social inferior without diminishing their own achievement. Finally, I consider the steep increase in Amazon pictures on Attic vases circa 450 and their accompanying changes in iconography. I suggest that they may be a response to the immigration crisis of the 450s that prompted Perikles' ultrarestrictive Citi- zenship Law of 451. If so, it would be the first time that Amazons were used to stand for other Greeks, and this possibility enriches our understanding of the central role played by Athenian racial superiority in the imperalist ideology of the Periklean state.

The following essay is a revised version of a paper presented at Tel Aviv University onJanuary 18, 1994, in the context of a conference sponsored by the Moshe Dayan Center and entitled "Knowledge, Power, and Society: Scholarship and Modes of In- terpretation." I am most grateful to Professor Sally Humphries and Dr. Asher Susser for their invitation to speak, to the faculty and staff of the center for their hospitality and kindness during my visit, and to Professor Meir Sternberg for his invitation to publish the essay in Poetics Today.

Poetics Today 16:4 (Winter 1995). Copyright ? 1996 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/95/$2.50.

572 Poetics Today 16:4

In the twentieth century, Amazons usually get a bad press. Every man knows (or thinks he knows) what one looks like and what she represents. Big, busty, butch, and bad-tempered, she challenges his ego on every front. Yet this image is peculiarly modern; in ancient Greece, an Amazon was young, trim, sexy, and by no means necessarily an implacable man- hater. From the eighth century B.C.E., she occupied a central place in Greek thought about the Other. Being female, "antimale" (an ambiguous term, as will appear), and a non-Greek "barbarian," she was certainly well placed to fill this role. In her, Greek ideas about polis and barba- rism, ethnicity and gender, and knowledge and power coalesce, fracture, and recombine in ways that are often revealing, sometimes unexpected, and always stimulating. But this is a vast subject, so I want to begin with the problem of who the Amazons were and what they stood for and then move on to what became of them in fifth-century Athens.

The Question

Why did the Greeks need Amazons? What could the Amazons say about otherness that Trojans, Giants, and the rest could not? What conceptual niche, in other words, did they fill? Scholars have often tended either to take them for granted, as a given (e.g., Bothmer 1957); or to explain them in isolation, as fossils of ancient matriarchies (Bachofen 1861) or Freudian figurations of Greek complexes about their mothers (Slater 1968); or to reduce them to one-dimensional antitypes of the Greeks

(Castriota 1992). One might label these three approaches the desexual-

ized, the hypersexualized, and the dichotomized. The first ignores the role of gender in Greek society, the second theorizes it in unaccept- ably anachronistic terms, and the third polarizes (and politicizes) it in a

crudely reductive way. J. J. Bachofen (1861), who made the first serious attempt to probe

the meaning of the Amazon myth, regarded it as a relic of prehistoric matriarchy. Though he grudgingly acknowledged the benefits of this pri- mal state of affairs (peace, for one), his verdict upon it was unequivocal: when women rule, the spirit remains earthbound. "The triumph of patriarchy brings with it the liberation of the spirit from the manifestations of nature, a sublimation of human existence over the laws of material life" (Bachofen 1967 [1861]: 109). Picked up by Engels (1884), Bach- ofen's thesis soon became extremely influential, and his negative judg- ments upon it were often radically reversed; Marxists, feminists, Freudi-

ans, Jungians, and latter-day devotees of the Goddess all swallowed the notion with gusto (Wesel 1980). Many still do, even though we now know that the concrete historical value of the ancient testimonia on matri-

archy is precisely nil (Pembroke 1967). For example, Bachofen's theory that the inexorable advance of patriarchy roused the priestesses of the Goddess to become warrior Amazons has survived unscathed (Bachofen

Stewart * Imag(in)ing the Other 573

1967 [1861]: 106; Graves 1955, 1:355; Stone 1976; Kirk 1987). Not sur- prisingly, orthodox Marxist historiography subscribed to this idea, too (Kanter 1926; Thomson 1961 [1949]: 180-83).

Early-twentieth-century scholarship, uneasy about Bachofen's thesis, produced three new answers, which for convenience one might call the positivist, the political, and the psychoanalytic. Walther Leonhard (1911) was the first to propose a positivist reading. In his view, the Amazons were actually a Greek reminiscence of clashes with the beardless Hittites or, according to a recent version with unpleasantly racist overtones, with "a beardless, small-statured race of bow-toting mongoloids" (Bisset 1971; cf. Zografou 1972). Exactly who these mysterious bow-toting mongoloids were is not specified. The Athenian politicization of the Amazons was most carefully spelled out by Roger Hinks (1939). Arguing that they "preferred to conceal [their] memory of the great ordeal of Marathon and Thermopylae and Salamis" through the "mythical transposition of historical episodes," he saw the great fifth-century Amazonomachies as illustrating a "symbolic situation" set up by the Persian invasions. They represent the "moral conflict of which the political clash is the outward and contingent expression" (ibid.: 65).

Amazon psychology, dominated by the Freudians, soon attained as- tonishing precision. Schultz Engle (1942) thought the Amazons were driven to fighting by the impotence of their Skythian menfolk, whose hours in the saddle had given them orchitis; although she wrote her paper in the Midwest, she had evidently never encountered a cowboy, let alone a Turkoman or a Kirghiz. In her view, the Amazons derived mas- turbatory satisfaction from riding (the horse being a phallus substitute), while the Greek campaigns against them were motivated by castration anxiety, as manifested in the myths of Herakles and Omphale, and of Achilles among the maidens. More recently, Philip Slater (1968: 393) viewed them as a projection of Athenian sex antagonism, of the general "misogyny of Athenian thought," concluding that the myth "primarily describes an event in the emotional life of each male child."

Slater's contemporaries were the structuralists of the Paris school and the more sophisticated feminists. Though he shows no sign of having read them, some of his ideas roughly coincide with theirs. For the scholarship of the sixties and seventies achieved a rare consensus con- cerning the Amazons. It was generally agreed, first, that Amazonian society was a mirror image of the Greek polis, and second, that the specter (already raised in the fifth century B.C.E.) of a gynaikokrateia or "female tyranny" was also used to figure Greek notions about barbarian despotism, particularly during and after the Persian Wars (Vidal-Naquet 1986 [1970]; Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988 [1972]; Carlier-Detienne 1980-81; Merck 1978). At this point the classical archaeologists rejoined the fray. Using Dietrich von Bothmer's (1957) comprehensive catalog


of Amazon scenes in Greek art, they attempted to reconstruct the lost Amazon frescoes of Mikon, commissioned after the Persian Wars, and to interpret the many Amazonomachies in extant Athenian fifth-century art (see Appendix) as direct reflections of the victories of 490 and 480-479.

Naturally, each group had its own agenda. The archaeologists were (and still are) less concerned with ideology than with iconography and chronology and with matching (or disconnecting) event and representation (Barron 1972; Devambez and Kauffmann-Samaras 1981; Boardman 1983; Castriota 1992). The structuralists took their cue fromJean-Pierre Vernant's aphorism that in Greek society, marriage was for women what war was for men (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988 [1972]: 99; cf. Vidal- Naquet 1986 [1970]: 205-23). They argued that Amazon society was the inverse of the polis, "the Greek men's club," and particularly of its quintessential manifestation, fifth-century Athens. To this way of thinking, the Greeks used matriarchy as a tool for conceptualizing, explaining, and validating the polis's customs, institutions, and values by postulat- ing their opposites and revealing them as absurd (see Tyrrell 1984: 28). The feminists agreed, but to them matriarchy became a weapon in the feminist struggle, a useful means to attack and eventually destroy the masculinist tyranny (Merck 1978; cf. duBois 1982; Keuls 1985: 44-47; Kirk 1987). Yet as some critics have recognized (e.g., Carlier-Detienne 1980-81: 30; Lefkowitz 1986: 17-29), this feminist appropriation of the

myth has succeeded only by doing considerable violence to it.

Critiquing Bachofen, his feminist followers, and the structuralists, Mary Lefkowitz (1986: 26-27) finds the notion that Amazons express male anxieties about Athenian patriarchalism to be oversimplified. She

points out that the myths are centuries older than the Athenian ideal of sex segregation, that men suffered as much as women from the Amazon invasions, and that the Greek habit of paralleling them with the Centaurs (duBois 1982) undermines rather than strengthens the feminist thesis. For if the Amazonomachy advocates the suppression of women, then the

Centauromachy must advocate the suppression of horses; but the Greeks valued horses highly and treated them extremely well. Instead, the myth was a warning to "loners," those who withdraw from or reject ordinary society. It proclaimed that they are dangerous to it and to themselves.

Furthermore, Stewart Flory and Francois Hartog have objected that Herodotos exhibits no trace of hostility toward the Amazons. Flory (1987: 108-13) argues that for him they are a variant of the noble savage motif or a kind of wry joke; Hartog (1988: 216-24), that he is using them to make a complicated point about the otherness of the Skyths. And Froma Zeitlin (1986: 135-36) complains of "a certain pallid and complacent reductiveness that accompanies the now canonical explanations of the structures and functions of the [Amazon] myth that end in the message, 'women must marry,' or 'the social order must reassert the principle of


male dominance on which it is founded.'" She stresses how "the Ama- zon continually complicates the issue of male dominance," and wonders whether Theseus's abduction myth "may have more to tell us about the violence inherent in sexuality and marriage and about the nature of the feminine response to the violation of its body's boundaries" (ibid.). Ad- dressing these and other issues, Lorna Hardwick (1990) traces several stages of development in the Amazon myth, correctly noting that they were by no means consistently portrayed as hostile to men and that the archaic and classical Greeks, far from denigrating them, cleverly used their formidable prowess in battle to enhance their own status as victors.

The latest synthesis, by David Castriota (1992), pays little heed to these warnings. Drawing upon the work of the sixties and seventies, he inte- grates it with the views ofJ. J. Pollitt (1974: 184-89) and others on the ethical agenda of fifth-century painting. The evidence for this agenda consists of the statements of Aristotle and others that Polygnotos was an agathos ethographos, a "good painter of character" (Poet, 6, 1450a24; Pol. 8.5.7, 1340a35), and of the Greek belief that painting of this kind could mold people through the ethical lessons it expressed-what Robert Sut- ton (1992: 6) has aptly called the Peitho model of art. In Castriota's (1992: 12) view, classical Athenian rhetoric reduced "the complex reali- ties and potential contradictions of fifth-century history ... to a series of binary oppositions--to the victory of justice and law against aggressive violence and disorder, and to the putative superiority of the Hellenic ethos over that of foreigners, who are compared disparagingly to women and wild animals." In Mikon's Theseion frescoes of the 460s, for example, "the opposition between the righteous, heroic Greek ethos and the inferior character of a criminal enemy began to emerge as a source of unity for an extended display of myth" (ibid.: 58). Though there is some truth to all this, it hardly does justice to the complexities and ambi- guities of either the Amazon tradition or its various transformations in fifth-century Athens.

John Henderson (1993) has recently addressed some of these ambi- guities in a postmodernist reading of Amazon pictures on four archaic and classical Athenian vases. Both indebted to and critical of the struc- turalist and feminist theses discussed above, but too complex, allusive, and deliberately quirky to be summarized here, his argument concludes that "if the Amazon is the counterpart of the Man, if she is what secures his prestige, then she makes him mean differently, she persistently threat- ens to return as the repressed but necessary victim and so invades his security ... [inhabiting] an ambience and a representational regime to go with it which could only celebrate the plurality, lability and recursive- ness of the repressed .... These are no 'Images of the Other,' but 'Our Likenesses.' The feared, abjected, Legacies of 'Greece'" (ibid.: 137).

Finally, excavation of a series of kurgan or "mound" burials at Pokrovka


in Russian Central Asia (between the Caspian and Aral Seas) should add new fuel to the debate about whether Amazons ever existed--or, more accurately, whether Herodotos's account of them (4.110-17) has any basis in fact. Attributed to the Sarmatian and/or Sauromatian cultures, rich in gold and other finds, and dating from the sixth to the fourth centuries B.C.E., these burials included many females, some of whom were furnished with bows and numerous arrows, of which only the arrowheads have survived (Davis-Kimball, Yablonsky, and Bashilov 1995).1

The Tradition: From Homer to the Persian Wars What did the Greeks feel, think, say, and do about the Amazons? Roughly speaking, the history of the legend before 400 B.C.E. divides into four

phases: the Homeric, the Archaic, the Persian War period, and the Peri- klean. This section sketches the first two.

Homer calls the Amazons antianeirai or "antimen" (an ambiguous term, since anti- can mean either "opposite to" or "antagonistic to"; cf. Drew-Bear 1972). Using their reputation as formidable fighters to enhance the prestige of Priam and Bellerophon, he relates only that the former fought them in Phrygia and that the latter slaughtered them in

Lykia (II. 3.182-90, 6.171-86).2 In this way Homer also establishes them as liminal figures, living somewhat beyond the outskirts of the Greek world: not the girls next door but the girls on the next block but one. Thenceforth, as that world expanded, they withdrew; fleeing from Her- akles, they settled in the Crimea, and Alexander the Great had to go to Tajikistan to find them (Aesch. PV 415-19; Hdt. 4.110; Plut. Alex. 46; etc.).

Homer mentions no direct Amazon participation in the Trojan War; this would have both contradicted the tradition of Priam's animosity to Amazons and violated his own principle of never referring to events that

happened after the end of his poem, with the exception of the death of Achilles, already predicted by the gods (II. 9.410-17). This left his supposed pupil Arktinos of Miletos to fill the lacuna. Arktinos began his

Aithiopis (a continuation of the Iliad, allegedly composed around 700) with the story of the Amazon Penthesileia. Only the first two lines and a few other miserable scraps of the poem remain, but thanks to the

Byzantine scholar Proclus, the plot's outline survives. It begins as follows: "The Amazon Penthesileia, daughter of Ares and a Thracian by birth, arrives to aid the Trojans in war. As she is fighting valorously Achilles kills her and the Trojans bury her. Achilles kills Thersites for slandering him and carping at his alleged love for her; whence there is a division

1. This information has been kindly supplied byJeannine Davis-Kimball. 2. All citations from Greek and Roman literature follow the format of the Oxford ClassicalDictionary; these works are not listed in the references at the end of this essay.


among the Greeks about the murder of Thersites" (Chrestomathia p. 105, 20-28 Allen).

Made suddenly topical by the Kimmerian invasion of Ionia, the theme of Penthesileia's arrival and death soon appeared in pictorial form. A votive shield from Tiryns, made around 675, is the earliest example;3 some have even sought to read the motif of the doomed romance into these images, but they are usually ambiguous, as is Proclus. The im- portant point is that Arktinos built male desire for the Amazons into his poem, and this innovation stuck. As for the Amazons' own desires, Herodotos (4.110-17) and Hippokrates (Airs, Waters, Places 17), our two most informative fifth-century sources, give many details about their interest in the men who trespass into their territory and their romances and marriages with them. Slightly later, Hellanikos (FGH 323a F 17c) even calls them "man-loving." So much for the notion that the Amazons were always implacably hostile to men.

But this is to anticipate. The next hero to encounter the Amazons was Herakles, who attacked them in their home territory on the Black Sea coast (Pind. fr. 172 Snell; Pherekydes, FGH 3 F 15; Eur. HF 408-18; Ion 1144-45). Attic vase painters took up this theme around 570, quite suddenly and without apparent precedent, though in this period the bulk of the scenes appear on the so-called Tyrrhenian vases, which were found in Italy and were probably made specifically for export (cf. Henderson 1993: 98-113).

Soon another now-lost epic, the Theseis, added Theseus to the Ama- zons' tormentors. Attempting to boost the Athenian national hero to a position of equality with the panhellenic Herakles, it gave him his own set of labors and much else, an Amazon expedition included. The Amazons, it alleged, first received him with courtesy and friendship, but he repaid them by raping their queen, Antiope, though he did subse- quently marry her (Plut. Thes. 26-28; cf. Pind. fr. 175 Snell; Pherekydes, FGH 3 F 151-53). Since in Attic vase painting his deeds increase dra- matically in number and variety around 520-510 and now include the rape (though this episode never attains wide popularity; see Appendix), it is often argued that they reflect this poem's first performance, either under the tyrant Hippias (527-510) or under the fledgling democracy of Kleisthenes (archon in 508).

This expansion of the Amazon myth coincides with the Persian con- quest of Lydia (547), Ionia (ca. 540), Thrace (512), and Macedonia (by 500) and with the simultaneous extension of Athenian interests to the

3. Representations of Amazons in archaic and classical Greek art are conveniently collected in Bothmer 1957 and (less comprehensively) in Devambez and Kauffmann- Samaras 1981; those illustrated in this essay are individually referenced in the cap- tions.


northern Aegean, the Dardanelles, and the Black Sea. As already remarked, it also coincides with the fall of the Peisistratid tyranny in 510 and the beginnings of Athenian democracy: the quintessence of the Greek men's club. Henceforth, under the slogan isonomia (equality of

rights), the city becomes a signifying space where decisions are placed "in the midst" (to use a contemporary formula that is closely linked with isonomia) and all citizens--all adult males, that is--have relations with it that are both symmetrical and reversible (Hdt. 3.80, 142; Vernant 1988 [1974]: 92; Fornara and Samons 1991: 166). As not-males but definitely people "of the city," women fit into this space in a most awkward way.

It is hardly surprising, then, to find late-sixth-century Athens suddenly awash with images of women: courtships, abductions, explicit erotica, courtesans, maenads, the Akropolis korai, and, of course, Amazons (see Appendix). These images, and hundreds more like them, signal many things about their male patrons and public: curiosity, anxiety, desire, pride in possession, the need to control, and sheer brute macho sexism, to name but a few. Not a few of them share a common denominator: the fact that the women in them are oblivious to or heedless of what one

may call the "world's eye," the censorious gaze of men. Their combined

significance, however, is clear: by around 500, Athenians were vigorously scrutinizing the proper place of women in their reorganized city.

Amazons occupied a special place in this discourse. Far from being "in the midst," their society was at the margins: geographically and socially a liminal place, the inverse of the polis. Yet obsessed with structural- ist polarities, ancient matriarchies, psychoanalytic diagnoses, or feminist

political agendas, most discussions of it seem to have overlooked the Amazons' most distinctive characteristic. Aischylos (PV 416), Hippok- rates (Airs, Waters, Places 17), and Herodotos (4.114, 117) all call them

parthenoi or "unwed girls," and the last of these writers makes them de- clare, "We are archers, javelineers, and riders-we have not learnt the works of women." This does not mean that they were virgins in the tech- nical sense of virgo intacta. For since the Greeks denied the existence of the hymen (Sissa 1990), they had no means of telling whether a girl was

virgin in our sense or not. And in a traditional Mediterranean society, then as now, this meant a lot of lost sleep for her parents.

Adolescents Abroad

Parthenoi, then, are nubile young women who have had no open sexual

relationship with a man. Their sexuality, or lack of it, is socially constructed, in that they are officially presexual beings, defined by public knowledge of their virginity. In this respect, as in others, Greek notions of sexuality are not congruent with our own and should not be conflated with them. To quote Anne Carson (1990: 144), "Greek women have no

prime, only a season of unripe virginity followed by a season of over-


ripe maturity, with the moment of defloration as the dividing line." So

parthenoi represent femininity in its unripe, unfinished state. They are adolescents who have not been tamed by marriage and the offspring- producing "work" of conjugal sex with a husband (Xen. Oec. 7.10; Mem. 2.1.11; P1. Ti. 44a-b; Leg. 2, 653d-e; etc.).

As anyone who has a teenage daughter knows, this is a very dangerous time indeed. Imagine how anxious it must have made the Greeks -anxious enough to characterize their own daughters as little less than wild animals lusting after the life of Artemis (Hom. II. 21.471; Pind. Pyth. 9.6; Xen. Cyr. 6.13; etc.) and to marry them off as soon as they possibly could, often by the age of fourteen. In his law code of 592, Solon even man- dated that a father or brother could sell into slavery a parthenos (daughter or sister) caught in bed with a man (Plut. Sol. 23), the only occasion when a free Athenian could be so treated. For since transgressions of this kind struck at the very heart of society, overturning the normal order of

things and insinuating bastards into the body politic, her guardian could

literally treat her as a foreign body. Instead of giving her away with a

dowry to a legitimate husband, he could sell her like a human object, for

profit. Her seducer was said to have "destroyed" her, and any children she might have were called skotioi, "darklings" (Pollux 3.21); for what is hidden does not exist, and revelation spells disaster.

Even the bodies of parthenoi were different, much more like those of boys than of women (cf. Hippokrates, Genit. 2 [VII.472-74L]; Arist. Gen. An. 1.20, 728a17-22, 728b22-33; 2.3, 737a25-30; ps.-Arist. HA 7.1, 581a9-b12). Not yet truly feminine (soft, moist, and permeable), they were not properly masculine (hard, muscular, and sharply defined), either. Adolescent girls with this physique are to be found on the splendid bronze mirrors of sixth-century Sparta (where, like the males, they apparently exercised in the nude, but for eugenic reasons) and on the modest but fascinating fifth-century vases used in the Athenian festi- val of Artemis Brauronia (see, respectively, Scanlon 1988; Kahil 1983). Indeed, one wonders if the name A-mazon or "breastless" originally re- ferred not to some obscene self-mutilation, as asserted by Hippokrates (Airs, Waters, Places 17) and repeated countless times since, but to the sexual unripeness of the nubile adolescent. In fact, this alleged auto- mastectomy is never shown in ancient art, less because Greek and Roman artists regarded the human body's integrity as sacrosanct than because to represent it would destroy one of the Amazon's most potent characteristics: her sexual allure. In contrast to the modern image of the Amazon- big, busty, and butch -in classical Greek art they are always young, slim, and strikingly beautiful (Figures 1, 4-5, 9; cf. Kirk 1987: 33-36).

So until they marry and lay aside their weapons, Amazons are un- ruly teenagers: unripe, undeveloped, undomesticated, and unrestrained. Living beyond the confines of polis society, they mate with men at their


own convenience and pleasure and maim or kill the male infants born of these promiscuous liaisons (Hippokrates, Articulations 53; Hellanikos, FGH 323a F 17c). Far from the demure virginity prescribed by law and custom, their sexual life is a continual series of flagrantly public one- night stands. In this way they represent not only the threat that every adolescent girl poses to her father's authority and to the stability of the family, but the lure of forbidden fruit as well.

An anonymous Attic artist, the "Andokides" Painter, made their sexu-

ally ambivalent and socially liminal status (cf. Carson 1990; Sissa 1990) explicit as early as around 520; on an amphora of his in the Louvre, Ama- zons are arming on one side, while adolescent girls are exercising and

swimming on the other (Figures 1-2). We know that the latter are true

parthenoi because the Greeks believed that false ones drowned (Paus. 10.19.2); as in medieval Europe, water, the purest of liquids, is the litmus test of feminine purity. But once an Amazon passed the test of killing a man in battle (three men, according to Hippokrates) and decided to

marry, then she no longer rode, shot, or hunted unless compelled to

by a general mobilization. No longer a parthenos, she turned at last to women's work at the side of her chosen man (Hdt. 4.117; Airs, Waters, Places 17).

We can now understand why Amazons were so often paired with the Centaurs. For the Centaurs too were agrioi, "wild," and instead of riding horses they were themselves semi-equine. Offspring of the would-be

rapist Ixion, they too were undomesticated and unrestrained; indeed, both kentron (goad) and tauros (bull) were frequent synonyms for the

phallus (Henderson 1975: 122, 127; duBois 1982: 31, 40). And the untamed horse had long symbolized male sexuality on the loose; not for

nothing did Poseidon, its creator, rape Demeter in equine form. So, just as Amazons represent the wild, untamed, unmarried, and potentially lustful female, the bestial in woman, Centaurs represent the same kind of male, more beast than man.

All this makes "matriarchy" a most inappropriate description of Ama- zon society, as Bachofen (1967 [1861]: 105, 153) himself seems to have

recognized on occasion. They are more like a third sex, or like the agelai or "herds" of Spartan adolescent girls described by Pindar (Pind. fr. 112 Snell; Calame 1977, 1: 372-78 and passim). It is clearly time that Bach- ofen's ghost was laid to rest-though this plea will surely have no effect on his followers, let alone on the cult of the Goddess and its devotees.

Kimonian Athens: Amazons and Aliens

Kimon, son of Miltiades (the victor of Marathon), dominated Athenian

politics from the expulsion of the Persians in 479 until his ostracism in 461. It is during this period that the tale of the Amazons' revenge for

Antiope's rape first appears. Led by Molpadia, they invaded Attica, en-

Stewart ? Imag(in)ing the Other 581

Figures 1-2. Amazons arming and girls swimming, from an Attic amphora attributed to the Amasis Painter. Ca. 520 B.C.E. Louvre, Paris (Bothmer 1957: 149, no. 34; Beazley 1963: 4, no. 13; Devambez and Kauffmann-Samaras 1981: no. 710).


End wall Rear wall End wall

1. Oinoe 2. Amazonomachy 3. Troy Taken 4. Marathon

Author unknown Mikon Polygnotos Mikon and Panainos

(History) (Myth) (History)

Figure 3. The Stoa Poikile (Painted Stoa) in the Athenian agora: Probable ar- rangement of the frescoes. Ca. 460 B.C.E.

camped upon their father Ares' hill, the Areiopagos, and attempted to take the Akropolis by storm. Theseus and Antiope, leading the Atheni- ans and fighting side by side, succeeded in throwing them back, but not before Antiope had fallen to Molpadia's arrows. Many Amazons were killed and buried in and around Athens, and the graves of others were identified in Boiotia and Thessaly (Pind. fr. 174 Snell; Aesch. Eum. 685- 89; Hdt. 9.27; Plut. Thes. 27). The entire story was presumably concocted as an analogue for the great victories of Salamis and Plataia and soon became highly popular in art, poetry, and rhetoric; the embarrassing fact that, but for a few diehards, the Athenians had actually abandoned their citadel to the enemy in 480 was simply ignored.

In 473 Kimon sailed to the bleak island of Skyros to recover the bones of Theseus, and on his return a shrine was constructed in the Agora to house them; its frescoes, by the painter Mikon, showed Theseus battling the Amazons and Centaurs and retrieving Minos's ring from the bottom of the sea (Paus. 1.17.2-3). The Amazonomachy illustrated in Figure 3 has been thought to echo the first of these pictures, with some plausibility (Barron 1972). Ten or fifteen years later, Mikon received a second, simi- lar commission from Kimon's brother-in-law, Peisianax. Together with

Polygnotos and Panainos, he was engaged to fresco Peisianax's new por- tico in the Agora; so splendid was the result that it became universally known as the Stoa Poikile or Painted Stoa (Paus. 1.15; schol. in Ar. Lys. 678; schol. in Dem. 20.112). Alongside the Amazonomachy he placed the Sack of Troy and completed the ensemble with two episodes from the Persian Wars themselves, which he painted facing each other on the end walls: the Athenians mustering at Oinoe before the battle of Marathon, and the battle proper.

The potters cheerfully exploited the popularity of these frescoes.

Though the total number of Amazon scenes drops quite sharply after the Persian Wars (see Appendix; perhaps the market had reached satura- tion point), the concentration is now upon large-scale panoramic battles

featuring the novel perspectival devices of the murals (Figure 3). These scenes are especially popular on big symposium vases, where they would have provided a spectacular centerpiece for the party.


Figure 4. Amazonomachy, from an Attic red-figure volute krater found at Nu- mana and attributed to the Painter of the Woolly Satyrs. Ca. 460 B.C.E. Metro-

politan Museum of Art, New York (Bothmer 1957: 161, no. 7; Beazley 1963: 613, no. 1; Devambez and Kauffmann-Samaras 1981: no. 295).

So why and how were the victories over the Persians mapped onto these preexisting gender conflicts? How was a contemporary supposed to read the Amazon-Persian comparison implicit in the Theseion frescoes (where Theseus's victory was crafted into a precedent for those of 490 and 480-479) and explicit in those for the Painted Stoa? First, the Amazons satisfy one obvious requirement for a representation of an alien but nevertheless human enemy: they look and are different from nude Greeks without being bestial, monstrous, or grotesque.4 For whether nude or armored, Trojans and Giants in archaic and early classical Greek art are basically indistinguishable from their Greek and Olympian oppo- nents. Furthermore, Centaurs and other freaks were at best only one- dimensional symbols of human desires and antagonisms. Amazons, on the other hand, were all too obviously human, conveniently located be-

yond the Greek world's eastern borders, formidable fighters, and sexu-

ally intriguing to boot. All this made the Amazonomachy a far more subtle symbol of Greek male prowess in action than, say, the grossly phal- lic herms dedicated after the victory at Eion in 476 (Aeschin. Ctes. 183; cf. Stewart 1990: 51, fig. 234) or the picture on a little jug made after

4. I owe this observation to Professor Sally Humphries.


Kimon's victory at the Eurymedon in 465 (Kilmer 1993: no. R1155, with ill.). The herms were the standard stone pillars sporting a huge, erect phallus and topped by a bearded head, and on the jug, a Greek armed only with his penis approaches a trousered, bent-over Persian as if to bugger him, saying, "I'm Eurymedon"; while the Persian says, "I'm butt- first!" In both cases the message is brutally clear: "We really screwed them over!"

But though the Amazon-Persian analogy feminizes and so denigrates the Persians to a certain degree, it should now be quite clear that it by no means stigmatizes them as simply a bunch of cowardly women. For the Amazons were daughters of Ares, sacrificed to him, and fought like tigers; and, strictly speaking, they were not (yet) women. As the early- fourth-century orator Lysias (2.4-6) remarked, "The Amazons were counted as male for their bravery rather than as female for their nature, so much more did they seem to excel men in spirit than to be at a

disadvantage in their form." In the vase paintings (Figure 3), they are often shown in brutal hand-to-hand combat with the Greeks and are always sexually mature, just as Lysias suggests. Contrary to popular belief, though, the bared right breast is not a standard feature of archaic or

early classical Amazon iconography: I know of only two examples in the vase painting of the period (for one of them, see Figure 3), and in each case it is the violence of their movement that has caused their tunics to

slip. Pheidias was apparently the first to thematize the motif, on his great shield for the cult statue of Athena Parthenos (Figure 9; completed in 438), but even so it did not become standard until the Hellenistic period (see Stewart 1990: figs. 365-71, 388-96, 448-49, 461-65, 529-32).

These Amazons, then, challenge the cultural stereotype of a docile

femininity by exhibiting not only an independent sexuality but also a vig- orous and resourceful courage in battle. So far from simply reinforcing the racist cliche of the craven barbarian and the heroic Greek victor, they help question and problematize it. But, crucially, they do not know when to stop, nor can they learn from their mistakes (Lysias 2.6); immature, wild, and unrestrained-characteristics that Pheidias registered in his

brilliantly chosen motif of the bared breast-they lack the quintessential classical virtue, sophrosyne. Sophrosyne is the self-knowledge that leads to a measured self-control, a virtue that is conspicuously manifested in such classical monuments as the Parthenon frieze and the Doryphoros of Polykleitos (Stewart 1990: 155-57, 160-62, and figs. 327-46, 378-82). But whereas Greek men can know their boundaries, can develop rational self-control and resistance to excess, women and barbarians cannot.

A woman's sophrosyne consists in knowing that she must submit herself to male governance. When Antiope fell in love with Theseus and married him, she showed that she had come to recognize this. In the for-


mula of the Greek marriage ceremony, she had left the bad and found something better. Now domesticated within the polis, she had abandoned her wild state of partheneia, had learned sophrosyne, and had submitted herself to the womanly "work" of marriage. The Persians, too, lacked sophrosyne. The whole point of Aischylos's Persai of 472 is to show how Xerxes' ambition knew no boundaries and how his hybris led him and his people to disaster. For they were also adolescents of a sort. Since barbarian society resembled that of Greece before the invention of the polis (Hdt. 3.80-83; Thuc. 1.5-6), the Persians, like the Amazons, suffered from a bad case of arrested development. Both races were ruled by monarchies that could easily become tyrannies. They neither lived in proper cities nor were ready for the self-discipline required by equality of rights or isonomia, the cornerstone of Athenian democracy. Though personally brave, they often fought with the bow, from long range, not with the manly spear, and from horseback, like Greek aristocrats of old, not on foot. They knew nothing of the democracy of the phalanx, where all are equal and interdependent, and (because generals were elected and campaigns decided upon by free vote) decisions were "in the midst."

Periklean Athens: Aliens II So much for the Persian invasion and its aftermath; what of our final phase? Perikles achieved political prominence at Athens in the 460s; by 449, when peace was made with Persia, he had become the city's most powerful man, and his preeminence lasted until his death in the great plague twenty years later. In 447 he persuaded the Assembly to inaugu- rate a building program that was to make Athens the envy of the Greek world. The first and greatest of its projects was the Parthenon (447-432), dedicated to Athena in thanks for her help in the victory over Persia. It included two monumental Amazonomachies, one on the fourteen metopes of the west front and the other on the shield of Pheidias's great gold and ivory statue of Athena within the temple. The other metopal themes were the now-familiar Centauromachy (south) and Sack of Troy (north); on the east side they were joined by the Gigantomachy, which was also repeated on the interior of the shield.

The metopes are too battered to reveal anything much beyond the fact that, as in Mikon's paintings, the Amazons were mounted; unfortu- nately, it seems that they generated no echoes in the minor arts. Yet the shield was apparently very popular; though it is now totally lost, several quotations from it turn up on late-fifth-century vases, and scholars have been able to reconstruct it quite accurately from the numerous Roman replicas in marble, some of individual groups (Figure 8) and a few of the entire composition (see Stewart 1990: 157-58, figs. 364-71). It showed the Amazons (about half of them with their right breasts bared) scaling


Figures 5-6. Amazons advancing and women fleeing to a bearded patriarch, from an Attic red-figure bell-krater found at Spina and attributed to Polygnotos. Ca. 440 B.C.E. Museo Nazionale, Ferrara (Bothmer 1957: 198, no. 132; Beazley 1963: 1029, no. 21; Devambez and Kauffmann-Samaras 1981: no. 724).

the rock of the Akropolis and the Athenians, led by Theseus, attacking them from above.5

Vase painters of the Periklean period also invested heavily in Ama- zons, who are now almost always mounted; in the years around 450 the number of Amazon scenes more than doubles, even though the total

output of painted vases is falling (see Appendix and Figures 5-6). The fame of the Painted Stoa and its frescoes is an insufficient explanation for this puzzling phenomenon,6 for the Stoa's other mythological theme, the Sack of Troy, actually drops precipitately in popularity (by almost 80 percent) during this period, and the Persianomachy vanishes com-

pletely. As for the other candidates, the Parthenon's metopes were not finished until 442 and were third-rank decorative sculpture; the shield

5. As Gale Boetius reminds me, the Greeks identified the right side as the virile side: in Hippokratic physiology, for example, male infants are associated with the right side of the womb and the right breast (Hippokrates, Epidemics 2.6.15, 6.2.25, 6.4.21; Aphorisms 5.38, 48); for other examples and discussion see Loraux 1990: 46. 6. Even though the striding Amazon in Figure 5 is labeled Peisianassa, for the right- hand one is labeled Dolope; this refers to the Dolopian pirates destroyed by Kimon on his Skyros expedition, after which he dedicated the Theseion. Since the painter is

surely not citing both frescoes, the most likely explanation is that he was only making a verbal allusion to Mikon's pictures, perhaps with satirical intent: see below.


was not finished until 438, and its Amazons fought on foot. So what was responsible for the surge?

One possibility is that this intensified interest in Amazons, and Ama- zons alone, may have had something to do with the immigration crisis that precipitated Perikles' Citizenship Law of 451. This extraordinary piece of legislation, which has no known precedent in Greek legal practice, stipulated that "no-one should share in the city who was not born of native Athenians on both sides" (Arist. Ath. Pol. 26.4; cf. Plut. Per 33; cf. Ar. Av. 1661-66; Ath. 577b-c).7 The law thereby defined any union between Athenians and foreigners, both Greek and barbarian, as con- cubinage and its offspring as bastards. By so doing, it proclaimed that

7. Plutarch wrongly links it to Psammetichos's grain donation of 445/4. I thank Professors Ronald S. Stroud and Raphael Sealey for their kind assistance with this section.


Athens's citizen body was now one big, endogamous family. Henceforth, only pure Athenians would share in the benefits of citizenship and thus of empire; they would constitute an imperial elite (Patterson 1981, 1990).

The actual word Perikles used for "native Athenians" is astoi, "people of the city." This term not only got around the fact that in this context he could not use the word politai, "citizens" (for Athenian women were not citizens), but immediately brought to mind the Athenians' boast that

they alone among the Greeks were autochthonous (Thuc. 1.2.5-6 etc.). All other Greeks were wanderers and immigrants, not least the metoikoi, "metics" or resident aliens, who now thronged the streets of Athens itself and were surely the law's prime targets.

Perikles' main purpose was probably to stop intermarriage between Athenian men and metic women. For thanks to massive immigration after the Persian Wars, metics now composed from one-fifth to an almost incredible one-half of the free population (Thuc. 2.13.6-7, 31.2; Diod. 12.40.4; Gomme 1933: 5, 26; Duncan-Jones 1981; Rhodes 1988: 271-77). They could not vote, own land, plead in court, or take part in most civic festivals, and they could be expelled without notice, but they controlled much of the city's industry and commerce. For the strains that such a

huge influx of deracinated foreigners would place upon the body politic, one only has to consider the attitudes toward the far smaller numbers of immigrant Turks and Eastern Europeans in present-day Germany, of North Africans in Italy and France, or of immigrant Hispanics and Asians in the United States.

But there is more. The life tables used by the scholars who have done these calculations show that in the 450s, between 350 and 1,000 metic

parthenoi would be reaching marriageable age each year.8 Probably less

strictly closeted than their Athenian counterparts and encouraged by parents eager to improve their position, these metic girls surely posed a far more substantial threat than metic men to the local marriage market. For in a traditional agrarian society, sons tend to remain at the pater- nal farm or business whomever they marry, while daughters are usually traded in alliances that improve the family's status; and in archaic and classical Athens, this meant marrying an Athenian. So it is perhaps no co- incidence that all our documentation about particular exogamous mar-

riages in sixth- and fifth-century Athens concerns Athenian men marry-

8. Low estimate (Gomme 1933): 6,000 metic hoplites = ca. 9,500 metic adult males = ca. 17,600 metic males of all ages = ca. 17,600 metic females of all ages x 2% =

ca. 350 girls of fourteen years. Total citizen adult male population: ca. 43,000. High estimate (Duncan-Jones 1981, assuming more nonhoplite, i.e., poorer, artisan-class metics in the total metic population): 12,000 metic hoplites = treble all figures quoted above x 2% = ca. 1,000 girls of fourteen years. Total citizen adult male population: ca. 45,000-60,000.


ing foreign women (Pomeroy 1982: 128-29). So the feelings of Athenian fathers in the 450s as they saw their daughters' prospects, and their own, steadily shrinking can readily be imagined.

In 454 an event occurred that would have sharpened the crisis con- siderably and may even have prompted Perikles' initiative. A fleet of two hundred Athenian and allied ships had been operating in Egypt since 459, aiding a local revolt against the Persians. After some initial successes, this force found itself blockaded on an island formed by a canal between two channels of the Nile. A messenger was sent to Athens for help, but in the interim the Persian commander drained the canal and attacked the island. The Greeks burned their own ships, many were killed, and the rest surrendered but were allowed to march across the desert to Kyrene and safety. The Athenian relief expedition of fifty ships then arrived, only to be ambushed by the victorious Persian fleet; a mere handful of them escaped. The number of Athenian citizens killed in this double disaster has been conservatively estimated at eight thousand, or 15-20 percent of the citizen population. Since Athenian men normally married in their late twenties, the loss of unmarried males was particularly severe (Ruschenbusch 1979: 84, 135-36; cf. Sealey 1987: 23-24).

So, in mid-fifth-century Athenian sexual politics, not foreign men but foreign girls were the threat -exactly the reverse of the present situation in Germany and other Western nations with large numbers of immigrant workers. In a city that prided itself on its autochthony, these alien parthenoi could justly be represented as draining the city of its remaining eligible bachelors, depriving its daughters of their birthright, and mon- grelizing the community. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that Perikles' law was apparently passed without significant opposition. Compare Figures 4-5, where as the Amazons advance, scared young Athenian women flee to a mature man, represented not as a warrior but as a bearded patriarch. These scenes are very numerous, an invention of this period, and certainly suggestive.

This is not to argue, however, that these pictures simply "reflect" Peri- kles' law-a pernicious expression that reduces art to a mere appendage of the already known. So far from being parasitic upon society, as it im- plies, images are socially formative; they help create the space in which people come to understand themselves, their lives, and their surround- ings. If these vases relate to Perikles' law at all, they must be deeply implicated in it, part of the extended midcentury debate over Athenian identity and Athens's imperial mission in the world. The Painted Stoa's great fresco of the Amazon invasion, in other words, could have had the unintended effect of sharpening Athenians' anxieties about the unprece- dented influx of foreign girls into their city and its consequences, cre- ating a lively market for these images of advancing Amazons, frightened


women, and stalwart patriarchs. If so, they can only have heightened the wave of xenophobia that must have both preceded and followed the law's

passage. If this guess is correct, these Amazons would stand not merely for bar-

barian parthenoi but for non-Athenian parthenoi of any kind, Greeks included. Though startling at first sight, this is perfectly congruent with the kind of imperialist arrogance that Thucydides documents in Perikles' Funeral Speech, the Mytilene Debate, and the Melian Dialogue (2.34- 46, 3.36-48, 5.84-113). After 451, endogamy now defined Athenian

identity and guaranteed Athenian racial, cultural, and military superiority over Greeks and barbarians together. Measured against the city that Perikles labeled an "education to Greece" (Thucydides 2.41), the law

implied that all foreigners-other Greeks included-were mere barbaroi.

Ironically, he soon felt its sting himself, for around 448 he took a metic mistress, the Milesian Aspasia, was unable to marry her, and eventually had to beg the people to legitimize his sons by her (Plut. Per. 37; Souda s.v. "demopoietos" et al.; Fornara and Samons 1991: 162-65).

Several scholars have suggested that Euripides' Medea and Hippolytos were responses to this law, proclaiming that exogamous unions and their fruit must turn bad. The first was produced in 431, during the first few months of the Peloponnesian War, and the second in 428, the year after Perikles' legitimacy petition was heard and approved and he himself had succumbed to the plague. Of the two, the Hippolytos is the more out-

spoken. At lines 304-8 the nurse (calling the Amazon queen Hippolyte instead of Antiope) says to Phaidra:9

Your children will never inherit their father Theseus' palace- No by Hippolyte, Queen of the horse-riding Amazons- She has a son whom your boys will serve as slaves, A bastard who thinks himself legitimate, you know him well: Hippolytos.

So, more than two decades after 451 and three years into the Peloponne- sian War, when the plague had strained Athens's manpower to the limit, the old anxieties were still festering, and the terms of the debate were still the same.

Coda In the tumultuous years from around 520 to 450, the Athenians gendered and mapped no fewer than three political and social issues onto the Amazon myth. First, there was Peisistratid and Kleisthenic Athens's

expansionism, reaffirmation of the polis as a male preserve, and selection of Theseus as its heroic paradigm; second, Kimonian Athens's conflict

9. In addition to unequivocally linking mother and son, Hippolyte, "loose-horse," has something of the flavor of "loose cannon" in English.


with the socially adolescent and mortally dangerous Persians; and third, Periklean Athens's immigration crisis, precipitated by imperial success and intensified by unexpected military defeat. Each of them not only added a new layer to the palimpsest but modified the one that went before it, inflecting not only the Amazon legend but Athenian notions about themselves as well.

It is suggestive, though, that among these crises only the Persian Wars, the most obvious and straightforwardly political, have hitherto been taken up by art historians. Yet in this case, the significance of the Amazon

metaphor has often been misunderstood as a straightforward effemini- zation of the Persians. This fact alone demonstrates that assumptions about gender structure our own discourse about the Greeks as much as

they structured Greek civilization itself, and that the two sets of ideas - ours and theirs-are by no means congruent. Of course, our attitudes themselves are hardly free of contradiction: the art historian, heir to the nineteenth-century positivism that gave birth to the discipline, has tended to deny gender, the social historian to acknowledge it but to

interpret it in anachronistically modern terms. It is appropriate to conclude, then, with a Greek viewpoint. In 411,

twenty years into the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes produced his

comedy Lysistrata. There, he conjures up the specter of an Athenian woman leading a women's peace movement and seizing the Akropolis in order to get her way. The male characters call the women's revolt hybris no fewer than three times during the play (at 399-401, 425, and 658- 59), and shortly after the third of these outbursts, they turn to the past (672-80):

But if we give an inch, they'll take a mile! They'll get themselves all sorts of fancy skills: Like Artemisia, they'll build a fleet, And try to sail, to challenge us at sea. And if they learn to ride, forget the Knights. For they know how to horse around in style, To mount up well and then sit firm and tight. Just look at Mikon's painted Amazons, All riding high and battling men. No way! Let's grab 'em all and chuck 'em in the stocks! A yoke around the neck-that's what they need!

This passage is replete with sexual innuendo (Henderson 1975: 163-65). Sailing and sea fighting were common metaphors for sexual intercourse, and as for horsing around, the chorus is describing the unnatural specter of women "on top" and riding their men. This adds a new, satirical dimen- sion to the names of two of the Amazons painted on the vase in Figure 4: Peisianassa, "she who rules Peisianax," and Hippomache, "equestrian fighter." Significantly, there is only one picture of the "equestrian" posi-


Figure 7. Lovemaking scene, from an Attic red-figured oinochoe found at Lokroi and attributed to the Shuvalov Painter. Ca. 430 B.C.E. Staatliche Museen, Berlin (Beazley 1963: 1208, no. 41; Kilmer 1993: no. R970).

tion in the whole of Attic erotic vase painting (Figure 6); all the rest show the man on top, or entering from the rear.

So, to Aristophanes as to the painters, uppity women of any kind are a mortal threat to Athenian manhood, and Amazons are the worst threat of all, for they endanger his position on top, in both senses of the word. For them and for most other Athenians, the ideal would surely have been the dutiful young Athenian wife of Xenophon's Oeconomicus and the dig- nified yet submissive women of the Parthenon frieze (Figure 7). The long folds of these women's peploi closely recall the furrows left by the plough: suggestively, "ploughing a woman" is a traditional Greek metaphor for marital sex (Pind. Pyth. 4.254-57; Aesch. Sept. 750-55; Soph. Ant. 569; Trach. 31-33; OT1207-12, 1255-57, 1484-85, etc.; see Henderson 1975: 166; duBois 1988: 65-85; Carson 1990: 149). This modest but evocative clothing contrasts starkly with the thin, see-through chitoniskoi of the Amazons on the shield of Athena Parthenos (Figure 8). The former re-

pels, the latter invite the attentions of the "eye's hand," positively teasing the male viewer to caress the Amazons' trim, lithe bodies, to possess them from afar. If painted like these, Mikon's Amazons would have only


Figure 8. Maidens and marshals, on a slab from the east frieze of the Parthenon at Athens. 442-438 B.C.E. Louvre, Paris.

Figure 9. Athenian and Amazon, Roman marble copy of a group from the shield of Pheidias's statue of Athena Parthenos. 447-438 B.C.E. Piraeus Museum, Piraeus.


served to reinforce the traditional patriarchal ideal of womanhood, to offer new arguments for the Athenians' segregation of their women.

So if these alien, untamed parthenoi at loose in the wild had any effect

upon the feelings of Athenian men toward barbarians and women, it was

surely to confirm their anxieties about both. Left to itself, each group could potentially overwhelm the patriarchy: the barbarians from without, women from within. The Amazons united both threats into one, eternally challenging the sacred principle of male supremacy: for every Molpadia outside the gates, there was an Antiope/Hippolyte within them. It was therefore every Athenian's patriotic duty to make sure that neither threat materialized, that the Amazons could never get into the saddle again.

Appendix: Amazons in Attic Vase Painting

Preliminary note: All statistics are taken from Beazley 1956, 1963, 1971; his lists include about two-thirds of all known Attic vases. The chronology is approximate at best, for no vases can be exactly dated and the careers of many of the painters he identifies overlapped. The overall picture, however, cannot be far wrong. For black-figure, Beazley's development is

roughly as follows: earliest = ca. 625-575; early = ca. 575-550; mature =

550-525; ripe archaic = 525-500; latest = ca. 500-475. For red-figure, his periods also span roughly a quarter century each, as follows: early =

525-500; late archaic = 500-475; early classical = 475-450; classical =

450-425; late-fifth-century = 425-400; fourth-century = to ca. 325, when the production of painted pottery ceases.

Total v HerBat ThBat Ach/Pen GenericBat TotBat Th/Ant Other Tot. %

625-575 778 575-550 752 30 21 51 5 56 7.45 550-525 2,343 24 3 40 67 6 73 3.12 525-500 4,478 64 2 29 95 4 47 146 3.26 500-475 8,819 96 2 47 145 4 143 292 3.31 475-450 5,115 4 2 32 38 15 53 1.04 450-425 3,754 13 1 67 81 31 112 2.98 425-400 932 4 4 6 10 1.07 400-325 1,838 27 27 46 73 3.97

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Documents

Imagining the Other: Amazons and Ethnicity in Fifth-Century Athens