Hercules and Xena |
Fandom Takes A Look At The Amazons | Hercules and Xena essays |
|
|
Hercules and Xena |
Fandom Takes A Look At The Amazons | Hercules and Xena essays |
|
|
|
| Xenite.Org News | Fandom Takes A Look At The Amazons |
|
Site Map 2 SciFi Links
Special thanks to: 
for designing Xenite.org's graphics Contact Us! |
Fandom Takes A Look At The Amazons
Every now and then someone starts a discussion about the Amazons among Hercules or Xena fans (or both, if they cross-post the discussion to various Hercules and Xena news groups). A recent discussion started up on Usenet and caught my attention. Renaissance Pictures started taking Hercules on his legendary journeys by having him visit the Amazons in the first Action Pack movie, "Hercules and the Amazon Women". One of the ironic aspects about this movie is that it marked the first appearance by Lucy Lawless in a Renaissance production. She played Lysia, an enforcer or general for Queen Hippolyta. The movie is loosely based on a real Hercules stories from ancient Greek mythology. For his ninth labor, Hercules was sent to fetch the girdle of Hippolyta, which legend said was a gift from her father Ares. Although Hippolyta apparently welcomed Hercules and gave him the girdle, Hera stirred up the Amazons and incited them to attack Hercules and his companions. Hippolyta was killed during the fighting, by Hercules according to some versions of the story, by the Amazons themselves according to other versions. The movie doesn't follow the legends very closely, as there is no mention of the Girdle, the Twelve Labors, or Antiope. Antiope was an Amazon princess who was taken back to Athens by Theseus (THE Theseus, apparently) to be his queen. The Amazons were incensed by the apparent abduction of Antiope so they mobilized an army and marched to Greece. There they fought many battles and eventually invaded Athens itself. Antiope died during the war, killed by the Amazons according to some accounts, killed by Theseus according to others. When Steven Sears joined the production staff for Xena: Warrior Princess he decided to have Xena and Gabrielle visit the Amazons. He didn't like the Amazons Hercules had met, however, so he came up with a whole new tribe. Roma Downey was probably already working on Touched By An Angel at that time, so she would have been unavailable to reprise the role of Hippolyta anyway. Xena's Amazons are different from the "original" Hercules Amazons. There is no mention of the Gargarantians (the men with whom the Amazons mated when they needed children) in any of the Xena episodes. It's vaguely implied the Amazons bear children when they need them. To keep things simple, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys now uses "Xena's" Amazons. To assure us of this fact, we have encounted Ephiny, the acting Queen of the Amazons, a couple of times on the Hercules show. We have thus learned through Ephiny that there are many tribes, some of which are renegades who still girl children and raise them (thus avoiding fraternization with men). Does it sound a bit confusing? It gets better. The Gargarantians of the movie are loosely based on the Gargarians of Greek legend. In the Greek stories the Gargarians rebelled against the Amazons and sided with the Greeks against the Amazons in a war fought in western Asia Minor. The Amazons defeated the Gargarians and forced them to migrate east. They eventually settled along the Thermodon river (located somewhere in what is now Turkey). The Amazons lived on one side of the river and the Gargarians lived on the other side. They had random encounters at night to provide each community with children. Now, for a long time modern civilization has not taken the stories of the Amazons very seriously. But it turns out there is a connection between the Amazons of myth and a historical people called the Sauromatae. The Greek historian Herodotus travelled extensively through lands around the Black Sea, including some of the lands of the Scythian tribes living north of the Black Sea. The Sauromatae were related to the Scythians (a steppe people noted for their fierce archers and their strong cavalry traditions). Herodotus wrote that the Sauromatae believed they were descended from a group of Amazons who had escaped from the Greeks. There is mention in ancient Greek sources of a war against the Amazons which apparently resulted in the destruction of their nation. Three ships carrying Amazon slaves were blown off course as they sailed back to Greece. The Amazons overthrew their captors and seized the ships, but they were not sailors. The ships drifted north until the Amazons came to shore. They wandered inland until they reached the lands of the Scythians. To make a long story short, after a battle with the Amazons the Scythians realized the Amazons were women. They selected a group of young warriors to woo these women as wives, which the men eventually succeeded in doing. But the Amazons insisted on starting a new tribe, so they left the Scythian lands and became the Sauromatae. Well, that's how Herodotus recorded the story, and he mentioned he had no way of knowing how true it was. But in the 1950s archaeologists began excavating dozens of graves from the first millenium BCE -- graves left behind by ancient peoples called Sarmatians, who were the successors (descendants) of the Sauromatae of Herodotus' day. Some of the graves proved to be Sauromatae graves as well. The bodies of young women, accompanied by weapons and armor, were discovered in grave after grave. Herodotus said it was the custom of the Sauromatae in his time to let their young, unmarried women ride to war with the men. These graves appear to support his account of their culture as it was in his time, but they cannot confirm the legendary account of the Sauromatae's beginning. So, what's the connection between Herodotus, the Sauromatae, Hercules and Xena's Amazons, and fandom? Well, all these "facts" (and many others) get brought up time and again in the discussions. Every time there is an "Amazon" episode someone inevitably asks somewhere about the Amazons, what's the connection, how closely do the Amazons of the shows resemble the "real" Amazons and were the "real" Amazons a real people? We don't currently have any evidence that the Amazons of Greek myth really existed. They do seem to enter into a number of stories and traditions from around the Mediterranean region. However, their frequent associations with gods and mythical heroes implies that any real tribe on which the stories were based was not well known to the writers and artists who preserved the traditions. The Amazons were a long-dead people in Herodotus' day. (There is a story about an Amazon who visited Alexander the Great, but contemporary Greek writers doubted the veracity of the story.) Before I throw in the inevitable links to various Web sites, let me close out the Amazon saga by mentioning the "Amazon Nation" movie. This is a pilot for a potential series that Renaissance filmed over a year ago. It was directed by Michael Hurst (who plays Iolaus in both H:TLJ and X:WP) and has as guest-stars Danielle Cormack (Ephiny) and Karl Urban (Cupid, Caesar). Unfortunately, though many Herc/Xena fans have been looking forward to the film's debut, Renaissance hasn't been able to sell the picture. Even if the movie does go into distribution, it is now doubtful there will be a series. At Xena Online Resources we anticipated the fans' interest in the proposed series and set up an "Amazon Nation" page for links about sites devoted to the series. Through the inevitable delays we've kept the page alive by collecting links to various Amazon Web sites. You can use the XOR Amazon Links page to start your search for information on the Amazons of mythology and television. One of the sites we've found that I think is most interesting is 101 Amazons (actually fewer than sixty are listed), which provides brief biographies of Amazons from Greek mythology. You can read an abstract of an Archaeology magazine article which was published in early 1997 and which sparked a lot of debate and discussion among fans. Another interesting site we've found is Myseries of Ancient History and Archaeology -- The Amazons. This is a virtual archaeological expedition exploring evidence of the Amazons in art and tradition as revealed through ancient artifacts. We list this and other sites dealing with Greek mythology on Xena Online Resources' Mythology page. |
This page is copyright © 1997-2007 by Michael L. Martinez. All rights reserved. |