position of the two contending armies: the left wing of the Amazons rested upon the spot occupied by the commemorative monument called the Amazoneion; the right wing touched the Pnyx, the place in which the public assemblies of the Athenian democracy were afterwards held. The details and fluctuations of the combat, as well as the final triumph and consequent truce, were recounted by these authors with as complete faith and as much circumstantiality as those of the battle of Platæa by Herodotus. The sepulchral edifice called the Amazoneion, the tomb or pillar of Antiopê near the western gate of the city—the spot called the Horkomosion near the temple of Thêseus—even the hill of Areiopagus itself, and the sacrifices which it was customary to offer to the Amazons at the periodical festival of the Thêseia—were all so many religious mementos of this victory;[506] which was moreover a favorite subject of art both with the sculptor and the painter, at Athens as well as in other parts of Greece. [500] Pherekyd. Fragm. 25, Didot. [501] Iliad, iii. 186; vi. 152. [502] See Proclus’s Argument of the lost Æthiopis (Fragm. Epicor. Græcor. ed. Düntzer, p. 16). We are reduced to the first book of Quintus Smyrnæus for some idea of the valor of Penthesileia; it is supposed to be copied more or less closely from the Æthiopis. See Tychsen’s Dissertation prefixed to his edition of Quintus, sections 5 and 12. Compare Dio. Chrysostom. Or. xi. p. 350, Reiske. Philostratus (Heroica, c. 19, p. 751) gives a strange transformation of this old epical narrative into a descent of Amazons upon the island sacred to Achilles. [503] Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 966, 1004; Apollod. ii. 5-9; Diodôr. ii. 46; iv. 16. The Amazons were supposed to speak the Thracian language (Schol. Apoll Rhod. ii. 953), though some authors asserted them to be natives of Libyia, others of Æthiopia (_ib._ 965). Hellanikus (Frag. 33, ap. Schol. Pindar. Nem. iii. 65) said that all the Argonauts had assisted Hêraklês in this expedition: the fragment of the old epic poem (perhaps the Ἀμαζόνια) there quoted mentions Telamôn specially. [504] 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).