Penthesilea

• 1. Introduction

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  Penthesilea arrived at Troy with twelve Amazon warriors at her side, prepared to fight for a city near its final hours. She was the daughter of Ares and the sister of Hippolyta, Antiope, and Melanippe. She had one day on the battlefield before Achilles killed her. In the immediate aftermath, a soldier named Thersites accused Achilles of having fallen in love with the woman he had just slain. Achilles struck Thersites dead. He then sailed to the island of Lesbos to be purified before returning to the war. The asteroid 271 Penthesilea, discovered in 1887, was eventually named in her honor. What drove an Amazon queen from Thrace to the walls of Troy? Why did artists and writers return to her story for more than two thousand years? How did one afternoon of combat generate so much grief, so much art, and so much argument?

• 2. The Lost Epic

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  The Aethiopis, a 5-book poem attributed to Arctinus of Miletus, was published in the 8th century BC. It was part of the Epic Cycle, a connected series of poems built around the Trojan War. In this poem, Penthesilea is a Thracian woman warrior. Achilles is the main character. He fights Penthesilea, then fights the warrior Memnon, and is himself eventually killed. So her story is embedded in a sequence where even the greatest hero dies. The Aethiopis has been lost, but the Epic Cycle was adapted and recycled throughout the classical age. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, grounded in oral tradition, were only written down after the Greek alphabet was adopted. The version of events in the Aethiopis became known as the Homeric tradition.

  Homer recorded that Priam had fought Amazons in his youth on the Sangarius River in Phrygia. That river sits roughly 350 miles east of Troy. Later writers placed Amazons across a broader sweep of Anatolia. They built an epic tradition where heroes such as Heracles and Theseus each confronted a famous Amazon warrior.

  Neoptolemus, not Achilles, kills Penthesilea in one alternative version of the myth. Stesichorus, who published his now-lost poem in the 7th or 6th century BC, went even further. In his telling, Penthesilea killed Hector, placing her not as a fallen adversary of Achilles but as the slayer of Troy's greatest defender. Lycophron, writing in the 3rd century BC, was among the first later writers to push openly against the Homeric tradition.

• 3. Beyond the Epic Cycle

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  Lycophron was born in Euboea, home to a shrine honoring wounded Amazons who had fought in a mythic Battle for Athens. Writing in the 3rd century BC, he shifted the focus of the legend away from the battlefield entirely. He told the story of Clete, a young Amazon attendant left behind in Pontus when Penthesilea marched to Troy. When Penthesilea did not return, Clete set out with a company of Amazons to find her. Their ship was swept off course and wrecked on the toe of Italy, in the region of Bruttium. Clete became the queen of the Amazons who settled there. Later sources trace the idea of linking the Penthesilea legend to Rome's founding myth back to Lycophron.

  Virgil's Aeneid, written between 29-19 BC, casts Penthesilea as a tragic figure. Achilles had dragged Hector around the walls of Troy and sold his body back to king Priam for gold. Against that backdrop of ruin, Penthesilea arrived too late. Virgil called her a bellatrix, the Latin word for "female warrior," who "dared to fight men" (audetque viris concurrere virgo). When Aeneas sees a panel of Penthesilea in the Juno temple at Carthage, he reads her defeat as a warning. It foreshadows the fall of the city itself. Virgil also connects Penthesilea's fate to that of Camilla, an Italian warrior whose story he describes in detail later in the epic. In the Aeneid, the Trojans who escaped the war sailed to Italy and became the ancestors of the Romans. Penthesilea's story was thus woven into Rome's own origin.

  Diodorus Siculus, writing in the 1st century BC, named Penthesilea the last Amazon to win renown for valor in war. After Troy fell, he wrote, the Amazons dwindled until their former glory was remembered only as legend. The 4th century AD poet Quintus Smyrnaeus opened his Posthomerica with Penthesilea's story, trying to finish what Homer had started. Smyrnaeus gave the legend an origin: Penthesilea had accidentally killed Hippolyta with a spear while the two were hunting deer. Overcome with grief and wishing to die, she could only pursue death honorably in battle. She therefore had little resistance when she was persuaded to join the Trojan War. Smyrnaeus describes her cutting through the Greek lines, killing eight warriors, and cutting the arm off the Greek who had slain her companion Klonie. Amazon comrades named Bremusa, Evandre, Thermodosa, Derinoe, Alkibie, and Derimachea fought beside her before all were killed. From the towers of Troy, the young Hippodamia watched and was moved to act. Antimachus's daughter Tisiphone gave a speech urging the Trojan women to join the battle: "not in strength are we inferior to men; the same our eyes, our limbs the same; one common light we see, one air we breathe." By the time Smyrnaeus wrote in the 4th century AD, Penthesilea had already been memorialized in art for several centuries.

• 4. Stone, Marble, and Clay

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  Built in the mid to late 5th century BC, the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae contains the Bassae Frieze. This high-relief marble sculpture fills 23 panels with scenes from the battle between Amazons and Greeks. The Greek army is charged by the Amazons, who gain the upper hand. At the height of the battle, on the slab known as BM 537, Achilles kills Penthesilea. She is identified as a queen by a crown and shown on the ground just before the killing blow. She and Achilles exchange a gaze. The final slab of the Amazon sequence shows a truce between the two armies.

  At the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, the throne of Zeus itself bore a painting by the artist Panaenus. Pausanias described what he saw there: "at the extremity of the painting, is Penthesilea breathing her last, and Achilles supporting her." That motif traveled through the ancient world. It was preserved at the Temple of Aphrodisias and reinterpreted in sculptures and mosaics across ancient Rome.

  A black-figure vase from around 510-500 BC shows Achilles carrying Penthesilea from the battlefield. One Athenian painter was so consistently drawn to the subject that the art historian Adolf Furtwangler gave him a name: the Penthesilea Painter. This artist was active between 470-450 BC. His work bridged two phases of ancient Greek art, the Severe style and Classicism. A considerable corpus of his work was assembled by the scholar J.D. Beazley.

  A white-ground alabastron from the 6th century BCE takes the subject in an unexpected direction. It depicts Penthesilea being courted by a female Thracian hunter named Theraichme. The scene inverts a standard pattern in Athenian art, in which a suitor presents a gift, typically a rabbit, to the beloved. Here Theraichme plays that role toward Penthesilea. Benoît de Sainte-Maure, who wrote the Roman de Troie in 1160, was the first to give Penthesilea a new reason to go to Troy.

• 5. The Chivalric Amazon

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  Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, written in 1160, gave Penthesilea a new reason to march to Troy. In the ancient versions she came as a warrior seeking battle. In this medieval tradition she came because she had fallen in love with Hector from afar. She knelt before Hector's corpse and vowed to avenge his death. She fought alongside the Trojans, killed many Greek soldiers, and was ultimately slain by Achilles' son. Her body was taken to the Thermodon for burial. Along the Terme River, temple burial sites attest to the heroic status she held in the medieval imagination. Through the Roman de Troie, Penthesilea entered the roman antique genre, which recycled Greek and Roman myths within the framework of chivalric romance.

  In John Gower's Confessio Amanatis, Penthesilea travels to Troy from Pafagoine. She is slain by Pirrus, the son of Achilles. A man named Philemenis returned her body for burial and was rewarded with three fair maidens per year. Christine de Pizan included Penthesilea in The Book of the City of Ladies in 1405. John Lydgate's Troy Book, which appeared in 1420, paired Penthesilea and Hector as embodiments of chivalric virtue. The 1405 chronicle known as the Haagse handschrift was compiled by the herald Baviere. It grouped Penthesilea with the Amazons Semiramis and Tomyris in a list of strong women. Between 1465-1480, a Netherlandish list of 101 strong women circulated at the court of Mary of Burgundy. Members of the Brussels administration read it. Philippe Bouton in 1480 published his Miroir des dames, which also featured her.

  Giovanni Boccaccio's De Mulieribus Claris, completed between 1361-1362, was the first biography collection in Western literature devoted entirely to famous women. It was written in Latin and dedicated to Andrea Acciaioli, the Countess of Altavilla. According to Boccaccio, Penthesilea succeeded the Amazon queens Antiope and Orithyia and surpassed them in strength and skill. He described her entering the Trojan War to prove herself to Hector. She and her Amazon troops were killed in a hard-fought battle. Boccaccio concluded that if upbringing and practice could change natural dispositions, the Amazon legends became plausible. He wrote: "through practice, Penthesilea and women like her became much more manly in arms than those born male." Those men, he added, had been weakened by idleness and love of pleasure. That claim opened a debate. Agostino Strozzi and Mario Equicola took it up in 16th century Italy, discussing whether gender differences were natural or the product of training. The argument Boccaccio introduced in 1361 outlasted every court that read his book. Heinrich von Kleist, centuries later, would carry it to a violent extreme.

• 6. Stage, Score, and Page

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  Heinrich von Kleist's drama Penthesilea unfolds in twenty-four consecutive scenes with no formal breaks into acts. Kleist described its rhythm as a "precipitously violent tempo." The most striking departure from the ancient tradition is this: in Kleist's drama, it is Penthesilea who kills Achilles, not the other way around. She and her dogs maul him. When she understands what she has done to the object of her desire, she dies through what Kleist calls "a crushing feeling." The Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck based a 90-minute one-act opera on the Kleist drama. It premiered in Dresden in 1927. The French composer Pascal Dusapin wrote his own opera from Kleist's text. It premiered in 2015 at La Monnaie in Brussels, conducted by Ludovic Morlot.

  Hugo Wolf had been drawn to the legend independently. The Austrian composer lived from 1860-1903. He wrote a symphonic poem titled Penthesilea between 1883-85, drawing on the myth directly rather than through any literary intermediary.

  The American author Edward Bellamy placed the year 1887 at the center of his 1888 novel Looking Backward. His main character, Julian West, is transported from that year to the year 2000. In the future, West reads a novel titled "Penthesilia" (spelled without the second e) by a fictional 20th century writer named Berrian. Bellamy presents it as a romance about the true power and fullest extent of love.

  Robert Graves returned to the story in a short poem titled "Penthesileia." Achilles becomes infatuated with the Amazon immediately after killing her. The final verse has been read two different ways. Some interpreters take Penthesilea's closing words as thanks to the soldier who defended her honor; others read them as addressed to Achilles himself. Graves left the question open.

  The American poet Judy Grahn placed Penthesilea in an underground Lesbian bar in her long poem The Queen of Swords. A middle-class woman named Helen is being led through a reckoning with her own past. Penthesilea, called Pen in the text, rises from the floor and asks Helen to touch her so she can live on earth again. In Grahn's poem, Pen describes herself: "Penthesilea, Amazon Queen, who went once to war to save Queen Helen (that was you). 'Able to make men mourn' my name signifies, supreme Amazon speeding to the neediness of Troy, leader of twelve good warrior maidens, battle-scarred and with fierce reputation. We were the last hope that queenly Troy could keep intact the power of women and the greatest beauty in the world." The 2015 premiere at La Monnaie placed those words on a living stage, more than two thousand years after the Aethiopis was written.