Theseus

Here, he says. the Athenians were routed and driven back by the women as far as the shrine of the Eumenides, but those who attacked the invaders from the Palladium and Ardettus and the Lyceum, drove their right wing back as far as to their camp, and slew many of them. And after three months, he says, a treaty of peace was made through the agency of Hippolyta; for Hippolyta is the name which Cleidemus gives to the Amazon whom Theseus married, not Antiope.

But some say that the woman was slain with a javelin by Molpadia, while fighting at Theseus’s side, and that the pillar which stands by the sanctuary of Olympian Earth was set up in her memory.

And it is not astonishing that history, when dealing with events of such great antiquity, should wander in uncertainty, indeed, we are also told that the wounded Amazons were secretly sent away to Chalcis by Antiope, and were nursed there, and some were buried there, near what is now called the Amazoneum. But that the war ended in a solemn treaty is attested not only by the naming of the place adjoining the Theseum, which is called Horcomosium,[*](From the oaths of ratification.) but also by the sacrifice which, in ancient times, was offered to the Amazons before the festival of Theseus.

And the Megarians, too, show a place in their country where Amazons were buried, on the way from the market-place to the place called Rhus[*](Stream, because water from the mountains above the city once flowed this way. Paus. 1.41.), where the Rhomboid[*](The Rhomboid may have been an irregular mound.) stands. And it is said, likewise, that others of them died near Chaeroneia, and were buried on the banks of the little stream which, in ancient times, as it seems, was called Thermodon, but nowadays, Haemon; concerning which names I have written in my Life of Demosthenes.[*](Plut. Dem. 19) It appears also that not even Thessaly was traversed by the Amazons without opposition, for Amazonian graves are to this day shown in the vicinity of Scotussa and Cynoscephalae.

So much, then, is worthy of mention regarding the Amazons. For the Insurrection of the Amazons, written by the author of the Theseid, telling how, when Theseus married Phaedra, Antiope and the Amazons who fought to avenge her attacked him, and were slain by Heracles, has every appearance of fable and invention.

Theseus did, indeed, marry Phaedra, but this was after the death of Antiope, and he had a son by Antiope, Hippolytus, or, as Pindar says,[*](In a passage not extant.) Demophoon. As for the calamities which befell Phaedra and the son of Theseus by Antiope, since there is no conflict here between historians and tragic poets, we must suppose that they happened as represented by the poets uniformly.