They were clearly admired.Īmphora (storage jar) showing Achilles killing the Amazon queen, Penthesilea. It didn't always go as far as not desecrating their corpses. Respect for one's enemy didn't go as far as carrying them from the battlefield. However, the images of fallen Amazons being carried off the battlefield by their combatants, the Greeks, are beautiful, which is not the way fallen enemies are usually treated, either in poems or in the visual arts. The idea of female warriors was both compelling and troubling to ancient audiences – war was (and still is) a traditionally masculine sphere. They are the most frequently-painted characters found on Greek pots after Heracles (or Hercules, to give him his more common Roman name). The Amazons were fascinating to ancient artists. Penthesilea and her warrior women turn up to fight alongside the Trojans against the Greeks. In fact, these norms have already been subverted in the final year of the war, when the Amazons arrive. Hecuba stands beside her husband with her right hand raised to tear her hair and her left hand in an entreaty to her husband's killer. Women using knives to kill children is a particularly macabre distortion of the norms of combat (men killing other men with sword and spear-blades) in the war which has just come to an end.Īmphora (storage jar) showing the death of king Priam. A group of enslaved war-widows taking revenge on one Greek man and his children for all the sons, husbands and freedoms they themselves have lost. But while it is a shocking scene, it is also an extraordinary one. Modern theatre productions often struggle to show a woman doing something so unmaternal, indeed anti-maternal, as kill children (there is a tendency for them to imply the women are mad, which is not in the Greek text). It is a breathtakingly brutal response – the last thing this treacherous man will ever see is the murder of his sons in revenge for his own vicious crime. Then they pull out his eyes with brooch pins. Hecuba and her women kill the two children of Polymestor, the man who has killed her son. This final trauma is too much for Hecuba to bear, and she commits one of the most horrifying acts of revenge in all Greek tragedy and, possibly, in all theatre. Print showing Hecuba (in the hooded drapery) and Hector's wife Andromache weeping over the ashes of Hector.
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