Who Was Penthesilea? The Amazon Queen History Almost Forgot

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Is Penthesilea in the Iliad?

Penthesilea was the Amazon Queen who came to Troy to face Achilles. Homer mentions her only once — a single line in the Iliad's catalogue of Troy's allies — and then she disappears from the poem, as though Homer were pointing at something interesting at a party and walking away without explanation. She does not appear as an active figure in the Iliad itself. That complete story lived in a separate poem, the Aethiopis, composed by Arctinus of Miletus sometime in the eighth or seventh century BC, which covered events after Homer's Iliad ends. The Aethiopis is now lost. We know what was in it only through summaries written centuries later, the ancient equivalent of a plot synopsis scrawled in someone's margin. This is the normal condition of ancient literature: most of it is gone, and what survives does so largely by accident, the way a single jar survives a kitchen fire because someone happened to leave it on the wrong shelf.

A Daughter of Ares, a Sister in Blood

What survives tells us this: Penthesilea was the daughter of Ares, god of war, and of Otrera, a mortal woman who founded the Amazon nation and built the first temple to Artemis at Ephesus (which tells you something about what the ancient world considered a suitable founding achievement for a people of warrior women). This made her divine on one side and human on the other, which in Greek mythology is generally the arrangement that produces the most interesting and most catastrophic stories — the gods giving with one hand and the biology of mortality taking with the other.

Her sister was Hippolyta, the Amazon queen whose girdle Heracles stole in his ninth labour, which is the kind of family connection that makes dinner conversation complicated. Hippolyta was dead by the time Penthesilea came to Troy, and this is where the myth becomes genuinely interesting rather than merely exotic: Penthesilea killed her. Not deliberately — this is the standard mythological caveat, the accident that functions as a moral complication rather than an absolution — but in a hunting accident, a misthrown spear, the kind of error that leaves no obvious villain and no obvious remedy. The blood-guilt from killing a sibling was, in the Greek moral framework, a wound that did not close on its own. Penthesilea came to Troy in part because Priam had offered to perform the rites of purification she needed, and in part, one suspects, because fighting someone else's war is sometimes preferable to sitting still with what you have done.

The Amazon society that the ancient Greeks imagined — a nation of warrior women, somewhere to the east, living without permanent men, raising daughters and returning sons to their fathers or (in the darker versions) leaving them on hillsides — was always more useful to Greek mythology as a concept than as an ethnography. The Amazons exist in myth to be defeated: by Heracles, by Theseus, by Achilles. They lose with impressive regularity. The myth required this, and it delivered, and the consistency is itself the point. They represent something the Greek world found threatening enough to require repeated narrative elimination, which is its own commentary on what the Greek world thought about women with weapons and independent governance. Penthesilea arrived at Troy with twelve companions, all of them named in Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica, the poem written in the third or fourth century AD that is our most complete account of her story and which reads, in places, like a man trying very hard to fill in the gaps left by a poem he admired but could not read.

What Achilles Felt When He Saw Her Face

Quintus gives us the battle in full. Penthesilea fights brilliantly — she kills Greek heroes, she drives the army back, she fights in the way that the Greek poetic tradition reserves for people the narrative has decided to dignify with a good death. Then Achilles arrives, as Achilles always arrives, and the outcome is not in doubt. He kills her. What happens next is the reason the ancient world kept returning to this image: he removes her helmet, and he sees her face, and something happens to him that the ancient sources circle around without quite naming, the way you might circle around a word in a foreign language that has no translation in your own.

Grief is one word for it. Love is another, and the one the ancient sources reach for more often, with all the discomfort that implies — love for a woman he has just killed, which is either the definition of tragedy or a very particular kind of too-late recognition that the Greeks, who invented both tragedy and the concept of recognition as a dramatic device, understood better than most. Thersites — the ugly, loud, democratically-minded soldier who is the Iliad's most recognizably modern figure — mocked Achilles for it. Said something, in the version the myth preserves, about the absurdity of mourning an enemy. Achilles killed him for it, which created its own political problem, since Thersites was a cousin to Diomedes, and killing a Greek over a dead Trojan ally was the sort of action that required explanation.

Writing The Amazon's End, I found that what interested me most was not the battle but the moment of recognition — the structural irony that the myth buries in a single scene: that Achilles, the greatest warrior alive, meets the person he might have considered a peer at the precise moment it becomes impossible for that consideration to matter. The ancient world kept painting this scene on their vases. There are dozens of surviving examples. They kept returning to it the way you return to a question you cannot answer satisfactorily — not because the answer is hidden, but because the question itself is the point.

Myth survives in fragments and footnotes, in summaries of lost poems and captions on pottery, and occasionally — if a figure was interesting enough to enough people across enough centuries — in a novel written two and a half thousand years after the fact. Penthesilea is interesting enough. She always was. Homer knew it when he mentioned her in a single line and moved on, counting on his audience to fill in everything he left out. The pity is that so much of what they knew died with them.