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. Lively lasses, then. But who were these Amazons? At once no one and everyone.

Andrew O’Hagan talks about his new book The Secret Life – a funny, alarming and disturbing picture of what happens when digital fantasy meets analogue reality. Plus, he reveals the truth about Julian Assange’s appalling table-manners:

The Amazons of epic couldn’t have existed: a male-free ‘society’ is a rogue band doomed to self-destruction by eschewing procreation. And yet the Greeks willed the Amazons into existence, not as a proto-feminist construct, but a reassuring thought experiment. They were the reverse of All Things Greek: unbounded, independent, virile women, challenging society’s boundaries from the world’s fringes.

The Greeks first set them in Asia Minor, by the river Thermodon (the Turkisk Terme) on the Black Sea, before transplanting them yet farther afield to the limits of the known. The Amazons were forever destined to be defeated.