Soon after the Persian King
of Kings, Darius III, was betrayed and executed by Bessus (one of his satraps
or governors) in 330 BCE, Alexander the Great marched his forces to a region
known a Hyrcania, located just to the east of the Caspian sea. While he was
there, he secured fertile farmlands for his empire, hired mercenaries and
pacified a local tribe that allegedly had the audacity to steal Alexander’s
horse. There was, however, another incident that occurred in Hyrcania that was
controversial enough to cause even the ancient authorities on Alexander’s life
to fiercely squabble over the truth.
The interesting episode that the ancient
sources on Alexander’s life disagreed upon was a peculiar story in which
Alexander the Great spent nearly two weeks of pleasure with a queen of the
mythical Amazon warrior-women, a group likely inspired by the historical Scythian
or Sarmatian civilizations, which featured prominent roles for women.
According to myth, the Amazons (which
translates approximately to “no breast”) were a society of warrior women who
were so devoted to their militancy that the members of the tribe would remove
one of their breasts to make themselves better at launching deadly projectiles.
According to the tales, they ruled a domain to the north of Hyrcania and the
Caspian Sea. As they were an exclusively female tribe, the warrior women would
periodically breed with foreign men to ensure the survival of their civilization.
Yet, the fathers were not allowed to stay in Amazon territory, and male
children were killed or exiled.
Bringing us back to Alexander the
Great, legend has it that one particular queen of the Amazons, named Thalestris,
heard of the impressive victories of Alexander against the Persians. The tales
of his achievements were so extraordinary that she immediately left her homeland
with a band of 300 Amazons to find the conqueror. What she had on her mind was
an experiment of ancient eugenics—she believed that Alexander, as the greatest
man of the age, and herself, as the greatest woman, could produce truly great
children.
Thalestris and her honor guard of armed
women supposedly intercepted Alexander near Hyrcania, or possibly in Parthia,
where she blatantly declared that she wanted to have a child with the king. Alexander
the Great, at the time an unmarried bachelor, was said to have eagerly agreed
to the proposal. According to the tale, Alexander spent thirteen nights
heroically seeing to the queen’s desire. After nearly two weeks of passion, Queen
Thalestris returned to her realm in the north, confident that she was pregnant
with a mighty child.
If the tale seems too far-fetched, you
are not alone. Even the most ancient biographers of Alexander were split on the
validity of this particular encounter. Plutarch
(c. 46-119 CE) later wrote down a list of the two factions of Alexander
biographers in his own text about Alexander the Great. On the side of doubters
was Aristobulus, Chares, Ptolemy, Anticleides,
Philo the Theban, Philip of Theangela, Hecataeus of Eretria, Philip the
Chalcidian, and Duris of Samos. On the other hand, the advocates of the
controversial episode were Cleitarchus, Polycleitus, Onesicritus, Antigenes,
and Ister. Even though Plutarch sided with the skeptics, his own generation of
historians still disagreed about the tale. A century before Plutarch, Diodorus
Siculus happily included the enticing episode in his own text, The Library of History. In the end, it
is best to regard the story of Alexander and Thalestris as unrealistic folklore,
but, nevertheless, it makes for an interesting read.
Written by C. Keith Hansley.
Picture attribution: (Thalestris, Queen of the Amazons, visits Alexander, printed
c. 1696, [Public Domain] via Creative Commons).
- Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2011.
- http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0243%3Achapter%3D46
- http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/17D*.html#note76
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bessus
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sarmatian
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