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.
