This translation is a bizarre choice even if we are, like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, thinking of a genderless girdle which can be put round about the earth in forty minutes7 （though for many people today, the word ‘girdle’ implies an undergarment worn by women of my grandmother’s generation. One occasionally saw them on washing lines in my childhood: damp instruments of torture）。 It is an enormous pity to see Hippolyta distorted and diminished by this linguistic shift. She is wearing neither restrictive underwear nor a simple tie around her waist: she is wearing a war belt. The Greek word used to describe her belt is zōstēr: the exact same word used to describe the war belt worn by a male warrior for holding weapons. The word for a woman’s belt is zōnē, which doesn’t have martial connotations. Not for the first time, we see that an accurate translation has been sacrificed in the pursuit of making women less alarming （and less impressive） in English than they were in Greek. Euripides, Pseudo-Apollodorus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Diodorus Siculus and Pausanias all use the word zōstēr.8 For all these men, Hippolyta is a warrior, plain and simple.
Or rather, not plain and simple: ornate and highly decorated. Because Amazons separated themselves from respectable Greek norms with their choice of clothing, as well as their all-female society and fighting skill. Unlike Greek men and women, who wore tunics of varying lengths and draperies over bare legs, Amazons wore tunic tops over trousers or leggings.
The British Museum has a wonderful alabastron: a slender pottery perfume bottle, about fifteen centimetres tall, made around 480 BCE.9 It is decorated with a lovely black and white figure of a woman, her head turned so we can see that her long, curly hair is tied back. She is most probably an Amazon, because she is dressed in the style which we will soon see worn by figures securely identified as Amazons （potters often painted names next to the characters on their pots）。 She wears a pair of black straight-legged trousers, beneath a tunic top which belts in tightly at the waist. It is a linothorax （a protective garment made from either glued linen or leather） represented by monochrome patterns of lines and dots. In her right hand she holds the Amazons’ favoured weapon – an axe – and a quiver is also visible, strapped to her back. The style of her clothing could not look less dated: her weapons are the only things which differentiate her from someone walking through the museum to see this little bottle. That, and the fact that her tunic top would protect her from your weapon if you attacked her.
The tight leg-coverings （and sometimes also long sleeves on their tunics） are shown in incredible geometric detail on red-figure vases. A krater in the Metropolitan Museum in New York （attributed to the gloriously named Painter of the Woolly Satyrs in the mid-fifth century BCE）10 shows an Amazonomachy – a battle between Greeks and Amazons. The Amazons are wearing the most intricate designs on their leggings: chequerboard squares, tight zig-zags, hollow diamonds within a diamond grid. One has an armoured tunic, and another wears a decorated cap. One has the skin of a large cat as a cloak: his paw hangs against her thigh. Two Greek men are fighting these women: they are facing in opposite directions. The one facing to our left, closest to the viewer, is down on the ground. He is cowering behind his large round shield, as an Amazon on horseback thrusts her spear at him. We can see the sole of one of his bare feet; the Amazons have lace-up ankle boots protecting theirs. The other Greek draws back his spear to attack the two Amazons in front of him. Both women have their arms raised as they wield their battleaxes. Follow the scene around the pot and we find men riding a chariot to come and help their comrades.
There are a number of things which are remarkable about this scene. The first is that the Amazons are far more ornately clad than the Greeks. The men’s plain tunics contrast with their own finely decorated shields, but the Amazons are a riot of pattern and texture. The second is that this is a pretty even battle and the result is in question. One man is down, one is outnumbered, but more men are coming to join the fray. The men fight alone, as does the Amazon on horseback. The two women on foot fight alongside each other, comrades in arms. This is surely why Diodorus Siculus could say that the Amazons were ‘superior in strength and eager for war’。11 These women aren’t fighting because they’ve been attacked and they have to, they’re fighting because they’re warriors and they were born to. Another intriguing feature of the painting is the type of axe which two Amazons are wielding. The handle is long and thin, the blade sharply pointed. Amazons were so closely associated with this particular type of weapon （securis, to give it its Latin name） that Pliny the Elder tells us that it was invented by Penthesilea, the Amazon queen who fought at Troy.12 Not only were Amazons respected fighters, but they were innovators in the art of war. No wonder Homer called them antianeirai,13 ‘equivalent to men’。 Homer also describes war belts, incidentally – the leather and metal belts worn by the great warriors of the Trojan War – and he too uses the word zōstēr, the same word other authors use for Hippolyta’s belt.