When Thracians face off against maenads it rarely goes well for them, so while Rhesos is a hero within the Starry Bull tradition my money’s on Thero.
Who’s Thero, you ask? Why, only one of the most bad-ass warrior women to grace Etruscan and Southern Italian pottery. Although her name and general appearance remain the same, her story changes a bit with each depiction. Sometimes she’s an Amazon, sometimes a maenad, and sometimes she’s just hanging out killing shit, because she can.
The further Amazon, Thero, slightly in advance, wears Scythian dress decorated with horizontal patterns, alternately a double comb-pattern in black, and zigzags in light brown: across the right shoulder and chest runs a border of zigzags, and a border of mæanders across the thigh: her cap is ornamented with a helix: in her right hand she holds out an arrow, in her left (not seen) a Scythian bow. […] Hartwig’s attribution of this cup to Euphronios is strengthened by a comparison with the Naucratis fragments, D 1, on which the same decoration of the drapery with minute crosses, and arrangement of the hem in the triple wavy lines, occur; also the treatment of the hair of Thero resembles the manner of Euphronios. The name Thero occurs as that of a maenad in a vase of Oltos. (Henry Beauchamp Walters, A catalogue of the Greek and Etruscan vases in the British museum, Volume 3 pgs 70-71)
This vase is described by Jane Ellen Harrison thusly:
At this time the vase-painter is still free to make a certain choice, the twelve Olympians are not yet canonical. On the obverse the gods are seated waiting, and on the reverse the new god is coming in all his splendour in his chariot with vine and wine-cup in his hand. With him, characteristically, for he is never unaccompanied, come the Satyr Terpes playing on the lyre and the Maenad Thero with thyrsos and fawn and snake, and behind the chariot another Maenad Kalis with thyrsos and lion and a Satyr Terpon playing on the flute. (Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion pg 367)
Not actually a depiction of Thero, but I love how she’s got the satyr by the neck and is just nonchalantly swinging a cat. Because she can.
Tagged: dionysos, italy
