Arms and the Woman: Discourses of Militancy and Motherhood in Vergil's Aeneid

As Miranda Alison observes: "The mere fact that it is necessary to specify 'female combatants' indicates their historical rarity and symbolic position as unconventional figures" (2004.447). The historical rarity of women in combat is reflected in the relative scarcity of such characters within the (surviving) tradition of ancient epic. The Homeric poems include no examples of warrior women and, in fact, dramatize the exclusion of civilian women from the masculine sphere of epic combat with Hector's admonition to Andromache that "war will be the business of men" (πόλεμος δ᾽ ἄνδρεσσι μελήσει, Il. 6.492).¹ Within the epic cycle, Penthesilea was a prominent figure in the lost Aethiopis, but almost nothing of this poem survives. It is only with Vergil's Aeneid that a female character enters the epic genre as a "professional" warrior, when the Volscian bellatrix Camilla leads her squadrons to aid Turnus against the Trojan forces in the Italian conflict (Aen. 7.803–17).² Nor is Camilla the Aeneid's only female combatant: the poem is populated with numerous female characters who personally take up arms or are otherwise presented as agents of war.³ This paper analyzes Vergil's representation of these militant women in cross-cultural comparison with contemporary discourses about female combatants in ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. I focus on how discourses about female combatants, both then and now, contribute to or challenge gendered assumptions about women's motives and capacity for violence. Applying recent insights from feminist scholarship in conflict and security studies, I argue that Vergil relies on the same gendered scripts found in modern narratives about female combatants but with an important and surprising exception: the Italian matres who intervene in the conflict following the death of Camilla and who, as I will show, challenge the stereotypical discourses of female militancy found elsewhere in the poem.

This analysis follows from recent observations of the ways in which ancient and modern narratives of war can serve as mirrors for each other, admitting new perspectives on war and combat. Since clinical psychologist Jonathan Shay (1994, 2002) first drew attention to the correspondences between the experiences of contemporary American veterans and Homeric warriors, many scholars have observed parallels between ancient and modern war narratives, as reflected in both literary and historiographical sources.⁴ Objections have also been raised to an anachronistic equation of ancient and modern experiences: in particular, Jason Crowley argues that the American infantryman operates in a significantly different "sociomilitary environment" from the ancient Greek hoplite and that their experiences cannot be mapped onto one another in any straightforward way (2014.106). My project, however, is not concerned with identifying similarities in the emotions or actions of "real" combatants, but with analyzing discursive representations of female agency in combat. My methodology is one of discourse analysis, which views language as a social practice and explores how discourses shape, and are shaped by, social realities. Feminist discourse analysis, in particular, has shown that there are striking cross-cultural and cross-temporal similarities in gendered discourses that serve to reify gender differences in accordance with patriarchal values and practices.⁵

Within classical scholarship, an important precedent for this analysis is provided by Carol Dougherty, who reads the testimony of rape survivors from the Bosnian War against ancient accounts conflating rape and territorial conquest. As she argues: "These are not isolated acts of wartime violence—they are part of a larger discursive framework that unites women's bodies and the land to express political dominance of the latter as sexual conquest of the former" (1998.279). Moreover, "the story cuts both ways" (ibid.): identifying ancient precedents for modern narratives allows us to contextualize both within a larger discursive pattern and to become more aware of the discursive strategies used to marginalize and depoliticize women's experience of war in a wide range of contexts.⁶ Though the Aeneid opens with a programmatic assertion of the association of man and war when the poet promises to sing of arma virumque ("arms and the man," 1.1), it is also the first surviving...