page_title: Amazons
section_title: Battles with and against Dionysus
hierarchical_section_title: Amazons / Mythology / Battles with and against Dionysus
context_page_description: In Greek mythology, the Amazons were a tribe of warrior women believed to live in Asia Minor. Apollonius Rhodius, in his Argonautica, mentions that the Amazons were the daughters of Ares and Harmonia, that they were brutal and aggressive, and their main concern in life was war. Lysias, Isocrates, Philostratus the Elder also said that their father was Ares.
  Herodotus and Strabo place them on the banks of the Thermodon River. According to Diodorus, giving the account of Dionysius of Mitylene, the Amazons inhabited Ancient Libya long before they settled along the Thermodon. Migrating from Libya, these Amazons passed through Egypt and Syria, and stopped at the Caïcus in Aeolis, near which they founded several cities. Later, Diodorus maintains, they established Mytilene a little way beyond the Caïcus. Aeschylus, in Prometheus Bound, places the original home of the Amazons in the country about Lake Maeotis, and from which they moved to Themiscyra on the Thermodon. Homer tells that the Amazons were sought and found somewhere near Lycia.
context_section_description: According to Plutarch, when the god Dionysus and his entourage fought the Amazons at Ephesus, the Amazons fled to Samos. Dionysus pursued them and at Samos he killed a great number of them on a spot which was, from that occurrence, called Panaema (Πάναιμα), which means blood-soaked field. The Christian author Eusebius writes that during the reign of Oxyntes, one of the mythical kings of Athens, the Amazons burned down the temple at Ephesus.
  In another myth Dionysus united with the Amazons to fight against Cronus and the Titans. Polyaenus writes that after Dionysus had subdued the Indians, he formed an alliance with them and the Amazons, and took them into his service. He later used them in his campaign against the Bactria. Nonnus in his Dionysiaca writes about the Amazons of Dionysus, but he says that they were not from Thermodon.
caption: The Amazon Queen, Thalestris, in the camp of Alexander the Great, by Johann Georg Platzer
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