She-devils on horseback

Rumour will run wild about a society of warrior women, somehow free from the world of men. We all feel we know the Amazons, even if we struggle to connect them with the planet’s largest rainforest, river and internet company. But the historical reality of that thrilling and threatening tribe proves to be elusive. Even two millennia ago, the Greek geographer Strabo marvelled at his fellow men’s credulity about the Amazons: ‘the same stories are told now as in early times, although they are wondrous and beyond belief.’ Now John Man, the enthusiastic historian of Asia, dissects the Amazons with sharp scalpel and acute scepticism.

The Amazons were there from the start: for Homer they were antianeirai, ‘anti-men’; for Aeschylus ‘haters of men’. Heroes won their stripes by subduing these viragos: Achilles slew Penthesilea, the Amazonian queen; Hercules parted Hippolyte from her girdle; Theseus fended off a whole army from Athens.