Penthesilea- the Queen of the Amazons
A cura di Elisa Lorenzini, Melissa Laurenti e Sofia Orsini, 3AS
Penthesilea is a character who belongs to Greek mythology. Her deeds were narrated mainly in the Ethiopides, an ancient Greek epic poem, part of the Trojan cycle, which has been lost.
She was the queen of the Amazons, a people of warrior women who inhabited modern-day Pontus during the period of the Ilium War. She was the daughter of Ares and Otrera and sister of three other amazon queens, all daughters of Ares: Hippolyta, Antiope and Melanippe, who according to some myths are actually all three the same person.
According to the myth, however, Penthesilea was guilty of the death of her sister Hippolyta; in fact, during a fight that took place at the wedding banquet of Theseus and Freda, where Hippolyta had introduced the Amazons to kill Theseus’ guests, Penthesilea struck her sister by error. This crime led Penthesilea to be followed by the Furies, the personification of revenge for family crimes, who, along with twelve of her Amazons, went to Ilium in search of help. There she was confronted with the Trojan War recounted in the Iliad. Initially the queen wanted to depart but Paris persuaded her through gifts of gold to stay to support Troy in the war. Another version says that after the death of her sister, Penthesilea wanted to die but because Amazons can only die with honor in battle, she went to Troy specifically in search of death. Penthesilea was, however, condemned by Aphrodite to be raped by all men who saw her. Covered by her armor so that she was indistinguishable from other Amazons, she went down to war and brought down many great heroes such as: Antitheus, Eilissus, Elysippus, Hippalmos, Lerno, Macaon, Mollion, Persinus, and Podarce, until she was killed on the battlefield by Achilles.
There are then several versions of the myth. One in which Achilles, recognizing the queen’s great courage, would return her body to the Trojans for a proper burial. The most famous, however, is the version in which, upon the death of Penthesilea, Achilles, because of the condemnation inflicted by Aphrodite, fell in love with her and possessed by Eros performed an act of necrophilia; later Thersites made a mockery of Achilles’ sentiment, who then killed him. There is, also, a version of the myth where it is Penthesilea who killed Achilles; following his death Thetis, Achilles’ mother, prayed Zeus to perform a miracle on her son’s corpse that would bring him back to life. During the Trojan War, eleven of the twelve women who had accompanied Penthesilea also died, the only one to be saved was Cleta who escaped to Italy.
Some stories tell that she was the one who invented the battle-ax and the halberd. Her character is later also taken up in several poems. In the Inferno she is placed by Dante among the cursed in Limbo. Boccaccio tells an original myth of her in his work De mulieribus claris, in which she was in love with Hector. She also appears in Orlando in Love and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and inspired Othmar Schoeck’s opera named precisely Penthesilea. Italo Calvino gives its name to one of his Invisible Cities, and Carmelo Bene drew inspiration for the opera Penthesilea from the myth of Achilles and Penthesilea.
