Amazons- Greek RaceRace"Daughters of Ares"

Daughters of Ares

The Amazons lived at the edges of the known world — a race of warrior women who governed their own kingdom, rode to war on horseback, and answered to no man. Most sources placed their capital at Themiscyra on the river Thermodon in northeastern Anatolia, though others located them in Scythia, Thrace, or Libya. They were daughters or descendants of Ares, the god of war, and their queens — Hippolyta, Penthesilea, Melanippe — were his children, born to Otrera.

Their society was governed entirely by women. Men were excluded or kept only for reproduction; male children were sent away, while girls trained as warriors from birth. They fought as mounted archers and cavalry, armed with the bow, the double-headed axe, and the crescent shield. Herodotus traced the Sarmatians to Amazons shipwrecked on the Scythian coast who intermarried with local men and founded a people whose women still rode and hunted alongside the men.

They worshipped Ares as their divine father and Artemis as goddess of the bow and the hunt. Pausanias credited them with founding the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Heracles and the Girdle of Hippolyta

Heracles' ninth labor sent him to Themiscyra. Eurystheus's daughter Admete wanted the war belt of the Amazon queen Hippolyta, a girdle given to her by Ares himself as a mark of her sovereignty over the warrior women. Heracles sailed with a company that included Theseus and Telamon.

Hippolyta received them without hostility. Impressed by Heracles' fame, she offered the girdle willingly — there need not have been any bloodshed. But Hera, disguised as an Amazon, moved through the warriors spreading word that the strangers meant to abduct their queen. The Amazons armed and charged. In the battle that followed, Heracles killed Hippolyta and took the girdle by force, turning what might have been a peaceful exchange into slaughter through a goddess's spite. He also captured Melanippe, Hippolyta's sister, and ransomed her back to the Amazons before sailing for Greece with the belt.

Theseus and the Amazonomachy

Theseus — who had accompanied Heracles to Themiscyra, or led his own expedition in other traditions — carried off Antiope, an Amazon queen or princess. Some sources call her Hippolyta instead; the names blur across traditions. The Amazons answered with invasion. They marched across Thrace and into Attica, encamped on the Areopagus and the Pnyx — the very hills of Athenian civic life — and besieged Athens itself.

Fighting raged through the city. Antiope stood beside Theseus against her own people and was killed by the Amazon Molpadia, who was in turn killed by Theseus. The Amazons were eventually driven back, but the cost was heavy on both sides. The battle became one of Athens's defining legends, carved onto the Parthenon metopes and painted on the Stoa Poikile alongside Marathon and the fall of Troy. Plutarch records Amazon graves still shown along the road to Phaleron and a shrine near the Areopagus.

Penthesilea at Troy

The alliance between the Amazons and Troy had older roots than Penthesilea's arrival. In the Iliad, old Priam gazes from the walls and recalls that in his youth he fought alongside the Phrygians against an Amazon invasion along the river Sangarius. Yet when Troy was desperate after Hector's death, it was to the Amazons that Priam turned for help.

Penthesilea, daughter of Ares and Otrera, came to Troy with twelve Amazon warriors. She had accidentally killed her own sister during a hunt and sought purification through glory in battle — a death wish dressed as valor. She found the battle she wanted. She drove the Greeks back toward their ships, killing many, fighting with a ferocity that briefly made Troy believe it could survive. Then she faced Achilles.

He killed her with a single spear-thrust. As he stripped the helmet from her face, her beauty struck him with a force the battle had not — and he grieved for a woman he had killed in that same instant. When the Greek soldier Thersites mocked him for mourning a dead enemy, Achilles killed him with a blow. Achilles sailed to Lesbos and sacrificed to Apollo, Artemis, and Leto before Odysseus purified him of the killing.

Bellerophon and the Amazons

A third encounter appears in the Iliad, when Glaucus recounts the deeds of his ancestor Bellerophon. King Iobates of Lycia sent Bellerophon against the Amazons as one of a series of impossible tasks designed to kill him, alongside the Solymoi and the Chimaera. Riding Pegasus, Bellerophon attacked from the air, striking down warriors from an altitude their arrows could not reach. His victory was the feat that finally convinced Iobates to give up trying to destroy him and instead offer him his daughter and half his kingdom.