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.”