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"My men have turned into women and my women into men!" exclaims Xerxes as Artemisia sinks the ship next to her's - and this is exactly what gives the Greeks the willies. Wives who arrange for kings' murders over apparently minor injury; widows who refuse to marry powerful emperors; mothers who command their sons in battle; queens who are fully competent in defending their countries without aid - these things are terrifying to a culture complacent in its utter suppression of women. In The Histories, Herodotus uses the strangeness of these women to complement the strangeness of the other non-Greek cultures, and vice-versa. This is evident in the way he speaks about them, the actions and thoughts he ascribes to them, and by describing the barbaric customs of their respective cultures. The first woman introduced in The Histories is left un-named. This omission does not appear to be ignorance, but seems more likely to be showing the respect that Athenian women are given. However, this rather pointed similarity to Greek women makes Candaules' wife that much more strange. Whereas women of Athens are completely controlled by the men in their lives, this one not only controls her own fate, but goes so far as to terminate her husband's and place "strong necessity" (anagkh) upon another man's, not to mention instigating regicide and a new ruler. This image is disparate to the point of alarm from that of the good Greek woman, like Penelope being dominated by Telemachus. But Herodotus only draws that connection with one woman, the others he calls by name, seemingly treating them the same as he treats the foreign men. It could be argued that he is demeaning them with this familiarity, but I would argue that he is rather pointing out that their independence and power makes it impossible to define them only through their relatively insignificant relationships with men. Artemisia and Tomyris were both widows before they could come into their power, but their husbands are unnamed, and the marriage status of Nitocris is never mentioned (despite the presence of a son). Remembering the laws created to keep any kind of power - even over small property, spending money, and citizenship - in the hands of men, this is significant. Further, when he speaks of Nitocris and Artemisia, he has a tone of respect for their forethought and accomplishments, which he describes in detail. The very attitude of respect, rather than superiority or even mockery that might be expected about a woman in power, highlights the differentness of these women. It's not just the way he speaks of these queens that makes them stick out, but the deeds and plans he attributes to them. Artemisia is Xerxes delight. While she doesn't manage to persuade him away from Salamis, her arguments are blunt, unwavering and well-founded. And when she cannot convince him, she fights in the battle anyway. Interesting she sinks one of her own ships - but this is not incompetence in any way. Not only does she thus evade the attacking, and superior, Attic ship, she also gains favor with Xerxes, who only sees her sinking ships, and assumes they are of the enemy. She mentions, however, more than once the inferiority of women to men. This should not be as surprising considering how close to Greek she is (Halicarnassus, where Herodotus is from, and Greek Crete) - what makes it odd is how plainly her example refutes that. She proves to be more observant than any other advisor and a more effective (as Odysseus is effective) fighter. Babylonian Nitocris, far from Greece, never makes any such statements. She is effective as well, performing an almost Heraclean deed of changing the course of the Euphrates to best defend her kingdom when she hears that other kingdoms are falling. The kingdom was not taken during her reign, as it seems, but in her son's. And Tomyris' kingdom wasn't taken at all! Not only did she start making physical defenses when she heard of Cyrus' approach, she prepared to meet him on his own ground. But this was foiled by a plan from Croesus which worked on the barbaric nature of the Massagetae: their inexperience with wine and cultivated meat - the very standards of the civilization of the Greeks. But perhaps it is better to say that her men, including her own son, were foiled by this, for she was not, and turned around to destroy the Persians and Cyrus himself in what Herodotus dubbed, "the fiercest battle between non-Greeks there has ever been." Tomryis is a far cry from Andromache being shushed back to her room from the walls of Troy. What Tomyris did after the battle, though, is what really made her strange: to quench Cyrus' thirst for blood after he killed her son, the queen filled a bag with blood and stuck his severed head inside. The Greeks thought Achilles was off his rocker when all he did was drag his enemy around a couple times - Tomyris must have seemed criminally insane. This has two degrees of strangeness; first, it brings to mind the extremism credited to women in Athens (described nicely in Aeschylus' Oresteia), and second, it illustrates the intense otherness of non-Greek cultures. The latter point is expanded soon after by listing the customs of the Massagetaeans. This inventory is clearly meant to impart their inherent weirdness, citing everything from drinking milk, to the sexual availability of women to all, to the sacrifice of old people. A similar catalog is done regarding the Babylonians, from the auctioning of marriages to the ritual temple prostitution for Mylitta (Aphrodite). We are meant to remember that these women are not the women who live next door. The strangeness of these women is inescapable. Their power and intelligence is obviously unfeigned, and so incongruent from the Greek image of woman that it reinforces the otherness of the non-Greek cultures. At the same time, the manifest oddness of the non-Greek customs reinforces the otherness of these queens. They complement each other in supporting the status quo of Greece by more clearly defining what was and what wasn't Greek.
Read some more of Ailia's essays
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Contact me at ailiathena@yahoo.com Written before May 2002 at Oberlin College Last Updated April 19, 2005
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