Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being

Preface

Preface This book began as a study of Amazons, the band of fearless , independent creatures so often inspiring to women now, near the end of the twentieth century A.D. Studying the myth of the Amazons in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., however, I realized that just as a new Amazonian myth belongs to our history of liberation movements, of changes in the sex/gender system, of new ideas of community, so the ancient myth of Amazons is embedded in a network of events, ideas, and social relations. Thus this study became an attempt to see the whole of a complex system, the ancient Athenian speculation about sexual, racial, and species difference, in works of visual as well as verbal art, in myths, vase-paintings, monumental sculpture, tragedy, comedy, philosophy. It is a study of culture, of a particular culture's ideas of same and other; my goal was a mapping of how the changing representation of these patterns of same and other occurred in the world of the Athenians. A deliberate effort was required, to transgress the limits of traditional academic disciplines and to move towards a sense of a complex lived reality. Thus this book is not "history of ideas," not art history, philosophy or literary criticism. And its writing demanded certain polemical choices. I limited my choice of examples, omitting some significant works of visual art; others were selected because they seemed illustrative of a patterning at work in Greek culture. I did not intend to offer an encyclopedia of all references to difference in the ancient world. Three tragedies, the Persae, the Trachiniae, and the Medea, were chosen because they are masterpieces , because they exemplify principles of reasoning about sameness and otherness. To be exhaustive, to mention every tragedy in which difference is an issue, seemed to me to risk losing the lines of my argument in a mass of detail. viii Centaurs and Amazons This is a polemical work on a variety of cultural forms and it treats each work as it relates to the problematic in question, not as an isolated artistic phenomenon. The selection of material to serve as the object of study was intentional, to enable discussion of the ideas which interested me. Such polemical choices always run the risk of offending scholars of particular disciplines; I am grateful for advice received from many scholars, and hope to have made a beginning for myself toward breaking down boundaries in classical scholarship, a field which seems to me ideally suited for a more totalizing vision. This study attempts to reconcile a diachronic with a synchronic analysis. It treats fifth-century ideas of difference as a system , while acknowledging a progress within the fifth century of speculation about difference. It maintains that there is a rupture with analogical discourse in the fourth century, and tries as well to situate this rupture in a continuum. I hope it will be of interest to feminist scholars, to historians and makers of cultural change, as well as to classicists. Because the change discussed here is so fundamental to the history of Western thought about difference and hierarchy, I have wanted to make the text accessible to the reader who does not read Greek. I have transliterated some Greek words, indicating omega and eta with the circumflex accent. The transliteration of Greek names varies, since I have in general followed the practice of using the form more familiar to most readers. ...