NoCalOwner
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ORIGINAL: Leonidas
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Tacitus, in putting a pre-battle speech into the mouth of the Roman general Suetonius, said that there were more women than men in Boudica's army.
I might have said the same in a pre-battle speech to my men. Tacitus didn't happen to mention whether the men cheered or laughed at this particular revelation, did he? "We're facing a bunch of women" sounds like a good pre-battle morale booster to me, especially at a time when women were just spoils of war.
Indeed. Despite the fact that women, from slaves to those of high birth, sometimes fought in Roman arenas, there is no doubt that his statement was an appeal to, well, the sexism of the legionnaires. He also pointed out that the Iceni were badly equipped. Just the same, we have to take most Roman historians with a huge grain of salt, as so many things they say are obviously exaggerated, or are really veiled commentaries on Roman society. When in The Germania we are told that Germanic men are extremely proud and brave, and their women of unblemished virtue, what we are really being told is that the author considers the men of Rome to be cowardly and without pride, and Roman women to sleep around far too much. Tacitus goes on to say that less than 10,000 legionnaires go into that battle and slaughter 80,000 of the Iceni, while taking only 400 casualties themselves. I call BS on Tacitus.
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Ammianus Marcellinus said that Gaulish women were even stronger than their husbands, and makes them sound like very skilled streetfighters.
Again, I might have said the same. You have to remember that to the ears of the listener of the time "your women are stronger than you are" would have been a damn good insult, and quite possibly would have elicited a belly-laugh in the reader.
Possible, although I tend to think it improbable. Aside from a blatant dislike for Christianity, Ammianus is considered to be to most fact-oriented and objective of ancient historians, less biased than Tacitus or Livy. From Suetonius I'd expect jokes and jibes. If Ammianus Marcellinus said it, he probably meant it, in my opinion.
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In 102 AD, Plutarch said, describing a battle with the Celts: "the fight had been no less fierce with the women than with the men themselves... the women charged with swords and axes and fell upon their opponents uttering a hideous outcry."
Now this I do remember reading. Wasn't the context of this attack by the women the victorious romans attempting to enter the Celt camp and, um, enjoy the fruits of conquest?
Not quite, but the fault for your mistake may be mine. I said 102 AD, I meant 102 BC. Plutarch was writing about the first part of the battle of Aquae Sextiae, the last of many fought over several centuries between the Romans and the Ambrones. The Ambrones were finally beaten and annexed, forming the province of Cisalpine Gaul. According to "The Life of Marius," it went like this... the Ambrones had the men in the vanguard, and the women as the rear guard and protecting the camp. The men were divided while crossing a river, and the Ligurian forces on the Roman side took advantage of the situation and attacked, inflicting heavy losses. The men were routed, and tried to retreat through the women. The women would have none of that: "Here the women met them, swords and axes in their hands, and with hideous shrieks of rage tried to drive back fugitives and pursuers alike, the fugitives as traitors, and the pursuers as foes; they mixed themselves up with the combatants, with bare hands tore away the shields of the Romans or grasped their swords, and endured wounds and mutilations, their fierce spirits unvanquished to the end."
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Bodica inherited her kingdom from her dead husband, and was publically flogged, and her daughters raped by the Romans, yes? This was an outrage that started a rebellion. It's not as if she and her daughters were warrior princesses in their own right. They became symbols of revolt. Am I remembering this wrong? It's been a while since I read about it.
That's pretty much correct. Her husband had hoped to appease the Romans by leaving his half of his land to the Romans in his will, dividing the other half between his two daughters. The local Roman troops were totally undisciplined, and as soon as they heard of the husband's death, they went on a rampage of killing and pillaging (nice way to treat your new property, eh?). They also enslaved relatives of the deceased king, and committed any number of other atrocities. This led to the war in which 70,000 Roman citizens and sympathizers were allegedly killed, London conquered and looted, etc. I don't think that you can write them off as "symbols" rather than "warriors" however, since Boudica was regent of the Iceni during the minority of her daughters, who were heirs to half a kingdom. I see them more as the surviving leaders of the Iceni, who did what leaders might be expected to do under the circumstances. It's not like Boudica learned to drive a war chariot overnight. If you look at the fall of most of the Bronze Age cultures of the Mediterranean to the People of the Sea in 1200-1100 BC, it was because the established civilizations relied almost totally on war chariots, and a handful of highly skilled, well equipped, and thus very expensive charioteers. Most of these soldiers were on a first name basis with the rulers they served. They were like the heavy cavalry of the high middle ages. They were defeated by a new approach to warfare -- huge throngs of spearmen and archers, very cheaply equipped and minimally trained. Training for war charioteers, or knights, took years. "Boudicca, in a [chariot], with her two daughters before her, drove through the ranks. She harangued the different nations in their turn: 'This,' she said, 'is not the first time that the Britons have been led to battle by a woman.'" (Annals of Tacitus, Book XIV, Ch. 35)
There have been a number of burials found in Celtic countries (Gaul and Scythia for example) where the skeletons of women were found with swords, bows, armor and the bones of their horses. Chariots too, in some cases. Here's a fine example, a woman's breastplate from the land of the Belgae (Netherlands) around 1000 BC.
http://www.lothene.demon.co.uk/others/cuirass.jpg
Or consider that CuChulainn was supposed to have been trained in the arts of war by Queen Scathach of Skye, had a son by Aoife, a female warrior, and had as his main adversaries Queen Medb of Cruachan and her warrior sisters. Myth it may be, but scores of generations of Irish folk seem to have had no problem with the idea of women leaders with spears in their hands.
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You probably have a much better understanding of these things than I do. I'll have to go back and look at the roman sources again. You bring up some interesting things. I'm very curious as to their context.
Hope I managed to clear up context of the Roman stuff sufficiently. I'm not trying to change your mind about anything, really. I'd be the first to admit that, through the vast majority of recorded history, men have had the upper hand. But I'm not going to argue with anyone who believes that male dominance is not some immutable, natural law. Isn't the existence of religion a fairly compelling bit of evidence that most of the human race, regardless of gender, seem to feel the need to have some giant Dom/me taking care of us? Or look at the sheeplike way that voters act a lot of the time -- in the US, I think that this applies to men even more than to women. It is the really DANGEROUS side of submissiveness, since most people do not even realize quite what it is that they are doing. I'll close with a quote which I've found worthy of a great deal of thought over the years. It doesn't have anything valid to say about the role of gender in my opinion -- the author was very sexist by almost any standards -- but it has LOADS to say about human nature, the dangers of uncritically submitting, and the character of the person who said it. Think about this one next time you're headed off to (get *used* at) the polls, folks.
"The psyche of the broad masses does not respond to anything weak or half-way. Like a woman, whose spiritual sensitiveness is determined less by abstract reason than by an indefinable emotional longing for fulfilling power and who, for that reason, prefers to submit to the strong rather than the weakling - the mass, too, prefers the ruler to a pleader." -- Mein Kampf
< Message edited by NoCalOwner -- 8/18/2004 10:52:27 PM >
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RE: Misogyny - 
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) That the women had the power does not preclude war or preclude that men did the work of war. I come from a military family (on my mother's side). An admiral, captains, and a recently retired commodore: all strong and formidable men who command other men. All of them spending much time away from home. All of them live(d) in homes where the power in the home belonged to their equally formidable and dominant wives. In fact, if there is anything I have learned about a navy career, it is that you cannot progress to the top if you don't have a competent and powerful woman in charge of your home life and your children. Each of these men were dominated in a certain context by women. Some of them purposefully and some by necessity. The really interesting part comes when those men retire and start living full-time in those homes. The commodore unconciously expected to usurp his home from his wife when he was no longer focused on running naval aviation training for the entire USA. That didn't work out for him. In the end I think he has been somewhat emasculated. The Admiral from the previous generation was far wiser in my book. He knew my grandmother ruled the home for 46 years and had no intention of challenging that. In the end he played the role of a devoted servant to his wife and, though he did engage in vanilla submission, he never became any less of a man. 
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