Amazon setting out with horse. Mannheim Painter, active c 450 BC: Greek Attic red-figure Ceramic.

This is the kind of female warrior presented by Shakespeare as his Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream and again with Hippolyta and Emilia in The Two Noble Kinsmen. The Amazons were a nation of all-female warriors in Classical and Greek mythology. Herodotus placed them in a region bordering Scythia (modern Ukraine). Notable queens of the Amazons are Penthesilea, who participated in the Trojan War, and her sister Hippolyte, whose magical girdle, given to her by her father Ares, was the object of one of the labors of Hercules. Amazonian raiders were often depicted in battle with Greek warriors in amazonomachies in classical art. They are emphatically not weak females readily dominated by men. Greek Attic Red-figure: New York. Metropolitan Museum of Art. ©Kathleen Cohen: World Images (California State University): under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.