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.

I seriously doubt that the ancient Korinna was ever stuck at home on weekends grading midterms

Sorry, no update this week due to midterms. This week I'm the avenging angel of academic honesty, expelling plagiarism from wherever it lurks; next week I'll be the humble writer again.

A Daring and Cinematic Hero

      I will admit that, from a young age, I enjoyed stories about Perseus because he could fly. For my money there are simply not enough people zipping around with wings in this fantasy world we call classical mythology. Most of the gods have flying chariots (which they occasionally lend out to people like Medea), there’s a flying horse named Pegasus, there’s a pair of human twins who can fly, Daedalus builds artificial wings for Icarus, and Perseus has his flying sandals. In a world where gods occasionally float down from the sky and hand out magic items, I’d like to see more heroes performing marvelous feats while soaring though the air. Instead, everyone just travels around on foot, and Hercules for one is so technologically backward that his primary weapon is a wooden club (he hasn’t even adopted metallurgy yet!).

      At any rate, I’m a fan of Perseus. Perseus comes from a family with a lot of backstory, but let me strip it down to the relevant details here. Before Perseus was born, Perseus’ grandfather, a typical evil king, received a prophecy that he would be killed by his grandson. Like all the fools in mythology, he thought he could circumvent this prophesied misfortune by means of careful precautions. First the king tried to isolate his daughter and thereby prevent her from getting pregnant. That failed in an unexpected way (Zeus falls in love with and impregnates a lot of beautiful young virgins in mythology, and he often morphs into unusually virile animals to get access to them (to see this amusingly illustrated, scroll down to “First Date” here, SFW), but this is the only incident I know of where Zeus transforms into an inanimate object, namely a shower of gold. Which never struck me as an efficient form for seducing/impregnating someone? But maybe I shouldn’t overthink it), so the king condemned the daughter and her infant son (Perseus) to death. Yes, it’s that old tactic of ‘I’ll kill him before he kills me,’ much beloved of evil tyrants throughout folklore, and always totally ineffective at circumventing prophecies like this. The king’s methods of execution left something to be desired: he had them put to sea in a wooden chest, which predictably floated to a nearby island, where the lovely young woman and her newborn son arrived unharmed.

      Unluckily for them, the island where they arrived happened to be ruled by a king as evil as the one who had tried to execute them. The new evil king fell in love with Perseus’ mother and tried to pursue a sexual relationship with her. This is the point where one of those unrealistic time gaps (so common in mythic stories) intervenes: Perseus objects to the relationship between his mother and the new evil king, even though he ought to have been a newborn when the king met his mother. But we’ll hand-wave that away, because it gave the new evil king the opportunity to propose a deal for Perseus, a great example of the supposedly impossible quest: the king offered to leave Perseus’ mother alone if Perseus would kill a monster for him. (Note to evil kings everywhere: as methods of killing heroes go, this is almost as ineffective as setting someone adrift in a floating wooden chest.) The monster that Perseus was sent to kill was the gorgon Medusa, a hideous woman with snakes for hair who could turn people to stone with her gaze. Medusa has her own interesting backstory. Originally she was a beautiful woman with gorgeous hair, but she was raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple, and Athena was so offended at the defilement of her temple that she…took out her anger on Medusa. She couldn’t take out her anger on Poseidon very easily, since he was a powerful god, but she sure could take out her anger on a vulnerable woman. So Athena made beautiful Medusa a hideous monster as punishment for being raped in the wrong place. Later, seeing the monster as a danger to his kingdom, the evil king sent Perseus to kill her.

      To pursue this quest, Perseus acquired a special sword, a helmet of invisibility, a magic Medusa-proof bag for carrying back her severed head, and those flying sandals that impressed me so much when I was young. He killed Medusa with aplomb and prepared to go hassle the evil king about their deal, except that he got distracted by a few side quests. Namely, to prove that he did kill Medusa, he had cut off her head and put it in his magic bag. (Lest you assume that Medusa was less sexually active as a hideous monster than she was as a beautiful woman, n.b. that she was pregnant when Perseus arrived, and when Perseus sliced her open, two new children burst out: a two-headed hound, and a giant known as “the man with the golden sword.”) Nevertheless, the head had retained its power to turn people to stone, so Perseus discovered that he had an enormously powerful weapon that could kill anyone at long range. In short, he went on a killing spree, destroying anyone who disagreed with him, demonstrating a sort of “Maslow’s Gorgon’s Head” mentality (‘When the only tool you have is a gorgon’s head, every problem looks like someone who can be killed with a gorgon’s head’). When he decided he wanted to marry a particular princess, he killed the princess’ fiancé (blithely failing to notice any parallel to his mother, the king who made an unjustified sexual claim on her, and the king’s attempt to kill Perseus when he opposed that claim). He returned home and used Medusa’s head to kill not only the evil king who posed a sexual threat to his mother, but also all of the king’s supporters en masse. After he had killed everyone who dared to interfere with him, he surrendered the gorgon’s head to Athena, but he still went on to kill his grandfather without it (although not on purpose this time), thus fulfilling the prophecy. He accidentally hit his grandfather, that stupid evil king who thought he could outsmart fate, with a discus in an athletic competition.

      Even if I admire the cinematic panache of his transportation methods, Perseus is not the kind of person I’d want in my life. He was irresponsible. He did manage to marry that princess whose fiancé he killed (far off in Ethiopia), but after he sired a child on her, he went back to Greece, and, as far as I can tell, never bothered to go back. I hope she wasn’t lonely. He intentionally killed far more people than he had to, in addition to his grandfather, and he never developed any useful skills in diplomacy or problem-solving. After he killed his grandfather he claimed his throne as the rightful heir, but he was so ashamed of having murdered a family member (and the rightful king, too) that he persuaded a nearby king to switch kingdoms with him, as if royal lineage matters far more for leadership ability than experience with responsibility or practical knowledge of the place and population you’re supposed to be ruling. He was perhaps puzzlingly controlling of his mother’s sex life, and yet also ineffective at controlling it (okay, usually sources on the myth make clear that she didn’t want sexual attention from the second evil king, so it may be reasonable for Perseus to ward off the king for his mother’s sake, but Perseus took no precautions to fend off this attention from her while he was away for several years killing monsters and marrying princesses). If it’s any consolation, his many murders eventually caught up with him, and Perseus himself was murdered to avenge one of his victims. Overall, when I think of Perseus, I prefer to imagine his daring airborne combat with the sea monster, and forget about all of his bad decisions over the rest of his life.

Oak Tree with Leaves Down

There’s something about a great oak tree in autumn,

it goes so soon naked and claws at the air,

a gnarled gray hand grasping blindly toward heaven

to snatch down the sun, or to rake the sky bare.

They seem so infused with this desperate longing

for something they can’t understand, but still crave,

like helpless fish gasping to death out of water,

like damned souls in Hell wailing out of the grave,

or like someone falling in love for the first time:

that well of desire so sudden appears

and swallows you whole; it’s a blind fall of longing

a whirlwind of shadows, a vortex of fears.

I thought as I gaped how I’d possibly fathom

such mysteries, forbidden for mortals to know.

But someone scoffed, “Jesus, it’s only an oak tree

awaiting the first heavy blanket of snow.”

Amazonomachy

      There was a piece in the news this week about ancient Greek vase-paintings of Scythians. To sum it up quickly, there are a dozen Greek vase paintings with words on them that have historically been considered nonsense phrases in Greek; because these vase paintings feature characters in Scythian costume (such as Amazons), a museum curator finally made the connection that the so-called nonsense words might actually be words in ancient languages of the Caucasus, and an authority in languages of the Caucasus was called in to read the words, which turned out to be real ancient Caucasian words, such as nicknames for the Amazons. This discovery raises a whole pile of questions in my mind--who were the Greek painters consulting to get authentic foreign names for these characters? what was the purpose of writing Caucasian words in Greek script on a painting for a Greek or otherwise non-Caucasian audience?--but for today I want to focus on those Amazons.

      Amazons, you probably already know, are members of a mythical all-female warrior society. For purposes of reproduction, they empress men from neighboring societies into sex; female children are raised as warriors, and male children, depending on whose version you read, are either abandoned, cast off to neighboring societies, or raised as slaves. While evidence has been found for female warrior graves in the Scythian area, the Greeks were never able to substantiate the existence of an all-female warrior society; the Amazons in Greek lore were used as a cautionary example of the horrifying possibilities of life outside the civilized (i.e. Greek) world.

      The novelty of a female-dominated society makes them a favorite subject in Greek myth, but they’re usually not depicted as terribly foreign. They certainly don’t conform to standards of Greek female behavior, but their depiction, in terms of dress and behavior (particularly in early texts and art) runs closer to Greek warriors (i.e. men) than any identifiable foreign group. Mythological texts preserve the names of at least three particularly famous Amazons, all of whom have obviously Greek names: Penthesilia, Hippolyte, and Antiope. It reminds me of the way language is handled in the Iliad: even though the Trojans are ethnically distinct from the Greeks, the Trojans usually have Greek names, and they all speak Greek, both when they talk to the Greeks and to each other. There’s a narrative understanding that the Trojans are foreign, even though in practical terms they behave exactly like the Greeks. The Amazons, after the Persian War, are generally painted in Attic vase-paintings wearing Scythian leggings instead of Greek-style armor, as a nod to their surface otherness. But even though they live in a topsy-turvy female-run society, they still tend to be able to integrate into Greek society: Theseus brings home an Amazon concubine, and Penthesilia falls in love with Achilles.

      But where do the Amazons come from? Well, it’s hard to say. The Greeks were sure they were out there somewhere, but they had trouble finding them. As Greek history advances, and the Greeks get more and more reliable information about more and more distant places, the Amazons tend to move off into the distance since they can’t be substantiated within the known world. Although legend has it that certain cities (and that wonder of the world, the temple of Artemis at Ephesus) were founded by Amazons, evidently the Amazons didn’t stick around to run the places; certainly the cities labeled with this distinction are part of the ordinary male-run world.

      But even though they were hard to pinpoint in reality, the menace of Amazon warriors lurked all the same. One of the great stories from Athenian myth, depicted on the metopes of the Parthenon, was the Amazonomachy. Here the Amazons actually invaded Athens, setting up camp on the Areopagus (actually between the Agora and the Acropolis!) and terrorizing the Athenians on their home soil. The mythological pretext for this invasion is to regain the concubine Theseus brought home. As it turns out, Theseus handily defeats the foreign menace and drives them out of Greece (yaaay patriarchy!). What puzzles me is whether there’s a historical pretext for this invasion--no source I’ve read has identified a plausible invasion of Athens by non-Greeks that could be written up as a conflict with Amazons. The unsubstantiated nature of the myth suggests to me that the Athenians had an irrational fear of invasion, particularly a humiliating invasion by inferior women, and composed some self-aggrandizing mythology to illustrate how glorious they were. But I suppose I’m wandering too far into speculation. The Amazons, in any case, were described as a foreign menace with alien customs, and their incursion into the heart of Greece is a convenient way for Greeks to talk not only about the danger of a foreign invasion, but the natural Greek valor that they could use to defeat it. It makes a convenient analogy for the Battle of Marathon, and led to piles and piles of Greek vases with pictures of Amazons dressed as Persian archers, a true nightmare for the Athenian patriarchy.

The Exotic Eastern Queen

[I thought I could write up this post fairly quickly, but as I went along I realized that it had been a few years since I had read the scholarship on this character, and I didn’t have all the sources conveniently on hand, and it was harder to track down the information than I expected. Anyway, that’s why this is appearing so late.]

      There’s a certain character floating around the edges of classical myth, a near eastern queen who represents something magnificent and exotic when described by Greeks and Romans: Semiramis. She was a historical person, a queen of Babylon, although when related in Greek and Roman accounts she’s transformed into a mythic figure, the Good Queen or the Bad Queen or the Enchanted Queen or the Raglan Queen--it depends on who you’re reading, and what sort of narrative point he’s out to make. Her story is difficult to summarize because she just skirts the edge of the classical consciousness, and the stories told about her vary wildly.

      I’ll start with the historical side of Semiramis, before looking at how she’s been distorted and exaggerated by people who only heard about her fourth-hand. There is a known historical Assyrian queen by the name of Shammuramat, who held power as her son’s regent for a few years after the death of her husband. She lived in a culture that had a well-established writing system (thousands of years old, even then!) and a government that employed plenty of scribes, so we have records of her reign produced during her lifetime. She was not the founder of Babylon, as you might hear in Ovid, but you can find a few major works attributed to her. We still have a memorial stone that was set up for her, and Herodotus credits her with building a series of dykes (which he says are “remarkable to see”--bordering on faint praise since he only devotes a few sentences to her). It’s not a lot of material--she did only reign for a few years, until her son reached maturity--but it’s noteworthy to see a queen holding power over Assyria.

      So today you can study this queen as a historical person, based on the Assyrian evidence. Ancient Greeks and Romans, however, generally didn’t have access to this evidence, and when they mention her, her biography tends to take on mythic elements. You can find her in that highly accessible work of classical myth, which was after all where I first heard of Semiramis, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which there is a fleeting reference to her. Someone is narrating a story of the exotic east, and to establish the location, notes that the story takes place “where Semiramis built her lofty city,” i.e., in Babylon. This should call up an image of one of the Seven Wonders, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Here the series of dykes and the memorial stone aren’t important; what matters is the vague, fantastic flavor she gives the story.

      In fact there’s another, garbled reference to Semiramis right nearby in the Metamorphoses, when a character considers telling the story of Semiramis’ mother, Dercetis (also known as Derceto). The character decides against telling the story, but does in the process mention that Dercetis was changed into a fish, while Semiramis was changed into a dove. This seems to be a reference to a miraculous story of Semiramis’ birth (described by Diodorus Siculus), in which Semiramis was (in typical heroic fashion, like Romulus and Remus who were nursed by a wolf) abandoned in the wild to die but rescued by wild animals, in this case doves, who fed her tidbits of food until she was discovered by a shepherd. If Ovid’s audience has heard Diodorus’ story, they might question whether Semiramis was saved from exposure by doves, or was actually turned into a dove herself (one of these may be less reversible than the other). Her mother, Derceto or possibly Dercetis, according to Diodorus threw herself into a river and drowned after giving birth, but Ovid says she turned into a fish. There seems to be a fictionalizing process going on here: we start with a historical person with a mundane biography, but as the oral tradition gets passed along the person’s biography acquires legendary elements (exposed as a baby, raised by doves, melodramatic suicide). Later Ovid comes along writing a collection of imaginative mythic stories, and the legendary elements become the miraculous transformations that are the primary interest in the Metamorphoses. The real queen is being turned into a fantasy queen. 

      Speaking of contamination from legendary tropes, please note that as Semiramis’ character morphs to acquire characteristics of a typical fictional independent queen, she becomes more and more evil. Diodorus’ account largely shows her as the villainous queen who gains power through sex and then terrorizes men by means of sex. According to Diodorus she slept her way to the top (in the style typical of Bathsheba, Jezebel, Potiphar’s Wife, Cleopatra, Theodora…)--she was originally married to a nobleman, until she caught the eye of king Ninus, at which point she and Ninus forged their own alliance and her old husband was pressured to commit suicide. After her marriage to Ninus, she either killed him herself or arranged for him to be killed, at which point she gained power as regent. There are Armenian legends (several centuries later) that show her as a lust-crazed monster: as queen of Assyria, she hears a rumor that the king of Armenia is breathtakingly gorgeous, so she wages war on their country for the sake of subjugating the king (and, by that means, sleeping with him). As it happened, he was killed in the course of the battle, but she covered up this problem by disguising another beautiful man as the king and claiming that the king had been raised from the dead.

      Still, not all the re-casting of her life in legendary terms makes her look so bad. There is a Greek adventure story known as the Ninus Romance, which was lost during the middle ages, and partially reconstructed based on papyrus fragments, to the extent that we can see that it stars Semiramis and her (legendary) husband Ninus as sentimental teenagers falling in love for the first time. It’s very treacly. One of the two fragments we have is a speech in which Ninus tries to persuade Semiramis’ mother (his aunt) to let him marry his cousin Semiramis. This speech fortuitously preserves a lot of “as you know” style exposition (as if it were taken from the very beginning of the work?). Addressing Semiramis’ mother (here called Derceia), he runs over a lot of facts she probably ought to know: that he is seventeen, that he is the king, that he just returned from a victorious military campaign, that he driven to distraction by love of Semiramis. He also makes Semiramis’ age clear (she’s thirteen) and rails against a tradition that prevents them from marrying until she reaches the age of fifteen. (Even though Semiramis is established in this passage to also be in love with him, his argument that she should marry as soon as possible just because it’s already physically possible for her to become pregnant is pretty creepy.) In my opinion he comes off as a typically impatient teenager who thinks that two years are an interminable wait and worries too much that something terrible might happen to the object of his desire before he gets access to her. Semiramis, when she goes to make the same case to Ninus’ mother, is so overcome with the shame of expressing romantic desires that she is totally unable to speak, and her aunt praises her for being so modest--hardly the same lust-crazed monster queen described by Diodorus.

      Semiramis, in the more gracious legendary accounts, was a standout figure in many ways. She broke gender barriers not only by holding the office of regent while her son was underage, but in her independent career as well--one of the accomplishments attributed to her is the invention of non-gendered clothing. Although these stories of power are quickly exaggerated into erotic tyranny by men hostile to women in power, she still gets a positive spin in the works of Ovid, cited as a city-builder and local hero.

      What seems strange to me is that I’m not aware of many appearances of Semiramis in modern popular culture. As far as eroticized ancient queens go, Cleopatra remains perennially popular (and even Olympias was portrayed by Angelina Jolie on the silver screen nine years ago), whereas Semiramis seems to be forgotten--although I hear “Semiramis” can be used as a derisive nickname for any queen with a reputation for an uncontrollable libido. If you like, you can scan the “In Later Traditions” section of Semiramis’ Wikipedia page for some obscure references, although I came away pretty unimpressed. Just like I’ve always said about the Aeneid, we need a good film interpretation of Semiramis’ life.