Another Warrior Woman

      I’m not really the type to dress up for Halloween, but if I were, I would be inclined to go as Camilla. She’s always been one of my idols. She’s a warrior maiden/huntress on the model of Athena, Artemis, Atalanta, Callisto, Penthesileia, and so many others: a young woman who rejects conventional feminine activities and clothing and adopts masculine habits, while simultaneously refusing any romantic entanglements. It’s the sort of persona that sounded very daring to me when I was a young tomboy, a persona that I myself aspired to have. These days I tend to approach these warrior maidens through a more critical gender-theory lens, asking why it’s always necessary in myth for women who engage in conventionally masculine pursuits to forego a romantic life, why the male authors who record these stories are apparently so threatened by the idea of a physically competent woman who also have satisfying sexual lives (but I’ll spare you a tirade on the pervasive association of femininity with weakness).

      Still, for the casual reader, or the young student of myth, these women can be encouraging personalities, evidence that--although we hear plenty about the oppression of women and the dominance of men in antiquity--not all women were stuck at home spinning while the men were out hunting. Some of the women refused to be constrained by gender expectations, and Camilla is a great example. She’s a distinguished character in Vergil’s Aeneid (though not really mentioned in any other classical works of literature), in which Vergil praises her as a competent leader, a miraculously fast runner, the darling of Diana, and a fearless warrior. Vergil has a reputation for not being attracted to women, but reading his description of Camilla, there is a definite aura of impressiveness around this character, if not attractiveness. Camilla is a character who really shines out in spite of the setbacks imposed by her gender.

      She has a fatal flaw, in spite of all these admirable qualities: she gets greedy on the battlefield. In a time when looting the bodies of fallen adversaries was a primary source of income for soldiers, it’s understandable that Camilla marks out an enemy with particularly expensive armor and wants to kill the guy wearing it to get it for herself. She is distracted enough by the ostentatious armor that another enemy is able to kill her. Diana mourns Camilla’s death and regrets that it was dictated by fate; as much as Diana favored Camilla, there was no way for her to prevent her from dying on the battlefield. Although her death is depicted as tragic, the flaw serves to humanize the character, who otherwise appears intimidating, almost superhuman in aspect.

      This is where I start considering my costume, and wondering how to make it recognizable. The Aeneid doesn’t really give much indication of what she looked like (although Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid casts her as a beautiful girl, for no reason that’s obvious in the original). Vergil describes her in equipment typical of any other military leader on the field--red cape, bow and quiver, etc.--but otherwise doesn’t describe her physically. He only says that everyone was in awe of her and impressed by her appearance. In Mandelbaum’s translation of the Aeneid, book 7 is introduced with a haunting illustration of Camilla by Barry Moser, which shows her as a grim and arresting woman in a black cloak and a mail shirt. Her face is pale (against a black background) and her eyes are shaded, giving her face a skull-like look. Decidedly not pretty, but certainly a military leader who could inspire awe.

      Unfortunately, the Aeneid seems to be our only source for stories about Camilla (aside from one sentence in an obscure author named Hyginus). I say unfortunately because she’s one of the characters in the Aeneid who is thought to be adopted from ancient Italian folklore. The idea is that when Vergil went to write an epic about a military conflict involving many pre-Roman populations of Italy, he researched a bunch of pre-Roman folklore and incorporated the most impressive heroes (including Camilla) into his epic. The ultimate victors of the Aeneid would be the proto-Romans, Aeneas and his cronies, so this composition process contains an implicit disparagement of the inferior Italian heroes. This process serves to illustrate how great Aeneas is--Camilla, after all, is killed when fighting Aeneas’ army. Presumably, however, in the earlier stories that Vergil researched, the pre-Roman characters were consistently cast as heroes, without suffering any humiliating process of subjugation to the proto-Roman invaders. In the Aeneid we only see Camilla when she’s fighting Aeneas, except for one charming story about how, when she was an infant, her father tied her to a spear and threw her across a river to save her from a rampaging horde. I imagine there were other unique stories about Camilla, and I’m very sorry that they are now lost.