Outcyclopedia - Hippolyta

Hippolyta, or Hippolyte

In Greek myth, Queen of the Amazons, sister of Antiope and Penthesilea. One of the twelve labors of Hercules was to obtain Hippolyta's girdle, a gift to the Amazon queen from the goddess Aphrodite. Some versions of the myth say that Hercules killed Hippolyta to obtain the girdle, others say that he killed several of her warriors and took Hippolyta away to Athens to be the bride of Theseus, the Athenian king. It is from this version that Shakespeare derives the backdrop for his Midsummer Night's Dream. Still other accounts relate that it was Antiope that was carried away to Athens, and that Hippolyta and Penthesliea led a combined army of Amazons and Scythians in a seige of Athens to retrieve their sister. The Amazons withdrew after Antiope willingly agreed to stay and marry Theseus, and she later bore him a son, named Hippolytus after her sister. Years later, Hippolyta was accidentally killed by Penthesilea during a stag hunt, and Penthesilea succeeded her as Queen, though she did so amid dissension among the Amazons and the relentless haunting of the Furies, the three goddesses of retribution.

Hippolyta appears in the Wonder Woman comic books as the Queen of Paradise Island (later called Themiscyra), where the Amazons had been exiled three thousand years earlier after allowing themselves to be deceived by Hercules. Unlike her super-hero daughter or the Hippolyta of myth, she is immortal. Originally a purely intellectual monarch, in later comics Hippolyta evolved into an image closer to the fierce warrior queen of myth, even travelling back in time to help the Justice Society of America battle the Axis in World War II as penance for the death of the original Wonder Woman. The character of Hippolyta appeared in some episodes of the Wonder Woman television series of the 1970s, played first by Cloris Leachman and later by Carolyn Jones. In the television movie Hercules and the Amazon Women, a pre-cursor to the Hercules series starring Kevin Sorbo, the role of Hippolyta was played by Roma Downey, star of the series Touched By An Angel.

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