Note 504 — Chapter XI · ATTIC LEGENDS AND GENEALOGIES.

The many diversities in the story respecting Thêseus and the Amazon Antiopê are well set forth in Bachet de Meziriac (Commentaires sur Ovide, t. i. p. 317).

Welcker (Der Epische Cyclus, p. 313) supposes that the ancient epic poem called by Suidas Ἀμαζόνια, related to the invasion of Attica by the Amazons, and that this poem is the same, under another title, as the Ἀτθὶς of Hegesinous cited by Pausanias: I cannot say that he establishes this conjecture satisfactorily, but the chapter is well worth consulting. The epic Thêsêis seems to have given a version of the Amazonian contest in many respects different from that which Plutarch has put together out of the logographers (see Plut. Thês. 28): it contained a narrative of many unconnected exploits belonging to Thêseus, and Aristotle censures it on that account as ill-constructed (Poetic. c. 17).

The Ἀμαζονὶς or Ἀμαζονικὰ of Onasus can hardly have been (as Heyne supposes, ad Apollod. ii. 5, 9) an epic poem: we may infer from the rationalizing tendency of the citation from it (Schol. ad Theocrit. xiii. 46, and Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. i. 1207) that it was a work in prose. There was an Ἀμαζονὶς by Possis of Magnêsia (Athenæus, vii. p. 296).