Amazon Story Bones

by Ellen Frye

Who says that history has to be written by the winners? A tantalizing, evocative account of some of the lesser-known losers of the Trojan war, and how their herstory might have been.

Genres: Fiction

193 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Ellen Frye is a writer and musician whose connection to Greece began when she lived there in the early 1950s. She makes her home in Vermont.

Reviews

[Serena · Rating 5 out of 5]

This loosely connects to Ellen Frye's The Other Sappho in only exploring the story that Lykaina knows of a maid of Cassandra, Marpessa - a daughter of Parthena the Cassandra's nurse and her Amazon lover Melanippe. Similar names for Amazon, nurse and maid are used in Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays but I do not yet know if the names came from a text by ancient author or no.

We learn the long story of these two from Marpessa's granddaughter Iphito who wants to know the songs of the Amazons -their myths and truths, and to find them and join them even as a Amazon she's known as "Granny" dies in her cavern home in her lovers arms.

I liked the point made that Amazons as defined as roaming free warrior women are found everywhere in history & around the world, even if I wished Melanippe and her old woman had found their tribe and been among them at the ancestral homeland.

[Suzanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

OK, maybe 4.5 stars, but I was really touched by this set of stories, ancient Greek myths of the gods and the Trojan War retold from the viewpoint of Amazon women, much of it the life stories of elderly Marpessa and Melanippe being teased out over several years by granddaughter Iphito.