Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/241

 THE AMAZONS 209 early creations and frequent reproductions of the ancient epic which was indeed, we may generally remark, largely occupied both with the exploits and sufferings of women, or heroines, the wives and daughters of the Grecian heroes and which recog- nized in Pallas Athene the finished type of an irresistible female warrior. A nation of courageous, hardy and indefatigable women, dwelling apart from men, permitting only a short temporary in- tercourse for the purpose of renovating their numbers, and burn- ing out their right breast with a view of enabling themselves to draw the bow freely, this was at once a general type stimu- lating to the fancy of the poet and a theme eminently popular with his hearers. Nor was it at all repugnant to the faith of the latter who had no recorded facts to guide them, and no other standard of credibility as to the past except such poetical nar- ratives themselves to conceive communities of Amazons as having actually existed in anterior time. Accordingly we find these warlike females constantly reappearing in the ancient poems, and universally accepted as past realities. In the Iliad, when Priam wishes to illustrate emphatically the most numerous host in which he ever found himself included, he tells us that it was assembled in Phyrgia, on the banks of the Sangarius, for the purpose of resisting the formidable Amazons. When Bellero- phon is to be employed on a deadly and perilous undertaking,! by those who indirectly wish to procure his death, he is despatch- ed against the Amazons. In the JEthiopis of Arktinus, describing the post-Homeric war of Troy, Penthesileia, queen of the Ama- zons, appears as the most effective ally of the besieged city, and as the most formidable enemy of the Greeks, succumbing only to the invincible might of Achilles. 2 The Argonautic heroes find the Amazons on the river Thermodon, in their expedition along Iliad, iii. 186 ; vi. 152. 2 See Proclus's Argument of the lost jEthiopis (Fragm. Epicor. Graecor. ed. Diintzcr, p. 16). We are reduced to the first book of Quintus Smyrnaens for some idea of the valor of Penthesileia ; it is supposed to be copied more or less closely from the ./Ethiopia. See Tychsen's Dissertation prefixed to his edition of Quintus, sections 5 and 12. Compare Dio. Chrysostom. Or. JLI. p. 350, Reiske. Philostratns (Heroica, c. 19. p. 751) gives a strange transformation of this old epical- narrative into a descent of Amazons upon the island sacred to Achilles. VOL. I. 140C.