Theseus carried off an Amazon — Antiope, Melanippe, or Hippolyte in the rival lists — and her sisters marched on Athens in vengeance; he defeated them at the city, and by the captive he begot Hippolytus, the hunter who would scorn Aphrodite.1
The Amazon carried off
After he was king, Theseus joined Heracles in a campaign against the Amazons — or raided them alone — and carried away a princess. Apollodorus names her Antiope; others say Melanippe, and Simonides calls her Hippolyte. She must not be confused with Antiope the Theban mother of Amphion: this is the warrior bride of the Thermodon, and the sources never agree on her name.2
The Amazons at Athens
The Amazons marched on Attica in anger for their stolen queen and encamped on the height that was afterwards called the Amazonium. Theseus met them in battle, routed their host, and killed Hippolyte — or she fled to Megara and died of despair, as the Megarians showed her tomb shaped like an Amazon's shield near the shrine of Pandion.3
Hippolytus
By the Amazon Theseus begot Hippolytus, a youth who devoted himself to Artemis and would have nothing to do with women — the son whose stepmother's false charge and his father's curse would one day call up a bull from the sea. Pausanias knew the Amazonium in Athens and the tomb at Megara as landmarks of the campaign that bound the hunter's fate to his father's house.4
· EXEUNT ·
How the centuries saw it
In play
Penthesilea
The Amazon queen who dies at Achilles' hand — the Trojan War's most famous Amazon duel.
Amazon (mythology)
The warrior women of myth — from Hippolyta's belt to Troy's walls — remain antiquity's emblem of female arms.
Aethiopis
The lost epic that brought Penthesilea and Memnon to Troy — Amazon and Aethiopian allies in Achilles' last days.