Hippolyta

Apollodorus names the belt of Hippolyte as the ninth labor that Eurystheus set Heracles. She was queen of the Amazons, a warlike people living by the river Thermodon. She wore the belt of Ares as a sign that she stood above all the other Amazons. Apollodorus says the errand began with a wish: Admete, the daughter of Eurystheus, wanted the belt for herself.

Heracles sailed with a band of volunteers in a single ship. On the way he fought the sons of Minos on Paros and helped King Lycus in Mysia against the Bebryces. He then put in at the harbor of Themiscyra. Hippolyte came down to the ship, asked why he had come, and promised to give him the belt. The labor could have ended there without a blow.

It did not, because of Hera. In Apollodorus's account the goddess took the form of an Amazon and went through the crowd. She told them the strangers were carrying off their queen. The Amazons armed, mounted their horses and charged the ship. Heracles saw them coming in arms and suspected treachery. He killed Hippolyte, stripped the belt from her body, fought off the rest and sailed away toward Troy. This is the version most modern retellings follow, and it makes Hippolyta a casualty of Hera's lifelong hatred of Heracles rather than of any quarrel of her own.

Other ancient writers tell the labor without her death. Apollonius of Rhodes, describing the voyage of the Argonauts past the Amazon coast, says Heracles ambushed Melanippe, a daughter of Ares. Hippolyte then gave him her glittering belt as her sister's ransom, and he sent the captive back unharmed. Apollonius also places Hippolyte as ruler of the Themiscyreian Amazons, one of three separate Amazon tribes.

Euripides's Heracles recalls the same exploit in a choral ode without naming the queen. The chorus sings of a voyage over the Euxine against the mounted Amazons to fetch her gold-embroidered belt. Those spoils, it says, are kept safe in Mycenae. Diodorus Siculus, in Book 4 of his Library of History, has a pitched battle in which Heracles kills Amazon champions one by one. There the commander Melanippe is ransomed for her girdle, and Diodorus does not say what became of Hippolyte herself.

A second story attaches Hippolyta to Theseus, and it is the source of most of the confusion around her name. Apollodorus's Epitome says Theseus joined Heracles against the Amazons and carried off an Amazon bride. Most writers call her Antiope, some call her Melanippe, but the poet Simonides calls her Hippolyte. Plutarch's Life of Theseus also prefers Antiope, yet reports that the Athenian historian Cleidemus named Theseus's Amazon wife Hippolyta. In Cleidemus's version, peace between the Amazons and Athens was made through her.

Isocrates, in his Panathenaicus, gives the fullest romance under her name. Hippolyte broke the laws of her people, fell in love with Theseus, followed him to Athens and lived with him there. The Amazons marched on Athens to take her back.

Her death in this Athenian cycle is told several ways. The Epitome says the Amazon bore Theseus a son, Hippolytus, yet Theseus later married Phaedra, and his Amazon wife arrived in arms at the wedding with her followers. The guests shut the doors and killed her, though others say Theseus killed her in battle. Plutarch records a tradition that she fell fighting at Theseus's side, struck by the Amazon Molpadia. Pausanias tells that story of Antiope and says her monument stood at the entrance to Athens.

Pausanias keeps both women apart in a second passage, at Megara. There he saw the tomb of Hippolyte, whom the Megarians called Antiope's sister and the leader of the Amazons against Athens. After their defeat she fled to Megara with a few survivors. Despairing of ever reaching Themiscyra again, she died of grief, and the Megarians buried her in a tomb shaped like an Amazon's shield.

Latin epic borrows her name for a comparison. Virgil likens the band of the Volscian huntress Camilla to Thracian women who fight in Amazon arms around Hippolyta (Aeneid 11.648-663).

Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream follows the Theseus tradition rather than Apollodorus. The play opens with Theseus, Duke of Athens, days from his wedding to Hippolyta, and he admits he wooed her with his sword. Titania later calls her Theseus's warrior love, the bouncing Amazon. In Act 4 Hippolyta recalls hunting a bear in Crete with Hercules and Cadmus.

DC Comics made her Wonder Woman's mother. Queen Hippolyte first appeared in All Star Comics #8 (December 1941), created by William Moulton Marston and Harry G. Peter. That origin reworks the ninth labor: Hercules tricks the queen out of her magic girdle. From 1958 the comics spelled her name Hippolyta.