Characters
- Amazons — warrior people of Themiscyra; fought and largely destroyed in this account
- Antiope — captive given to Theseus
- Heracles — leads the expedition; defeats the Amazons; frees Melanippe for her girdle; gives Antiope to Theseus
- Hippolyte — named as the Amazon whose girdle is the assigned object; not the slain figure of the Apollodorean climax
- Melanippe — captive Amazon; freed when her girdle is taken as ransom
- Theseus — receives Antiope as gift (link to Attic Amazon tradition)
Places
- The deep — sea into which Heracles sails (aetiology of the name in this tradition)
- Themiscyra — city and palace of the Amazons; camp of Heracles
- Thermodon — river at whose mouth the Amazons dwell
Themes
Narrative
In Diodorus’s account Heracles is commanded to bring back the girdle of Hippolyte the Amazon and therefore makes an expedition against the Amazons. He sails into the Pontus—said in this tradition to have been named by him Euxeinus—and camps near Themiscyra at the mouth of the Thermodon, where the Amazons’ palace stands.
What follows is open war, not a failed guest-gift. Heracles fights the most renowned of the Amazons, routs the rest, and cuts down so many that Diodorus speaks of the race as all but exterminated. Among the captives he gives Antiope as a gift to Theseus and sets Melanippe free, accepting her girdle as her ransom. The prize that satisfies the labor is therefore a captive’s ransom-belt, not the corpse-stripped belt of a queen killed under a goddess’s rumor.
This version has no Hera in Amazon disguise, no initial promise from Hippolyte at the ship’s side, and no scene in which Heracles suspects treachery and kills the queen to take Ares’s token. The conflict with the Apollodorean line is sharp enough to warrant a separate catalogue entry: one tradition centers divine deceit and the death of Hippolyte; the other centers a general Amazonomachy resolved by Melanippe’s ransom and Antiope’s gift to Theseus.