Heracles and the Girdle of Hippolyta

The ninth labour was not a monster. Admete, the daughter of Eurystheus, wanted the belt of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, which Ares had given her as a mark of command, and her father passed the request on as an order. Heracles was to sail to the far end of the Black Sea and come back with a piece of a woman's armour, because a princess in Tiryns had asked for it.

He took a ship and a company that included Theseus, and the voyage there was a labour in itself: a stop at Paros that cost him two men and ended in a siege, another at Mysia, another where he settled a war for a king who had been good to him. Apollodorus tells all of it in a single hurried paragraph, as if the author were also impatient to get to the Amazons.

They put in at Themiscyra, on the river Thermodon. Hippolyta came down to the ship herself. She asked why he had come, and he told her plainly, and she said he could have the belt. That was the whole negotiation. The most dangerous woman in the world looked at the strongest man in the world and decided the errand was not worth a war.

Hera would not have it. She came down into the Amazon camp in the shape of an Amazon and went from fire to fire saying that the strangers were carrying the queen off, and by the time the story had gone round the camp the women were arming. They rode down to the shore at speed.

Heracles saw the charge and drew the only conclusion available to him, which was that the offer had been bait. He killed Hippolyta and took the belt from her body, and the fight that followed went the way fights with Heracles went. He sailed home with the belt and gave it to Eurystheus, who gave it to his daughter, and there is no record of what she did with it.