The Amazons

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Speaker 1 The Amazons. Their idea is one of the most romantic and resonant in all antiquity.

Speaker 1 A mythological race of women that lived on the plain of Themyscyra next to the Black Sea and featured in several of the biggest episodes from Greek mythology.

Speaker 1 From Heracles' labors to Jason and the Argonauts to the Iliad where an Amazon queen battles the Greek hero Achilles.

Speaker 1 They were renowned warriors who in Greek mythology lived in prehistoric times long before the age of classical Athens or Alexander the Great.

Speaker 1 Their stories endured and became popular across the Greek world. But the Amazons also did much more than just fighting.
They were founders of cities, of festivals and peoples.

Speaker 1 They were guileful superwomen that became closely entwined with wonders of the ancient world.

Speaker 1 Today we're going to explore various myths and legends of the Amazons that have endured from ancient Greece.

Speaker 1 We'll be delving into how the ancient Greeks perceived these alluring, clever and dangerous warrior women. Our guest is Dr.
David Braun, Emeritus Professor at the University of Exeter.

Speaker 1 David, he has just released a brand new book all about the Amazons and their presence throughout the ancient Greek world. It was a pleasure to interview him and I hope you enjoy.

Speaker 1 David, we are talking about the Amazons today, your brand new book. The Amazons, they seem as popular as ever.

Speaker 1 But am I also right that modern perceptions of Amazons, they're very different to what the ancient Greeks thought?

Speaker 15 Yeah, very often they are. There's a lot going on, you know?

Speaker 15 And actually, before I say anything else, I think I should just make one, I think, quite important sort of ethical point that my book, my research, is all about getting to grips with Greek thinking in the ancient world about Amazons.

Speaker 15 And I'm aware that, you know, because that doesn't fit very well with a lot about Amazons that people think they know and often things which they're very committed to.

Speaker 15 That kind of awkwardness of fit could actually be quite problematic for some people.

Speaker 15 You know, I'm aware that there are people who draw a great strength from, and support really, from their ideas about Amazons. And I don't really want to damage that.

Speaker 15 I mean, to explain what I mean, I happened to across a Polish group, for example, of women who've had breast cancer and surgery and that sort of stuff.

Speaker 15 And they clearly find the whole Amazon myth as they perceive it to be really helpful to them. And I does

Speaker 15 I'm kind of nervous at producing a book which doesn't exactly threaten that, but kind of risks it, shall we say. Yeah.

Speaker 15 So I just want to make that point. That is not my goal.
I'm all in support of whatever anybody wants to do with Amazons, really. My purpose is, as it were, the history of the myth.

Speaker 15 The myth in Greek reality is what I'm aiming at. And I'm quite open for people now to do whatever they want with Amazons.
You know, that's the beauty of myth. It's endlessly elastic.

Speaker 15 And And I guess the reason people are still very interested in Amazons is precisely because it touches base with all sorts of really big issues in modern society.

Speaker 15 You know, everything surrounding gender for a start. My women of Poland, for example, as well.
All kinds of things which actually

Speaker 15 at times are a bit surprising to me, you know. Not to mention all the TV stuff, all the films and everything.
There's a lot of kind of noise around ancient Amazons.

Speaker 15 My focus is very much to try and get beyond all that and to look at what Greeks of antiquity, and to a small extent Romans too, what they had to say about Amazons.

Speaker 15 And in particular, to explain why they made so much of them, why they put them on their great public buildings, why they have...

Speaker 15 You know, three of the seven wonders of the world have Amazons quite prominently.

Speaker 15 And there's a lot of texts about Amazons, myths about Amazons in plays which explore real human difficulties and so forth.

Speaker 15 The ceramics of the ancient world, which are really quite important for us as an insight into the private life, the lives of ancient Greeks, quite often feature Amazons.

Speaker 15 and Amazon is really doing a lot of very interesting things. And we even connect with some rather surprising myths.
You know, the Trojan War, for example, everybody likes the Trojan War. Yeah?

Speaker 15 Brad Pitt charging about and so forth. No Amazons in that film, as far as I remember.
But

Speaker 15 in the ancient myth of Troy, just as Homer's account finishes, the war goes on, and Hector has just been killed at the end of the Homeric version of Troy. And what happens?

Speaker 15 The Amazon queen turns up to fill his boots. And she takes his place defending Troy.
And that immediately generates a whole series of questions.

Speaker 15 And it shows, for example, that the Amazons aren't exclusive with regard to men. Very often we find them in alliance with men or male-based communities, shall we say.

Speaker 15 patriarchal Troy, we might call it, with old Priam in charge and various key heroic figures.

Speaker 15 And yet, the Amazon queen and her followers have no problem turning up and fighting for Troy and actually dying there. I think there's special reasons for that.

Speaker 15 But as I say, the Amazons myth, it just touches a lot, a lot in antiquity and really quite a lot today, as I've tried to outline.

Speaker 1 David, it is so interesting, all of these different channels we can go down, these avenues to explore with understanding how the ancient ancient Greeks perceived the Amazons.

Speaker 1 I also really liked your mention of three wonders of the world, which we will get to as this chat goes on.

Speaker 1 But is it also then important to highlight that actually, from what you were saying, mythology, Greek mythology is not our only source for the Amazons.

Speaker 1 I mean, archaeology is also really important too.

Speaker 15 Well, some people have claimed as much. Really, the answer to that is no, it isn't.

Speaker 15 Now, unless by archaeology, you mean the uh material culture and for example vases that have survived and so forth with their images or buildings what exactly do you do you mean there Tristan in terms of archaeology is important too are you talking about the material culture survivals well in regards to archaeology I was thinking more about kind of how they're depicted as you mentioned on temple reliefs or in pottery or in coinage which may give us more of a sense of how the Greeks viewed these mythological figures that's certainly true.

Speaker 15 I thought you might be alluding to something quite different. It's worth addressing, perhaps.

Speaker 15 There has been a sustained attempt over the last 10 years or so to claim that Amazons have been found, literally dug up, through excavation. And this really is an unhelpful confusion.

Speaker 15 In English, English usage generally, there are two ways of using the word Amazons. This is where the confusion comes in.

Speaker 15 The general usage of Amazons is, as we all know, they are tough, resilient, resourceful women who might pick up a weapon, might even form an army or something. That's the general image of Amazons.

Speaker 15 There's also the far more specific meaning of Amazons, which is the Amazons of Greek thought, myth, belief in ancient times. Now, those two things need to be kept well apart.

Speaker 15 In terms of the ancient Amazons, we really have nothing in terms of excavations that have relevance. People claim we do and tend to say we have a lot, but trust me, we do not.

Speaker 15 What we do find are women around the ancient world, from time to time, either individually or maybe in small clusters with or without men.

Speaker 15 we do find women who are buried with several kinds of weapons. Okay.
Very recently, there's a bit of a fuss on the silly isles of all places, quite a long way really from

Speaker 15 the Greek main street, where a woman seems to have been excavated, buried with a large spear. And of course, immediately people say, oh, Amazon, Amazon.
And, you know, maybe so.

Speaker 15 Maybe this was a woman who in life went into battle with her large spear.

Speaker 15 But archaeologists, you know, we spend an awful lot of time trying to work out a methodology for

Speaker 15 getting into these grave goods, as they're called, to try to understand

Speaker 15 actually why these are buried there.

Speaker 15 The simple question is, why was this spear put in this burial? The short answer is, we do not know. One option is, yes, it was her favourite spear that she took into battle.

Speaker 15 But there are plenty of other options which confuse the picture. Maybe it's put there as a symbol of something

Speaker 15 important,

Speaker 15 important to maybe the woman and maybe the people that buried her. Maybe it's her husband's favourite spear that's gone in there.

Speaker 15 And one might even speculate about, you know, the phallic nature of the spear.

Speaker 15 We know in other contexts that weapons very often symbolic of the supernatural of gods and so forth so that it might be the case that we have weapons put in there as as part of a broader sense of religion and ritual we just don't know maybe the spears put there as a valuable thing in a context where maybe

Speaker 15 there were too many valuable things available to be put in in in a burial in the city isles.

Speaker 15 Now, you know, I focus on this one thing. I've had no contact whatsoever with the people who've excavated that and so forth.

Speaker 15 But I did notice how immediately we go from finding a weapon in a burial to Amazons. Now, normally we don't find spears, actually, with buried women.
We tend to find arrows most commonly.

Speaker 15 We find them buried in all sorts of contexts, in all sorts of places. I was looking some buried in the middle of Athens the other day.
So there are many, many ways of interpreting these grave goods.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 the mistake, as I would see it, is to take the fact that from time to time female burials contained what we might think of as weapons, to move from that to saying, aha, we have found an Amazon.

Speaker 15 And it's worth saying, actually, also, that especially with the older excavations, when you look more carefully, and people on the whole don't, I'm afraid, but when you do look more carefully, you find that actually the sexing of the skeleton is pretty iffy.

Speaker 15 You find that there's a cluster of burials all together, so we're not clear whether any weapon there was to do with the female or to do with men who are also buried there and thereabouts.

Speaker 15 Sometimes we're told triumphantly,

Speaker 15 you'll get my sense that I'm rather short of patience with this because it's on the whole unhelpful. We are sometimes told triumphantly, ah look, this woman was killed violently.

Speaker 15 Well, unfortunately, a lot of people in the ancient world were killed violently, and that includes women. It doesn't tell you that they went to war to get killed violently.

Speaker 15 They were on the wrong end of somebody's spear or knife or whatever.

Speaker 1 If we go a bit more on onto the myth surrounding the Amazons by the ancient Greeks, I mean, first off, do we know why the ancient Greeks created this story of the Amazons?

Speaker 1 Do we know much about the origins of the Amazon myth and, you know, the mindset behind the Greeks who would have created it?

Speaker 15 Now, that's a really interesting question, Tristan. I think the first point that needs to be stressed is that Amazons are already baked into Greek culture when Greek culture first comes to to us.

Speaker 15 I mean, if we follow the traditional view, which I do, that we should date Greek culture from around 700 BC,

Speaker 15 in other words, at the beginning of archaic Greece, as we tend to call it, we look to the early texts and we look in particular to Homer.

Speaker 15 And although Amazons don't appear at all in the Odyssey, which is quite interesting, they do appear in the Iliad, not once, not twice, but three times.

Speaker 15 And indeed, an interesting Amazon burial just outside the city of Troy, which is used as a sort of focus for Trojan military power and organization, actually.

Speaker 15 So Amazons are already, as Greek culture starts to sort of raise its head, are already there. Now, you were asking whether, you know, where it may all come from.

Speaker 15 And clearly, this is always a problem because

Speaker 15 you go in search of beginnings and you get into a sort of infinite regress.

Speaker 15 There's a glimpse of that already with Amazons. Again, a lot of daft claims have been made about Amazon myth origins.

Speaker 15 But on a positive note, I think what's going on is that Amazons are in the great swathe of myth that comes from what we tend to call the Near East into Greek culture.

Speaker 15 And this involves a whole mass of stuff, Prometheus, for example, a good one, and much, much more besides. And I suspect that Amazons are coming in there.

Speaker 15 This is not a field I'm particularly expert in.

Speaker 15 However, I've noticed that those who work on Hittite texts, of which we have very few, unfortunately, are dating from what the early ish second millennium BC.

Speaker 15 So, you know, whereas Greek culture begins, say, 700 BC, this is more 1700 BC, a thousand years before, in these Hittite texts, there's just a hint

Speaker 15 of Amazons. There's certainly female power and queens and that sort of thing.

Speaker 15 And those who specialize in this are doing two rather interesting things. One is they're suspecting Amazon myth at at this early stage.

Speaker 15 And secondly, they're also engaged in this inevitable search for beginnings, which is an infinite regress.

Speaker 15 So just as I'm now saying, okay, probably it comes from the Near East and the Hittites, the Hittite specialists are saying, well, it may come from further over in the Near East.

Speaker 15 maybe a thousand years before. So you can go on and on, you know, and you end up with sort of Amazons in caves, as it were.

Speaker 15 You know, it's important to think about origins, but don't expect much in the way of answers, would be my thought on the subject, which is why, by and large, I haven't gone down that road very much.

Speaker 15 I'm very much more interested in the myth as embedded in Greek society in this very powerful way, so that they, as you were saying, they get into temples, the inevitable pottery and so forth, and also a whole series of key stories,

Speaker 15 including Troy, they're in the Argonautic epic, which is also very early, already there, again, in 700 BC, referred to in Homer, etc.

Speaker 15 So, yeah, Amazons, I think, are there in some ways for the same reasons that they have survived so much now.

Speaker 15 They touch. real society, we can call it that, everyday society, in a whole series of ways.
And I think that's perhaps the way to go in trying to understand all of this.

Speaker 15 And that's really what I've tried to do.

Speaker 1 David, is it also important to highlight, and I know you do so in your book, how the myths of the Amazons are created by men and they're written for men as well. Is that also important to highlight?

Speaker 1 Because I know there's like the word fantasy surrounding them as well.

Speaker 15 Yeah, there is. I always sign up for that as a general view, created by men and for men.

Speaker 15 I mean, this is a society which right through antiquity is dominated by men and these amazons they're not feminists in the sense that they have an agenda which is all that worrying to greek men actually

Speaker 15 the idea of amazons as alluring as actually quite new and it's something which i've placed far more stress on than most researchers ever have.

Speaker 15 But one really only has to look at the pictures and read the texts. The ancient Greeks themselves were very unclear about their sense of whether Amazons had ever once walked the earth.

Speaker 15 By and large, it's a bit like people believing in the literal truth of religious texts now, you know. They sort of believed in them and at the same time wouldn't really want to press it.

Speaker 15 They are quite happy to believe in a general way, as now perhaps somebody might believe in Jesus performing miracles without actually wanting to go very far in thinking that, you know,

Speaker 15 a few loaves and fish might feed a multitude.

Speaker 15 The ancient world is very like that with Amazons. They're perceived by and large as a a set of a state indeed, an ethnos is the word, a people of women who are all somehow in the prime of life.

Speaker 15 We hear very little about Amazon children and we hear absolutely nothing about middle-aged or older Amazons.

Speaker 15 Amazons are always

Speaker 15 somehow at around the age that a Greek woman in a sort of normative sense would be expecting to to be married usually that's where Amazons are located in Greek thought.

Speaker 15 They, in that sense, are indeed alluring, and in some of the stories we have about them, they are identified specifically as of great breeding stock.

Speaker 15 You know, they will produce really strong sons in particular. So that's something which we often find as a wonderful story in Herodotus, which is built all around that.

Speaker 15 So we can talk about fantasy, but we've also got to have some sense that these women are dangerous, of course. They can fight.
So it's a kind of mixed fantasy.

Speaker 15 It's a fantasy where these women warriors, we're going to call them that, are a challenge to the Greek male, and particularly perhaps the young Greek male looking to be in inverted commas, a hero, an Achilles, a Heracles even.

Speaker 15 And at the same time, these are potentially first class again.

Speaker 15 And it's kind of difficult to talk about this without being a bit sort of, I don't know, crude around the edges perhaps, but they're very attractive women physically.

Speaker 15 And part of the road to heroism in Greek male thought is not only

Speaker 15 being able to go out and defeat these Amazon women and all kinds of other opponents, but also, and in some ways even more importantly, to be able to resist their female charms.

Speaker 15 Okay, so when you go out as a young hero, Greek, out there to do battle with an Amazon, you are taking on an opponent who is doubly dangerous.

Speaker 15 She can fight you and kill you, but she can also see you off with her sheer attraction.

Speaker 15 One particularly famous and I think really rather astonishing version of that is in the so-called duel between

Speaker 15 an Amazon queen

Speaker 15 and the famous Achilles,

Speaker 15 where

Speaker 15 actually nobody survives Achilles. Achilles just kills anybody in front of him.

Speaker 15 And so, when the Amazon queen comes across Achilles, I'm afraid we all know what's going to happen, and it happens very quickly.

Speaker 15 We call it a duel, it's no duel at all, he simply kills her on the spot. However, however, although he's done that part of the hero role,

Speaker 15 he's not really equipped to cope with the other aspect of Amazon power.

Speaker 15 Because as she dies, he looks into her face into her eyes and is totally totally overwhelmed by strange emotions of passion love as it's often called is slightly odd in this context but nevertheless and he starts to think hang on here i am i've killed this woman who would have been a great wife partner for me, but I've just killed her.

Speaker 15 And he's disturbed by that, disturbed very deeply, so that when one of the others in the Greek army happens to be passing and says something, we don't quite know what he says, but we know it's offensive to Achilles about this, Achilles turns on him and kills him on the spot.

Speaker 15 He's totally distraught. And this causes problems for Achilles.
You know, he's killed one of his own men for saying the wrong thing. It's all getting a bit out of hand.

Speaker 15 And that's the power of the Amazon. She's powerful as a warrior, but she's also powerful with all the skills that the young Greek hero would tend to associate with the women around him.

Speaker 15 So that the outlook of the young Greek hero, who I agree, is totally central to all of this, the outlook that he's got is that this is the ultimate challenge.

Speaker 15 It's not a question of going out and killing a monster. You're going out and killing this beautiful creature, but there's a danger in that beauty, a great danger.

Speaker 15 And Amazon queens in particular, like the one killed by Achilles, are particularly outstanding in that regard and are flagged as such in the ancient texts.

Speaker 15 And we've got some really, very nice pictures of them, you know, they look great. What can you do?

Speaker 15 There's a nice vase in Manchester which shows the young Heracles going to see the Amazon queen on one of his missions. It's his ninth labor, in fact.

Speaker 15 He's got to go and persuade her to give him her belt, her battle belt, and they seem to get on quite well.

Speaker 15 But Heracles, we see him in the vase looking at this queen, who looks like a sort of ancient version, I always think, of Barbarella in the famous Jane Fonder role, covered in fur and all kinds of boots and things.

Speaker 15 It's all very potentially, it depends on the viewer, of course, but but potentially a kind of erotic scene.

Speaker 15 And according to myth, just as Heracles and the queen were going to have a sexual escapade, one of the goddesses, Hera, who had a problem with all this, intervened, caused a riot among the Amazons, so that Heracles, in fact, just had to kill the queen.

Speaker 15 and all the other Amazons that he could

Speaker 15 to get away with the belt that he come to get.

Speaker 15 So, you know, this double mixture is really important, I think, both the sex and the violence together. That's what's going on with Amazons.

Speaker 15 And I think that's why they're part of this complex fantasy and so powerful for Greek society, because Greeks in general were facing the whole issue of how to live their lives.

Speaker 15 And Amazons were offering all kinds of suggestions for, as it were, ways to go go or not go. And that would apply in epic, heroic contexts.

Speaker 15 And it would apply also in the more everyday context within, for example, a city like Athens. And that's quite aside from all the public images and so forth.

Speaker 15 We're talking here about the area that we know the least about, which is the private, everyday world

Speaker 15 of the Greek, the Greek male and the Greek female. Unfortunately, we just don't have have that much from the Greek females.

Speaker 15 It would be wonderful if we had a Greek female author telling us about all this, but we don't.

Speaker 15 Occasionally, we have a Greek male author suggesting what female figures might have thought about Amazons. And when they do that, it's really not very different.

Speaker 15 There's no sign of a kind of female take on Amazons as distinct from the male take on Amazons, though clearly in experiential ways there will be obvious differences.

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Speaker 1 Well, David, you've covered a lot of different points there, including, you know, some of the big myths in which Amazons are associated.

Speaker 1 You mentioned there, of course, Achilles and Heracles and the portrayal and sex and violence and so on.

Speaker 1 We'll come back to certain areas of that and hopefully we'll get to Athens as well, because they feel important in the story of the Amazons.

Speaker 1 But if we explore the mythology a bit more, did the Greeks place the Amazons in a particular area of the world? I mean, where did Greek myth locate the Amazon homelands?

Speaker 1 Is there a real geographic region for that?

Speaker 1 And do we know much about the whole Amazon society? What do the Greeks tell about that?

Speaker 15 Right, yeah.

Speaker 15 No, the Greek culture is pretty clear about this, actually, though there are one or two loose ends.

Speaker 15 In terms of their earliest origins and their sort of ethnicity, for want of a better word, Greeks regarded the Amazons as coming from Thrace.

Speaker 15 In other words, roughly the area between northern Greece, Thessaloniki, etc.,

Speaker 15 up to more or less the Danube, Bulgaria, Romania, those areas. That's where they thought they came from originally.

Speaker 15 That goes together with a set of myths which talk about, in prehistoric times, major movements of peoples from that area, from Thrace, that sort of Danubian area, from Thrace eastwards and the peoples, cities, etc., along what is now the south coast of the Black Sea and northern Turkey, they often have a story about migration from Thrace, as if in some sense Greeks thought that, and these peoples themselves apparently thought, that Thracian influence had spread right across the southern, in particular, Black Sea, as far as the Caucasus Mountains in what is now Georgia and beyond that actually and even into Azerbaijan and so forth and the shores of the Caspian.

Speaker 15 So the Amazons are part of those stories of Thracians moving eastwards. Now the Amazons however stop

Speaker 15 at a particular fascinating location actually, one of the greenest and most fertile areas around the whole coast of the Black Sea.

Speaker 15 And this is in what is now northeast Turkey on the shores of the Black Sea, immediately east of the modern town of Samsun, which is ancient Amisos.

Speaker 15 And there you can actually go to a sort of Amazon theme park, if you like.

Speaker 15 And the locals, I'm reliably informed, are very proud of their Amazon past, their Amazon connection.

Speaker 15 And I think that's borne out by the fact that in a small town there, which is taken to be the epicenter of all of this, little place called Terme, you find in the main square a very large statue of a very lively Amazon to this day.

Speaker 15 It's a modern statue, but what's interesting about it is that there's clearly a communal commitment to this Amazon past.

Speaker 15 And in a society, you know, it's a pretty patriarchal society, really, around those parts. So again, there's a kind of a mirror image of what's going on with ancient Greece, perhaps.

Speaker 15 But that area is known in the ancient world and in a way today too, as the plain of Themiskyra.

Speaker 15 So

Speaker 15 going back to the point, the Amazons have drifted or marched or whatever they've done from Thrace, which they've left completely behind them, to this place on the eastern part of the Black Sea, the southeastern part of the Black Sea, northern Turkey, where they establish cities.

Speaker 15 We call them cities, as usual in the ancient world. What we tend to mean are small towns, villages, even.

Speaker 15 And there, at those three rather rustic villages, they

Speaker 15 spend a lot of time with their horses. They're great horse women, rather obsessed with horses, actually.

Speaker 15 They have their society there. Now, what happens is, as I mentioned briefly, Heracles rather reluctantly smashes the whole society.
It never really recovers.

Speaker 15 But in terms of Amazon society there, we have a consistent sense that it's a monarchy, a monarchy with a queen, of course, and we have a whole mess of rather kind of silly, you might say, stories.

Speaker 15 You see, with myth, myth doesn't feel the need to offer a kind of ethnography. Myth gives us highlights and often things which really don't fit together very well.

Speaker 15 I mean, you might say, well, how can it be, for example, that Amazons are always, you know, teenagers in their early 20s, something like that?

Speaker 15 How can that be? It makes no sense. But nevertheless, myth doesn't worry about that.

Speaker 15 But the people that do worry about that are, in a way, people like you and me, people who, you know, want to have a fuller story.

Speaker 15 And so, as antiquity goes on, particularly with the later periods, the fourth, third century BC and onwards, we find various writers coming up with their own notions of what went on in the private lives of Amazons.

Speaker 15 Mostly it's an obsession with Amazons' sex with either neighbors,

Speaker 15 sometimes a lot of deliberately crippled males. that they keep for sexual purposes.
This is all pretty sort of torrid stuff, which is not part of the mainline traditional myth.

Speaker 15 The mainline traditional myth is much more interested in, for example, Heracles smashing the Amazon culture that's there.

Speaker 1 Because it's interesting, isn't it? You get that later idea sometimes of the Amazons being almost man-haters. And you mentioned that kind of more infamous portrayal of the Amazons that comes later.

Speaker 15 But is it very clear, like as well from the tales that you have, that although that part of the myth isn't fully fledged out you know it's a very capable society of independent women but also heterosexual women as well they're all as far as we hear actually rather keenly heterosexual you might say they certainly do not hate men what they want to do is to have their own independent state and actually that's why they have to fight Because if they weren't able to fight, then they wouldn't be able to have this independent state because

Speaker 15 the ancient world is a violent place and they would be subjugated one way or another. They by no means hate men.
They get on very well with men.

Speaker 15 But they do go to war with a whole series of cities and peoples and so forth. They're kind of surprising in that way, perhaps.

Speaker 15 And this idea of hating men, you know, it's really hard to find anything like that in the ancient texts. Almost nothing.

Speaker 15 After all, since this is this as we called it a fantasy of men for men and maybe for women too it would perhaps be a little bit surprising if they were as it were men haters they're really not we get our sense you know that the amazons are pretty different to greek women but were those differences Were they sometimes bridged?

Speaker 1 Was it sometimes not the case that some Greek women were very different to Amazons?

Speaker 15 Yeah, this has been overplayed a lot, really.

Speaker 15 And, you know, one reason I got into writing this book is that I spent years teaching about Amazons and I found it very hard to recommend anything to my students.

Speaker 15 I mean, that's why I wrote the book, really.

Speaker 15 And we have a whole sort of set of slightly daft ideas. I mean, yes, Amazons are unlike, if you like, normative Greek women in certain regards.

Speaker 15 They have their own political system, a system within which they are out and about riding horses, indeed not side-saddle, which is also quite important.

Speaker 15 And they're doing things that, in general, in Greek society, women did not do, particularly the more wealthy and prominent women. Poor women, on the whole, did whatever they had to do to get by.

Speaker 15 We tend to forget them.

Speaker 15 It's fair enough to talk about them being different to Greek women, say. However, However, they're by no means as different as has been claimed over the years.

Speaker 15 You know, quite apart from their obviously same biology, we find women in Greek culture who are really good warriors.

Speaker 15 We find, for example, a particularly notable one called Atalante, a woman of Archadea in the Peloponnese in southern Greece, who's a match for any man.

Speaker 15 And indeed, there's a whole myth around around her, an early and important myth, the myth of the Caledonian boar.

Speaker 15 She is the one, the first one, to damage this huge beast, this great big wild pig, but a massive one. When all the youths of Greece want to be the first one to draw blood from this creature,

Speaker 15 It's a woman who does it, Atalante, who manages to hit it. And the result of that is all sorts of argument about, well, you know, should women really be allowed to come and do this kind of stuff.

Speaker 15 There was a whole debate about whether Atalante should join the Argonautic expedition to go with Jason and the other heroes of his day to get the Golden Fleece.

Speaker 15 In one or two versions of the story, she's allowed to go, but it's problematic. In the best known...
version by a guy called Apollonius Rhodias. Jason says to her, look, I'd love to take you.

Speaker 15 You know, you deserve to come. But my God, can you imagine? You'd be the only woman on the boat.
We're rowing all the way across the Aegean Sea and Black Sea and we're going to face who knows what.

Speaker 15 You're just going to cause mayhem. And again, partly because women like this, from a Greek male perspective, are, by and large, very attractive.

Speaker 15 So poor Atalante, despite the fact that she'd probably be the best warrior on the ship, perhaps, doesn't get to go at all.

Speaker 15 So, there are stories about Greek women like this, and the distinction, the contrast between Amazons and ordinary Greek women, as it were, is much weaker than has often been understood.

Speaker 15 And I think that's underlined particularly where we have a transition where Amazons actually

Speaker 15 become normative Greek females.

Speaker 15 The classic case of that is the Athenian hero Theseus, whose story we can explore if you like. But the general point is very clear.

Speaker 15 Amazons and real Greek women actually are fundamentally very similar. So that stories about Amazons are also stories about female potential.
I think that's very important.

Speaker 1 Well, you mentioned there the the story of Theseus and Athens, and yes, I would like us to explore that in a bit.

Speaker 1 But I feel we should talk a bit about Amazon warfare and how the myths portray the Amazons and how they fight. Now, David, we get this idea today, quite a big idea, isn't it?

Speaker 1 Like with the bow and arrow and so on and so forth. But do we know, I mean, what do the sources say? What do they reveal about how the Amazons fought?

Speaker 15 Right. That comes in sort of two slightly different packages.
In the straightforwardly grand epic contexts, like the duel with Achilles, the women fight as Achilles fights, which is in the epic style.

Speaker 15 In other words, with large spears mostly used for throwing.

Speaker 15 However, although you get the use of javelins more generally, In most stories about Amazons, outside that narrow kind of epic vision, you have Amazons who are fighting with bows and arrows in particular, and also axes.

Speaker 15 The Greeks imagined axes very much as a domestic weapon, and occasionally a woman chooses to kill her husband or something with an axe, because, you know, lying around the Greek house, there were plenty of axes, so that axes are regarded very often as a female accoutrement and indeed they're also particularly connected with Thrace.

Speaker 15 So, in Amazon's, we've got women from Thrace, so doubly we should see them wielding axes, which usually Greek warriors don't tend to make much of.

Speaker 15 The archers very often have a small axe with them, so that perhaps goes with the bow and arrow side of things.

Speaker 15 There's a whole kind of ethical vision of how one should go to war, which Greece often sort of holds forth on one way or another.

Speaker 15 The bow and arrow is regarded as something which is perhaps not entirely heroic. Heracles, for example, got a lot of stick for using a bow and arrow quite a lot of the time.

Speaker 15 It's a little bit cowardly. You're a bit like, say, Paris in the Trojan story.
You're not really much of a warrior if you use a bow and arrow all the time. Heracles does it some of the time.

Speaker 15 Paris does it all the time. It's a sort of cowardly weapon in the sense that you're fighting at a distance.

Speaker 15 So actually

Speaker 15 quite suitable in the sense of what women might be able to do usefully on the battlefield.

Speaker 15 The standard Greek battlefield, if we can call it that, is all about a kind of rugby game in a way, a rugby game with spears and shields, where each side forms this sort of thick phalanx and charge into each other as if in a rugby scrum.

Speaker 15 Now, okay, women can do that, but they're automatically, physically up against it, given the, in general, the larger weight and size of their male opponents.

Speaker 15 So normally, when Greeks imagine Amazons fighting, they're doing this more distance stuff.

Speaker 15 Now, remarkably,

Speaker 15 Plato of all people,

Speaker 15 is a bit of a dry stick, he holds forth on the whole idea of whether actually

Speaker 15 it might be a good idea for Greek states to train their young women in using bows and arrows. Why not, he says? You know,

Speaker 15 they can fire an arrow just as well as any man.

Speaker 15 And where's the problem? Let's train not only the young men to be warriors, but train the young women to be able to be warriors at a distance.

Speaker 15 The bow and arrow, or maybe even throwing a javelin or something of that sort.

Speaker 15 And indeed, given their love of horses, throwing a javelin or firing an arrow or sometimes wielding a big axe on horseback, there is a kind of internal logic to all of this from a Greek perspective.

Speaker 1 Thracian warfare as well, where they have that, you know, the kind of the javelin and the mounted warrior idea with the corner of most the skirmisher cavalry.

Speaker 1 Is there a sense that the Greeks might have modelled that idea of Amazon warfare on the actual Thracians that they would have faced, you know, to the north of the Greek world in the central Mediterranean?

Speaker 15 Yeah, I think that's almost inescapable. It's kind of hard to know what comes first, but it's a kind of rational package, isn't it? These are Thracian women.
They fight like Thracians.

Speaker 15 Why wouldn't they?

Speaker 1 Well, let's explore something else now.

Speaker 1 I want to move a bit away from the fighting, because we can talk about fighting for so long, but with the Amazons and how they are portrayed in the ancient Greek myths, it feels like there are almost secret, lesser-known parts of the Amazon story and what they were renowned for.

Speaker 1 And one of the things I have in my notes is astronomy. So David, how big is astronomy to the Amazons?

Speaker 15 Yeah, quite big, actually. And as you rightly say, it's something which never, never gets a look in.

Speaker 15 I mean, part of the problem with pretty much everything that's been written about amazons over the years is that there's been this relentless obsession with their fighting and yes they fight and they fight very well but they do a lot else amazons are incredibly creative incredibly intelligent and wise in all sorts of ways let's not forget that there's an element of divinity about them.

Speaker 15 They're not immortal. They're not gods.
But they are, in ways which myth never quite explains properly, they are the daughters of the war god Aries. Okay,

Speaker 15 so that they have a lot in their, if you like, in their genetics. Now, we have quite a few stories of Amazons planning and constructing major buildings.

Speaker 15 For example, a temple of Aries up there in the southern Black Sea for their father. A temple, a whole temple planned, conceived, orientated, created by Amazons, which is an extraordinary thing.

Speaker 15 Because in the ancient world, I mean, we see all those temples as we go around, you know, you see the path and on. I've just come back from Sicily, you go to Agrigento, full of temples.

Speaker 15 But we need to be clear that these temples are really hard to build. They cost a bomb, and you've really got to know what you're doing.

Speaker 15 And we do know that it was not unusual for there to be major problems in construction. And yet, these Amazons can do all that.
Now, one of the other things they can do is they can look to the heavens.

Speaker 15 And we actually have, bless him, in a play of Euripides, a whole account of an Amazon vision of the stars

Speaker 15 because he the

Speaker 15 Euripides tells of a tapestry, which is in itself quite interesting. Amazons can weave too.
They sometimes claim that they can't, but they can.

Speaker 15 They do the female jobs, weaving, as usually understood by the Greeks, a female job, but they also do the astronomy.

Speaker 15 Because the tapestry in Euripides is a whole picture, a magnificent, huge picture of the stars seen in very much female terms.

Speaker 15 So the figures who are featured are in one way or another key to primary female concerns, including, for example, the hunter Orion, Orion who's a male.

Speaker 15 but who is a very nasty male from a female perspective. He's a kind of determined rapist.

Speaker 15 And, you know, we see him having a bad time up in the heavens in this tapestry that Euripides offers us in one of his less known plays called the Ion.

Speaker 15 And the tapestry said to be kept in vaults in Delphi, in the Temple of Apollo. whether there ever was anything of that sort in the Temple of Apollo.

Speaker 15 There were tapestries for sure, and a lot of other bric-a-brac, you might say. say.
So, the general idea is very appealing and sensible enough. But what Euripides does is

Speaker 15 show us these Amazons who study the stars. They study the stars in a particularly female kind of way, which he doesn't develop a great deal, but nevertheless, it's there.

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Speaker 1 Do we also get a sense in the surviving myths and even, you know, with playwrights and so on and historians, I believe I've got my notes Herodotus here as well, that the Amazons also, you know, one of their many traits and like kind of the legendary stories that become associated with them is that they become linked to the founding of cities and the creation of new peoples and sanctuaries across the Greek world and indeed beyond the borders of the Greek world too.

Speaker 15 Yes, absolutely right. And you're right to mention Herodotus in particular.
in book four of his histories. I think it's about chapter 110 onwards.
if anybody wants to look it up.

Speaker 15 Herodotus himself shows no enthusiasm for Amazons, actually.

Speaker 15 What he's trying to do is to explain the background to a whole bunch of peoples who are there in the broader Black Sea world when the Persians turn up to try and take over.

Speaker 15 And one of those peoples, the Sarumatians, Sarumati,

Speaker 15 they have women who

Speaker 15 go out hunting with their husbands, who may even go to war with their husbands. And Herodotus says that there's a story that all of this goes back to Amazon genetics.

Speaker 15 In a nutshell, what has happened is that Heracles has smashed up the Amazon state. A small number of Amazons, Amazons go in all directions, a small number are taken back towards Greece on board ships.

Speaker 15 But the Amazons, being a tough lot, take over the ships.

Speaker 15 Now, they don't quite know how to work ships, but nevertheless, there they are on the ships, and they get thrown up on land on the northern coast of the Black Sea.

Speaker 15 And there they do what Amazons do best. They pinch some horses because they're in this new world.
They're refugees, but they're very resilient. And they seize horses,

Speaker 15 have punch-ups, et cetera, with the locals, the so-called Scythians.

Speaker 15 And the Scythians soon discover that these are women. And they think, well, this is interesting.
Why don't we send our young boys out to breed, basically, with some of these

Speaker 15 strange, powerful women who've turned up? And we'll have some really good grandchildren, etc.

Speaker 15 And so the old Scythians send out the young young ones who meet the Amazons and fairly quickly, because these Amazons are clever, very quickly form erotic relationships with the Amazons.

Speaker 15 The Amazons then start to say to the young Scythians, look, normally we'd go back with you to your families, but we can't do that. Because your families, you know, they just don't live like us.

Speaker 15 The women of Scythia spend all their time sat about in wagons. We can't do that.

Speaker 15 Incidentally, this is one text which, among many, which torpedoes a popular idea that the Amazons are in some sense Scythians. They're not.

Speaker 15 Anyway, so the young Scythian men, very impressed with the Amazons, go home to their families, take what they can, and together with the Amazons, according to this origin myth, strike eastwards, cross the Don into what is now South Russia, and establish a new people called the Saromatians.

Speaker 15 And so, says Herodotus, that's the reason why, because all of this is an explanatory myth, that's the reason why the women of the Saromatians look a bit like Amazons.

Speaker 15 Because way back when there were some Amazons cast ashore, and the result of that genetic mix between a few Amazons there and a few Scythians, the genetic mix is the Saramatian people.

Speaker 15 The whole business of the destruction of the Amazon state is a large part of this larger tale of creativity. And I really want to sort of emphasize that.

Speaker 15 It seems to me a huge pity that through this obsession with Amazons fighting, we lose so often their incredible creativity.

Speaker 15 As you said, creating peoples, in this case, the Saramatians, creating sanctuaries and so forth, and creating whole cities and much else besides.

Speaker 15 I happened to be talking to a lady in Izmir not long ago who told me that the women of Izmir, which ancient Smirna in western Turkey, I dare say well known enough, and the women there are very proud that their city is named after an Amazon.

Speaker 15 an Amazon called Smirni.

Speaker 15 And they feel that they're descended somehow from from Amazons.

Speaker 15 And the women of Turkish Izmir take a particular pleasure in that, rather as the women and others, I think, of northern Turkey around Samsun, that I mentioned earlier.

Speaker 1 Is that the kind of the ancient city of Sinop or Sinope or that kind of area as well, which seems to, it feels like around that Black Sea area, is there a very strong link to Amazons that can endure even down to the present day?

Speaker 15 Yes, it's well known this story of this Amazon woman who turned up there and allegedly drank too much. It's a common stereotype we have in the ancient world for women.

Speaker 15 Women tend to get drunk a lot, according to ancient Greeks. And particularly, the peoples of the northern world get drunk a lot as well.

Speaker 15 So a woman of the northern world is going to be a serious drinker. The Thracian language has allegedly the word sanape to mean a woman that drinks too much.

Speaker 15 And the name of Sinope is sometimes derived from that particular story. There are a lot of myths surrounding Sinop, Sinope, actually, but that's quite a significant one.

Speaker 15 But it's all going on as well, not only on the northern coast, but also on the western coast of what's Turkey. I mean, I mentioned, I think I mentioned Bodrum, I mentioned Ismir.

Speaker 15 Also, a bit up the road at Ephesus. The situation there is quite remarkable.

Speaker 15 The

Speaker 15 hugely important, hugely important

Speaker 15 sanctuary temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the wonders of the world, was created with and sometimes in some versions by the Amazons, Amazons who had taken refuge there, thrown out of their homeland by Heracles, and incidentally also sometimes Dionysus.

Speaker 15 Now, Dionysus in all of this has been outrageously ignored. And I've tried to say a bit about that and maybe I'll come back back to it in the future in the book.

Speaker 15 Dionysus also goes to war with the Amazons and we know we need to think about that too. But the temple there, the sanctuary of Artemis at Ephesus, is all about Amazons and is about also the

Speaker 15 new life that Amazons will have away from their homeland up there on the Black Sea, which no longer exists thanks to Heracles.

Speaker 15 And they are made, as it were, civilized in the sense that they no longer or at least so much go out fighting or go out hunting they're turned into a more normative female as priestesses and

Speaker 15 servants of the goddess the goddess incidentally who is also very important in the land where they come from up there in the north One aspect of why these Amazons are so

Speaker 15 what what should we call them? For want of a better word, civilized, I suppose, from a Greek perspective, not monstrous, is that they sign up for these deities.

Speaker 15 Amazons are close, very close to Artemis and therefore inescapably also close, particularly to her twin brother Apollo, which is one reason why we find them. in Delphi.

Speaker 15 These are Amazons who aren't, in some sense, separate from, certainly not hostile to, the deities of Greece. They are closely aligned with several of them.
I've mentioned Aries already.

Speaker 15 And here we have Artemis, Apollo. You know, it's a quite serious list.
They don't get on with all of them. They don't tend to get on with Athena, for example, who's a different kind of female.

Speaker 15 But again,

Speaker 15 you know, it shows you that fighting isn't really as important as people want it to be. Of all the the female deities,

Speaker 15 the most full-blown military one is Athena, who tends to go around dressed in her famous warrior's helmet and the kit of the traditional heavy infantry. And she doesn't get on with Amazons very much.

Speaker 15 I think that's helpful in trying to see that Amazons are much more than women who fight.

Speaker 1 And it was very good of you there also, David, to highlight something something that I had questions for, but I didn't think we'd have time to cover, which was, you know, that big presence of Amazons in art and in the stories at great sanctuaries like Delphi and Olympia.

Speaker 1 And they're linked to particular Greek festivals as well. And that's another key aspect of their story.
So I'm really glad you mentioned that.

Speaker 1 And also, of course, the links to wonders of the ancient world, like the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. I mentioned it earlier, so I feel I must ask this now before we wrap up.

Speaker 1 We talked about the Black Sea region and the Amazons there.

Speaker 1 I don't think we'll have time to cover the importance of the Amazons for the Western Greeks and cities like what will become Marseille in France and that extraordinary kind of great geographic length that the Amazons cover and the Amazons remain important to Greeks of these various different cities across the Mediterranean.

Speaker 1 But I must ask about Athens, especially as you mentioned Athena there.

Speaker 1 Why does classical Athens in particular, so like the fifth century, why do the Athenians have such an obsession with the Amazons?

Speaker 15 They do, because it really was the Amazon invasion of Attica, Athens, that marked the city coming to fruition.

Speaker 15 The earliest version we have of this, really, is probably that of Aeschylus in his trilogy, the Orestia.

Speaker 15 That's what 458 BC first performed and re-performed thereafter. There, the Amazons come down to attack Athens, partly at least,

Speaker 15 because they're jealous of its fine buildings.

Speaker 15 They don't like the idea that somebody else has been out there creating a fine city, which Theseus has done. So they come down.
to have a go at Theseus.

Speaker 15 Now, that's something which again tends to be completely overlooked. And it partly explains place names, for example, near the Acropolis and so forth.

Speaker 15 Now, the other aspect of it is that Theseus has himself been up to the land of the Amazons in the southern Black Sea, various versions, either on his own or in partnership with others, in particular with Heracles, sometimes.

Speaker 15 And as a result, he's brought back with him a particular Amazon female. She's kind of a queen, and she goes under various names.
Antiope

Speaker 15 is one of those. She's sometimes called Hippolyte.

Speaker 15 There are plenty of Hippolytes in Amazon stories, and she has other names too. Now,

Speaker 15 she goes back with Theseus and is

Speaker 15 the whole business is actually told differently so much. There's a question mark as to whether she's actually carried off,

Speaker 15 as it were, looted, grabbed, abducted from her homeland, and there's certainly a good deal of that, or whether she actually

Speaker 15 is entranced by Theseus. And incidentally, Theseus himself is the great lover of so much of ancient Greek myth.

Speaker 15 So to be entrapped for a woman to be entranced by Theseus is by no means unusual.

Speaker 15 So she goes back to Athens and in Athens she becomes briefly Theseus' partner, Theseus' queen, and she tries to play the part of an Athenian woman.

Speaker 15 It's one of the transitions that we find where an Amazon can become a Greek woman as it were.

Speaker 15 And in that context, when the rest of the Amazons turn up to lay siege to Athens, which they do quite successfully, although as always in the stories of Greeks versus Amazons, the Amazons ultimately lose, but nevertheless do well.

Speaker 15 When these Amazons turn up,

Speaker 15 the Antiope, shall we call her, Theseus' partner, stands beside Theseus on his side, fighting for Athens, and actually gets into a duel with the new Amazon queen who tends to be grotesquely ignored, a woman called Malpadia.

Speaker 15 Malpadia.

Speaker 15 In the end, both women die and both women are commemorated in the landscape of Athens. So that in the fourth century BC,

Speaker 15 you might say to somebody, I'll see you near the Amazon, meaning Antiope's tomb. So it's very much a picture of Amazons who are there as the city faces its first real challenge.

Speaker 15 not the only challenge, there are also other challenges that come along around the same time from people from the Peloponnese in the south, people from the north.

Speaker 15 But the defeat of the Amazons for Athenians was a very special moment, a defeat which actually included having at least one Amazon fighting for Athens.

Speaker 1 And is it a myth then that they later try and substitute Amazons for Persians or the other way around? There always seems to be that link, isn't there, between Amazons and Persians.

Speaker 1 But the truth of that feels a bit more, well,

Speaker 1 take it away.

Speaker 15 Okay, well, the Amazon's Persians thing is, I'm afraid, another red herring. I should say that I didn't set out to sort of disrupt these connections, it just doesn't work.

Speaker 15 And others before me, actually, a minority of people, have long since observed this.

Speaker 15 It's true that the Amazon homeland is just about in the Persian Empire, but

Speaker 15 it's a very isolated, distant corner of the Persian Empire up there on the Black Sea. It really is.
And there's very little to see about

Speaker 15 Amazons that has anything Persian in it,

Speaker 15 as we've seen over and over again. They're Thracians.
It simply doesn't work. It was suggested because by the art historians, actually, there's nothing in any text.

Speaker 15 It was suggested that maybe there's some sort of linkage because

Speaker 15 sometimes, not very often, Amazons and Persians can look a bit the same in vase painting. That's why.

Speaker 15 Now the fact is that the representation of non-Greeks in vase painting is notoriously haphazard because these guys they the painters themselves they just produce something which looks sort of foreign-ish and it's true that you know with some of these images, the Amazons can look like Persians.

Speaker 15 But actually the truth is that that's very rare. And in the Persian Wars, for example, there's really no sign of that.

Speaker 15 And after the Persian Wars, when we hear about, we have Aeschylus' play, The Persians, there's no indication there that Amazons are in any way relevant to the Persian Wars.

Speaker 15 When Greek artists, Athenian artists wanted to show Amazons in art, they showed Amazons. They didn't need to show Persians who are kind of like Amazons or Amazons who are kind of like Persians.

Speaker 15 They wanted to show Persians, they showed Persians. They wanted to show Amazons, they showed Amazons.

Speaker 15 On one building, the so-called painted Stoa, the Stoa Poikule, painted in the middle of the fifth century BC, we have one huge picture with Greeks fighting Persians, Athenians fighting Persians.

Speaker 15 and another big picture with Athenians fighting Amazons. No problem.
So I'm afraid the whole Persians, Amazons thing is an unhelpful bit of nonsense, really. Sorry about that.

Speaker 1 Well, David, this has been a wonderful chat. We covered so many different themes and topics of the Amazons over this past hour or so.
And there are still so many other themes we could explore.

Speaker 1 But alas, we don't have time.

Speaker 1 We didn't even cover Alexander the Great and his sex marathon. We've won a later Amazon queen, which is fascinating, isn't it?

Speaker 1 But I'm guessing that as time goes on, as the centuries go on, Hellenistic period and then into Roman times and then the rise of Christianity, that the Amazon story, it remains popular across the Mediterranean.

Speaker 1 It's still there, but it evolves and it evolves down into present day where the name Amazons remains as big as it, I'm presuming it ever has been.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I think that's right. You do notice with the advance of time from about AD 300 onwards, Amazons get rather nastier.
They spend their time eating snakes and tortoises.

Speaker 15 They train their horses to eat people.

Speaker 15 All kinds of crazy stuff. But we've moved well away from the mainstream beliefs of the archaic and classical Greeks that meant they

Speaker 15 wanted to put Amazons on their temples and so forth. And we're into a world where you can say what the hell you like, really.

Speaker 1 Well, David, this has been fantastic. Last but certainly not least, your new book.
which explores all the themes we've covered today and so many more about the Amazons.

Speaker 15 It is called Amazons, the history behind the legend. What it means is how Amazons are important in Greek society and why.

Speaker 15 We cover, you know, the whole military aspect, but I just want to get people thinking about other things Amazons do. You know, their intelligence, their ability to create, you know, they're a beauty.

Speaker 15 They're not monsters, unless you perhaps perceive beauty as somehow monstrous. It's certainly dangerous, as is their warfare.

Speaker 1 Well, David, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Speaker 15 My pleasure, Trison.

Speaker 1 Well, there you go. There was Dr.
David Braun talking all of things the Amazons in ancient Greece. I hope you enjoyed the episode.
Thank you for listening.

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Speaker 1 That's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.

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Speaker 3 Dashing through the store, Dave's looking for a gift.

Speaker 4 One you can't ignore, but not the socks he picks.

Speaker 5 I know, I'm putting them back.

Speaker 2 Hey, Dave, here's a tip.

Speaker 6 Put scratchers on your list.

Speaker 7 Oh, scratchers? Good idea.

Speaker 8 It's an easy shopping trip.

Speaker 3 We're glad we could assist.

Speaker 9 Thanks, random singing people.

Speaker 10 So be like Dave this holiday and give the gift of play.

Speaker 11 Scratchers from the California lottery.

Speaker 12 A little play can make your day.

Speaker 13 Please play responsibly. Must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.