myth lecture

1. Monstrous Females and
Female Monsters
In this lecture, we will look at some of the female figures in
Greek myth who break out of women’s usual roles.
We will start by discussing the Amazons, a race of female
warriors who fought such heroes as Achilles, Theseus, and
Heracles.
We will then examine another foreign woman, Medea, who is
most famous for her marriage to Jason but has tangential
connections to other myths as well.
Finally, we will look briefly at the numerous female monsters that
appear in classical myth and discuss the possible genesis of these
figures in male anxieties about women’s roles.

2. • The greatest Greek
heroes all had
encounters with
Amazons at some
point in their
careers.
• Theseus, Heracles,
and Achilles each
met and defeated an
Amazon in battle.
Who were the
Amazons, and why
was encountering
them a test of hero
status?

3. • The Amazons were a race of
warrior women who lived
somewhere on the edges of
the civilized world.
• The most common location for
their homeland is near the
Black Sea.
• Some traditions put them in
Ethiopia.
• The location near the edge of
the know world stresses their
alien nature.

4. • The myth of the Amazons may have
some historical basis.
• It is highly unlikely that a female-only
society of the type depicted in
the Amazon myth ever existed.
• However, the location of the
Amazons near the Black Sea is
significant, particularly the version
that put their homeland in Scythia.
• Ancient Scythian women, as well as
men, were riders and nomads; the
two sexes dressed very much alike.
• The Amazon myth could be based
on exaggerations of reports about
the Scythians.
Salvador Dali, Women with Egg and Arrows

5. • For our purposes, the most
important thing to observe
about the mythical Amazons is
that they reverse, or invert,
almost every standard
assumption of Greek society
about the proper roles for
women.
• They are warriors who meet
men on equal terms on the
battlefield.
• They are sexually active outside
the bounds of marriage.
• They prefer female children to
male children; when they give
birth to boys, they kill them,
castrate them, or sell them into
slavery.
Amazons. 3636: Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, 1751-1829

6. • The acts of marriage for girls and
battle for boys are symbolically
equivalent. A girl matured when
penetrated sexually; a boy, when
wounded in battle.
• This helps to explain the Amazons’
role as warriors. They reject marriage,
so they must accept its equivalent,
battle.
• Because they are also sexually active,
however, they are a sort of hybrid,
both male and female, and remain
sexually attractive to males (including
Greek heroes).
• As such, they are extremely
disturbing.
Giuseppe Mariotti

7. • The interactions of Greek heroes with Amazons can be seen as reasserting the “proper”
order of things, because the hero always defeats the Amazon.
• On the simplest level, the Greek heroes always defeat the Amazons; thus, Greek defeats
barbarian and male defeats female
Peter Paul Rubens

8. • The encounter between a
Greek hero and an Amazon
always entails a re-feminizing
of the Amazon.
• Theseus marries Hippolyta.
• Heracles steals Hippolyta’s
“girdle” (or belt); “loosening
the girdle” of a woman was a
standard euphemism for
having sexual intercourse
with her.
• Achilles falls in love with
Penthesilea as she dies from
the wound he has given her.

9. • The myth of Hippolytos, as told by Euripides, highlights several of these
themes.
• Hippolytos is the son of Theseus and the Amazon Hippolyta.
• He shuns sexuality (and so incurs the anger of Aphrodite) and devotes
himself to Artemis.
• His refusal of sex indicates a refusal of adulthood and societal
responsibilities (to beget children).
• Artemis is the patron goddess of young unmarried girls; in his devotion to
her, Hippolytos is acting like a girl.
• Like the Amazons, Hippolytos is a hybrid between male and female. Unlike
the Amazons, who take on aspects of both genders’ adulthood, Hippolytos
cannot achieve adulthood in either a male or a female way. He remains
frozen in a kind of pre-adolescence.

10. • The myth of Medea highlights
many of the same points as the
myth of the Amazons. In many
ways, Medea is a pseudo-Amazon.
• Like the Amazons, Medea comes
from the edges of the known
world, near the Black Sea.
• She was princess of Colchis, to
which Jason sailed in search of the
Golden Fleece.
• She helped him on the
understanding that he would take
her with him and marry her.
Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys, 1868

11. • Like the Amazons, Medea is an
extremely powerful woman
who does not hesitate to use
violence against males.
• She is not a warrior like the
Amazons; her power consists in
her knowledge of magic and
sorcery.
• When the need arises,
however, she is as capable of
physical violence as any
warrior; when she and Jason
are fleeing Colchis, she kills her
younger brother Apsyrtos and
cuts his body into little pieces
to delay her father’s pursuit.

12. • Like the Amazons, Medea is no less desirable
for being frighteningly powerful; unlike them,
she uses this desirability in the framework of
marriage.
• Jason marries her.
• After she leaves Jason, she becomes the wife of
Aigeus.
• When Jason takes another wife, she murders
her own sons.
• This murder has no direct analog in Amazon
behavior; in the logic of her story, Medea kills
her children to make Jason suffer.
• This act can also be seen as reasserting her
Amazon-like status; by killing her male
offspring, Medea puts herself entirely outside
the pale of normal behavior for a Greek female
and follows the normal pattern for an Amazon. Gustave Moreau - Jason and Medea

13. • We must look closely at
one more category of
mythic females: the large
number of threatening
female monsters. These
occur in various types.
• Some are monsters that eat
men. Scylla and Sphinx are
examples of this type.
• Others are monsters that
kill men, but don’t devour
them. The Gorgons,
specifically Medusa, come
to mind here.
Francois Xavier Fabre

14. • Often these female become monsters because of an earlier sexual transgression.
• Scylla was loved by the sea-god Glaucus, whom the goddess Circe desired. Circe
tuned Scylla into a monster to punish her for attracting Glaucus.
• Poseidon raped Medusa in Athena’s temple, and Athena cursed Medusa with snakes
for hair
Skylla attacks Odysseus and his crew as the Sirens look on
Etching by Theodor van Thulden (Netherlands, 1606 - 1669

15. • We have one example of a female monster who is not particularly threatening despite being associated with
snakes. This is the Scythian echidna, or Snake-woman, as described by the historian Herodotus.
• Heracles encounters her as he is driving Geryon’s cattle home.
• The Snake-woman has stolen Heracles’s mares and promises to return them only if Heracles will sleep with
her.
• She wants children from Heracles, not to destroy him. After Heracles begets her three sons, she lets him go.

16. • She parallels the dangerous females in several ways.
• 1.
Like Medea and the Amazons, she lives near the Black sea.
• 2.
Like Scylla and Medusa, she is partly snake; Herodotus says that she is a
woman from the waist up and a snake from the waist down.
• 3.
Her youngest son is Scythes, who becomes the ancestor of Scythians. The
Scythians later mate with the Amazons to produce a tribe called the Sauromatae.
• These various females—the Amazons, Medea, and the monsters—all seem to
represent the Greek male’s anxiety about women’s power, particularly their
sexual power.
• This theme is encapsulated in Medea’s name, which means both “genitals” and
“clever plans.”

17. • The theme of women bearing children only to kill them reiterates the regret that women are necessary for men to reproduce.
• Sexual reproduction means that women control men’s ability to have offspring.
• Mothers’ killing their offspring is simply an exaggerated form of that control.
• This may even help to explain the frequent rape motif in Greek myth, because such rapes always result in offspring; the motif may
have less to do with male sexual pleasure than with male desire to control fertility.
• Women’s ability to deny men continuity through offspring is enlarged in these myths into a tendency on the part of females to
destroy men entirely.
• The connection that we saw in the House of Atreus myth between illicit sexual activity and illicit eating, specifically cannibalism,
appears here as well.
Medusa by Caravaggio (1573-1610)