Yesterday, we looked at some ancient Greek sources that talked about the Amazon’s sex and child rearing practices. While there was a bit of enslaving and some child mutilation, surprisingly no one got killed. The Amazons didn’t cavalierly kill their sex partners or throw their male babies to the wolves. Women were in charge, and often weren’t too nice about it, but men played an important, more domestic role in their society. And again, nobody was killed.
.jpg)
So now we jump ahead several hundred years to the Roman Empire and their historians. For some reason, as more time passed the Amazons became more brutal. But the earlier Roman accounts of Amazon sex and child rearing weren’t too bad.
Just before the era of the Roman Empire began, though, there was one last Greek historian who wrote about the Amazons. In his Historical Library, dating to roughly 50 BC, Diodorus Siculus had this to say about the rise of the Amazon’s first queen:
To the men she assigned the spinning of wool and such other domestic duties as belong to women. Laws also were established by here, by virtue of which she led forth the women to the contests of war, but upon the men she fastened humiliation and slavery.
And as for their children, they mutilated both the legs and the arms of the males, incapacitating them in this way for the demands of war.
So basically, Diodorus read some Xenophon and pretty much copied him. That’s not so cool of him. Nonetheless, it brought Xenophon’s old account of the Amazons from hundreds of years before back to the minds of Roman era historians.
However, it seems that no one really cared because our next historian, Strabo, came up with a whole new story for the Amazons. Strabo was born in Turkey, but he spent a lot of time in Rome and toured the nascent Roman Empire extensively. His major work, Geography, dates to about 10-20 AD, and he told this story of the Amazons:
[The Amazons] have two special months in the spring in which they go up into the neighboring mountain which separates them and the Gargarians. The Gargarians also, in accordance with an ancient custom, go up thither to offer sacrifice with the Amazons and also to have intercourse with them for the sake of begetting children, doing this in secrecy and darkness, any Gargarian at random with any Amazon; and after making them pregnant they send them away; and the females that are born are retained by the Amazons themselves, but the males are taken to the Gargarians to be brought up; and each Gargarian to whom a child is brought adopts the child as his own, regarding the child as his son because of his uncertainty.
No killing OR enslaving OR mutilating. This is the most upbeat story since Herodotus. Once a year, the Amazons get it on in the dark with random Gargarians, go home and have babies, keep the girls, and give the boys back to the Gargarians. Everybody lives, no one gets their legs broken, and Amazon society can carry on.
So we’ve reached the Common Era, and no one’s mentioned the Amazons killing their sexual partners or their male babies. That’s about to change, but it’s sort of fascinating that the Amazons haven’t killed anybody yet. Most of the stories aren’t terribly cheery, but no one’s died.