As my role in the comment of the Rape of the Lock was characters collector, I was interested in writing about one of them, Thalestris.
In the poem Thalestris is Belinda´s friend and she is representing the historical Gertrude Morley, a friend of Pope and the wife of Sir George Browne.
I decided to write about her because she is the only one who encourages Belinda to think about the Baron´s misdeed as an affront to her honour and fight for the restore of her honour and her stolen lock.
All of us are supposed to know it, but we are not supposed to know who Thalestris was. According to the Greek mythology, she was the Queen of the Amazons, a race of warrior women who excluded men from their society. Thalestris brought 300 women to Alexander the Great, hoping to breed a race of children as strong and intelligent as he.
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Alexander met Thalestris, and they hunted lions together and had thirteen nights of lovemaking (thirteen is a sacred fertility number for moon worshippers, due to the number of moons in a year).She had hoped to have a mighty daughter from Alexander, but she died soon afterward without issue.
Pope used the name of Thalestris to represent that character probably due to the name suggests a fierce, combative woman. Thalestris´ attempts to rouse Belinda’s anger serve as a reminder of the behaviour Belinda should be demonstrating as the epic hero. In Belinda’s place, Thalestris is outraged. Her presence reinforces Pope’s manipulation of the epic genre, borrowing the Amazon from Greek mythology.
Pope is not the only one who used the name of Thalestris in one of his works. Thalestris is also the name of a character in Mary Renault´s historical novel The King Must Die and there is also a brief reference to the courtship between Alexander and Thalestris in Beaumarchais´" Le Mariage De Figaro".
