Amazon Moon (2 page)

All the soldiers had been proclaimed patriotic heroes by the Kavopolis Assembly for their part in a gory victory over Dorians. They were equipped with the finest iron swords forged at the Chalcis foundry on the island Euboea, and with the strongest bows made of horn: state-of-the-art killing instruments. The unit contained seven horseback lancers, thirteen archers, twenty foot-soldiers, a camp cook and a supply wagon, all under leadership of hawk-faced Commander Patros.

The warriors were on a search-and-destroy mission. From spy intelligence, they knew the concealed location of their target, a secret colony of rebels hidden in an isolated side-valley. The mouth of that valley was overgrown by an impenetrable thicket of thorn trees and vines. The spot appeared to be lonely wilderness. But the spy report disclosed that, beside a cliff at one edge of the ravine, tree branches could be pulled aside, revealing a narrow lane into the enclave. Also, the report said, occupants of the hidden colony always kept a sentry posted on a ledge above the cliff, lest outsiders discover the unknown sanctuary.

Commander Patros rode at the front, tall on a high black steed, a stiff figure of authority. From a rich family, he exuded the confidence of rank, social and military. Approaching a riverbend, he swung his horse and squelched the chanting.

"Silence among the troops."

The commander led the unit off the trail into the screen of trees. The men threaded the forest quietly until Patros waved a halt. He dismounted and peered between trunks at an overgrown side-valley barely visible ahead. He summoned a wiry archer he had selected for a stealthy task, and instructed him carefully:

"Don't approach directly or you will be seen. The sentry will sound an alarm and we will lose the element of surprise. Instead, climb the intervening hill, cross the ridge, and descend silently from above, unseen. After the sentry is removed, signal us and we will advance."

The archer checked his weaponry, test-pulled his bowstring, saluted, and hastened toward the hill. Grass of the valley floor was baked dull but foliage on the hillsides remained lush. The bowman stayed within the cover of bushes as he crept to the top, then quietly descended the opposite slope.

The sentry, a young Amazon, was bored from staring at the still ravine. Day after day she had served her shift on the clifftop ledge without even a passing squirrel to break the monotony. Around her neck, suspended by a leather thong, was a trumpet crafted from a ram's horn. In event of intruders, she was to sound it and run down the path to the village, blowing as she went, to alert the whole Amazon colony. But the trumpet never had been blown, neither by her nor others taking their turns on watch.

The sentry's hair was honey color, unlike the black locks of most Mediterranean people, indicating that her ancestors had been Slavs from the north. In the sultry heat, she wore the briefest tunic. She paced back and forth on the ledge, restless. She watched a spider string its web between branches of a bush. She scratched and fidgeted. She stretched and yawned. She was in mid-yawn when the arrow pierced her heart. She looked astonished and clutched the shaft protruding between her breasts. She tried to gasp but couldn't breathe. Her knees buckled. She fell onto the front of the ledge and tumbled down the cliff.

Moments later, the archer emerged into the Thermodon Valley sunshine and waved to the waiting platoon. Commander Patros signaled the advance. The warriors left the woods, approached the side-valley, and carefully entered the hidden lane by the cliff. They passed the twisted body of the sentry, her arms and legs skewed oddly.

The Greek fighters neared the upstream edge of the thicket. Through branches they glimpsed the colony, the secret village of Amazons. Some women splashed nude in a dammed creek. Others cooked in doorways. In vegetable gardens, male slaves hoed under female supervision. A few girl children were seen.

Hidden by greenery, Patros quietly arrayed his warriors for the attack. Horsemen readied their lances. Archers fitted arrows to strings. Foot soldiers drew their swords and adjusted their shields. Silently the commander raised his arm to launch the surprise assault.

2

The television set, tuned to a light classics channel, exuded a tender Chopin nocturne. But the nude couple on a livingroom rug before a glowing gas fireplace barely noticed. They clutched each other fervently in the agonized ecstasy of lovemaking, gasping and moaning. They were like a pair of wild animals. Afterward they sank limp in each other's arms, breathing heavily. She recited softly:

"They made love as if they were an endangered species."

"What's that from?"

"A Peter DeVries novel, I think."

As new lovers, Jack Hastings and Carolina King basked in happiness. Each evening, after their university classes and student jobs, they hurried home to their off-campus flat and the joy of being together: sharing candlelight dinners, studying head-to-head at the kitchen table, watching television entwined on the couch, making rapturous love night after night. Sometimes they remained naked all weekend in the privacy of their hideaway.

"That's what I like, quick access to your body," Jack said, patting her.

With a well-directed squeeze, she showed that his was just as accessible.

Some nights they slept like cradled spoons. He curled around her from behind, cupping her breasts in his hands.

"Do you suppose males have been holding females like this since cave days?"

"Probably," she answered, adding tongue-in-cheek: "Maybe that can be your next research project."

Both were 24. Both were completing master's degrees in archeology, focusing on ancient Greece. They had met in a classic languages seminar and felt instant affinity. Jack liked her spirited intelligence and unadorned good looks. She was oblivious to hairdos, cosmetics, fashions and jewelry but was alluring in jeans or shorts. She liked his honest eyes and lean fitness. After a few dates they wound up in her dormitory bed. Then they moved into the low-rent flat together. Both had gone through brief previous romances, but their bond with each other was deeper.

One morning after lovemaking, as they cuddled nude in each other's arms, Jack mischeviously began humming the melody, "Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the morning." At first, in her dreamy state, Carolina didn't detect his wordless joke. Then she sat upright in mock outrage.

"You clod! How unromantic!" She walloped him with a pillow while he laughed and shielded his head with his arms.

Thereafter, on mornings when they felt amorous, as he groped under her nightgown and her body responded, she eyed him archly and cautioned: "No more humming." He smiled and recited, "Yes, dear." She added, squirming naked against him: "And don't think it, either." At that point, he would do anything she asked. "Of course not."

He realized that his craving for her was growing into love.

Archeology consumed them. She had grown up in rural southern Ohio, Adena mound country. When she was in grade school, her uncle, digging in his garden, found flint arrowheads chipped by Indians. She became fascinated by traces of long-vanished peoples. In high school she joined an archeology club and helped unearth remnants of ancient villages, finding patterns of life that existed centuries ago. Jack was raised in Arizona near abandoned cliff dwellings that once teemed with pre-Pueblo life. He too was tantalized by the detective work of sifting fragmentary clues to fathom long-ago cultures that disappeared.

Both had finished their bachelor degrees with honors. For their master's theses, they chose two aspects of classical Greece. He outlined slavery that sustained Greek society. About half of that ancient populace consisted of bondservants. Some entered slavery by being born to bondwomen, some by being abandoned as children or sold by poor families, some by being captured in endless warfare in Aegean coastal lands. Affluent homes had several domestic slaves. Farms, mines, tanneries, quarries, brickyards, logging camps, carpenter shops, potteries, slaughterhouses and other workplaces operated on captive labor. Slavery upheld the economy. Many bondservants were Slavs, from whom the word slave derived.

Both Jack and Carolina had mastered classic Greek language. Hour after hour he pored over digitized images of ancient documents via his laptop computer.

"The Internet is incredible," he said, looking up from his screen. "I can find all the writing fragments in twenty European museums, just by clicking. I've got the whole Library of Congress and Athens Museum at my fingertips. A few years ago, this much research would have taken months."

For her thesis, Carolina chose a more intriguing topic: the strange contradiction posed by Amazons. Why did Greek males subjugate women completely, yet create more than a thousand writings, paintings and sculptures about fierce warrior women, the opposite of subdued Greek females? The first draft of her thesis began:

In ancient Greece, as in many past cultures (and a few present ones) male supremacy reigned to an extreme. Women mostly were chattel, possessions of men, scarcely above slaves, rarely educated. The whole society deemed them inferior. During Greece's Golden Age, around 25 centuries ago, great male thinkers taught male pupils the earliest known ventures into logic and scientific reason, planting intellectual seeds that gradually undermined the gods and magic of the times. But females rarely were allowed into this learning or any other activity outside the home. Typically, a woman was confined to a man's house and courtyard along with his other belongings. She prepared food, provided sex, raised children, and obeyed.

Female babies were less wanted, often placed on trash heaps to die. Some poor families sold daughters to slave traders or brothel owners. Otherwise, a girl stayed inside her father's house until about age fifteen. Then her father arranged a marriage to a suitable man, usually around thirty, and paid the groom a dowry to bribe him to take her. Thus the girl ceased belonging to her father and belonged instead to a man she hadn't met. Thereafter she remained within her husband's house and grounds as his possession. If he was kindly, she was fortunate. If he was abusive, she had little choice but to suffer.

If her husband was affluent enough to afford household slaves, the wife served as their overseer, although her status barely exceeded theirs. Poor homes lacked slaves, and wives performed all the housekeeping labor.

Carolina quoted Euripides' classic play, written in the fifth century BCE, in which Medea lamented: "Women would be better off as cattle than as we are, a subspecies of the human race. First, at great expense, we buy ourselves a husband. What is a dowry unless a payment for marriage? But then he owns us, especially our bodies."

Carolina quoted a Sophocles play of the same era in which Procne, wife of Tereus, protested: "We women are nothing.... When we attain maidenhood, we are driven away from our homes, sold as merchandise, and compelled to marry. Some go to strange men's homes, others to foreigners, some to joyless houses, some to hostile. Once the first night has yoked us to our husbands, we are forced to praise him and say that all is well."

Although Carolina never attended feminist rallies, she resented mistreatment of women. Her thesis enabled her to vent. Her draft continued:

Officially, polygamy didn't exist in ancient Greece, yet it was common, and wives were forced to endure it. A man with sufficient income could bring home slave girls or concubines purchased from brothels, creating his private harem. Outside his home, he could pay elite prostitutes called hetaera, or dally with common streetwalkers, or visit holy hookers in temples to the gods. The great Aphrodite temple at Corinth reputedly contained more than a thousand consecrated prostitutes mixing sex and religion, earning fees that enriched the house of worship and its priests.

Oddly, since each respectable female was confined to her husband's or father's home, the only women seen in public were the elegant hetaera or lowly street prostitutes, plus an occasional foreign visitor not subject to Greece's strictures.

One reason that Greek men deemed women inferior was that they were of little use in Greece's recurring warfare, because they were smaller and less muscled. In those times, combat was largely face to face: brutal chopping, spearing, clubbing and stabbing, toe to toe. Testosterone-laced males, larger and stronger, were the warriors. Heroes were powerful hulks who could kill the most rivals. It was a macho bloodbath. Women had no place in the gore.

Then Carolina turned to the great contradiction and mystery of the Amazons:

Amid the male rule, an oddity occurred. Many male writers, painters and sculptors portrayed fierce female warriors—Amazons—who renounced men, lived apart from them, and fought them in combat. They were a stark opposite of most Greek women. This contrast has puzzled researchers for centuries. In most of the tales, strong Greek fighters killed the lighter Amazons or took them captive. This has led some psychologists to speculate that the stories were myths reinforcing the male need for domination—or a veiled warning to Greek women, showing them what would happen if they rebelled against their subjugation. Did the Amazons really exist or were they a male fantasy? This question has plagued scholars.

More than a thousand ancient Greek pottery paintings and sculpted reliefs bear Amazon battle scenes. Carved burial vaults feature the fighting females. Even the majestic Parthenon temple of Athens displays Amazon combat. No other topic was more prevalent in classic Greek art. Museums around the world contain multitudes of these works unearthed by archeologists.

About fifty ancient Greek and Roman bards told of Amazons. Unfortunately, many of their writings were rhapsodic poetry, vivid chronicles of mighty heroes entangled with gods, goddesses, astounding creatures and magical happenings. Also, some of the accounts differ greatly. Finding reliable facts amid the contradictions and supernatural hokum is difficult. Early Greek poems, like most parts of the Bible, were recited orally by troubadours before they finally were preserved in writing (sometimes on thin sheets of wood, or painted onto pottery, or inked onto perishable papyrus from Egypt, or inscribed in wax, and finally penned onto durable parchment from sheep hide). Writing flowered after Greeks became the first to develop an alphabet with vowels, enabling spoken sounds to be written down more easily.