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The real Amazons were long believed to be purely imaginary. They were the mythical warrior women who were the archenemies of the ancient Greeks. Every Greek hero or champion, from Hercules to Theseus and Achilles, had to prove his mettle by fighting a powerful warrior queen.

In the non-Greek stories, Persia, Egypt, even China, Central Asia, in oral traditions and written literature, anyone who fights Amazons admires their courage and beauty, and they want to be allies of the Amazon; they don't wanna kill them.

We know their names: Hippolyta, Antiope, Thessalia. But they were long thought to be just travelers' tales or products of the Greek storytelling imagination. A lot of scholars still argue that. But archaeology has now proven without a doubt that there really were women fitting the description that the Greeks gave us of Amazons and warrior women.

A lot of names in America and Europe have their roots in Latin and Greek words. A lot of them go back to archetypes and their stories.

The language of the land in the Parthian empire was the native language of Iran. There is no trace pointing to any foreign language having ever been in public use under the Arsacids.

The fact is that much misunderstanding is often caused by our modern attempts to limit too strictly the meaning of a Greek word.

I think that the Greeks were extremely ambivalent about the stories of Amazons: they found them both thrilling and rather daunting at the same time.

For my part, it was Greek to me.

I feel a great kinship with my origins, even though I only learned a few words of Arabic.

My name is Arsenio. That's a very unique name for a black man. In Greek, it means Leroy.