7.
114 The early epic was largely occupied with the exploits and sufferings of women, or heroines, the wives and daughters of the Grecian heroes.

A nation of courageous, hardy, indefatigable women, dwelling apart from men, permitting only a short temporary intercourse, for the purpose of renovating their numbers, burning out their right breast with a view of enabling themselves to draw the bow freely; this was at once a general type, stimulating to the fancy of the poet, and a theme eminently popular with his hearers.

We find these warlike females constantly reappearing in the ancient poems, and universally accepted as past realities in the Iliad.

When Priam wishes to illustrate emphatically the most numerous host in which he ever found himself included, he tells us that it was assembled in Phrygia, on the banks of the Sangarius, for the purpose of resisting the formidable Amazons.

When Bellerophon is to be employed in a deadly and perilous undertaking, by those who prudently wished to procure his death, he is despatched against the Amazons .-- Grote, vol.
i p.