Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Theseus made an expedition against the Amazons—either as a companion of Heracles when the latter fetched Hippolyte’s belt (see 03-heroes/023–024), or on a separate Attic voyage. In Apollodorus’s Epitome he abducts Antiope (some manuscripts and authors say Hippolyte) as his prize; Plutarch reports both names in circulation and prefers Antiope as the mother of Hippolytus, noting that some poets called the same woman Hippolyte. Diodorus has Heracles give Antiope to Theseus after the Amazon war. Theseus brought the Amazon to Athens and married her; she bore him Hippolytus. The Amazons then invaded Attica to recover their sister (or to avenge the abduction). They encamped on the Areopagus and fought Theseus in the heart of Athens—a battle Attic art and Pausanias’s monuments celebrated as the Amazonomachy on Athenian soil. Antiope fought beside Theseus and died in the battle (or was killed earlier by Molpadia, an Amazon, accidentally or in combat); Theseus defeated the invaders and drove them out. Later he married Phaedra, daughter of Minos, while Hippolytus, the Amazon’s son, remained the child of the earlier union. The Theseus–Amazon story is thus distinct from Heracles’s belt-labor even when the voyages intertwine: here the focus is the Attic marriage, the son Hippolytus, and the war at Athens.