No Woman No War: Women's Participation in Ancient

Greek Warfare

Pasi Loman, Greece & Rome, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Apr., 2004), pp. 34-54 (21 pages)

Before the 2000s, my subject, the warrior women of Ancient Greek, had not received
much attention. In fact, it was rather avoided by historians and led to many
confusions in the archaeological sources.
Pasi Loman, the author of this article, makes the same comment about how little this
topic was discussed before the 2000s, even though women's studies really started in
the 1970s.

He is a Finnish professor of classics, specialized in the field of women's studies in

the Hellenistic period. He completed his PhD in 2004 with a thesis entitled "Mobility
of Hellenistic Women." He gave courses at the universities of Nottingham and
Birmingham. The majority of his published articles focus on women's studies in the
Hellenistic era.
These new analyses of this subject are relatively recent and prompt questions about
women's activities in ancient Greece and how they are perceived in the present day
and by their contemporaries.

So this is the background of this subject in the article, it’s a topic that has many
shadow areas because of the wrong conclusions notably in the archeological field,
where some archeologists made their analysis with a cognitive bias. Unfortunately
it's not something the author dwells on.
This is a tough task also because the writers of this period are mostly men so they
tend to not be interested in writing about the fact that a woman goes beyond the
supposedly rigidity of the patriarchal society they live in.

The author begins by making interesting comments on how the women viewed the
war. What we may think is that the peace was asked rather than the war by women
but it actually was quite the opposite. Poems from Anyte and Aristophane suggested
a strong admiration for men at war by their wives.

“Death took you in your prime [...]

dying, you brought dark grief to your mother Pheidia.
But the poem on this stone above you sings
of how you died doing battle for your beloved fatherland”

This is an extract from Anyte who’s a poet from the Hellenistic period writing about
an heroic death at the battlefield.
The second writing is about the comedy called Lysistrata. Although it served the idea
that women were rooting for peace, it was actually not really the subject of the play.
They acted from a place of loneliness by menacing their husband on a sex strike if
they go to war again. They were simply sick of being left by their husband, but not
really against the idea of war.

Alongside the artistic representations he refers to, the historian also evokes
Plutarch's writings on Spartan traditions, in particular the resilience of the spartan
mothers and wives about the death of their sons and husband at the battlefield. They
care about the community and the winning of the war rather than the survival of their
men. They tend to grieve with much more facility according to Plutarch, if the
Spartan succeeded at the military campaigns.

He also invokes the fact that women in Sparta were trained to defend the city in case
of civil war, we can assure that they have agency in these times of imminent danger
which may be a simple thing to say but quite important towards the look of the past
historiography on the subject. It implies a lot of things that are contrary to what
women were supposedly taught in other cities like Athens.

Later the author explains the myth of the Amazons that was especially a theme in
the classical periods through every support like painters, poets, historians,
sculptors.They are represented as losing in front of greek man during what we called
the Amazonomachy. These Amazons faced the well-defined idea of a woman plus
the barbarian origins which made them the perfect anti model of this society. These
images of defeating the Amazons give a symbol of power and control of the norms
the population has to serve in order to fit in the society.

The first point in the development is about the real implication of women in periods of
war. The author denies completely the passivity, a common idea of greek women
under these times of war, and searches to prove why women were also involved in
this and has taken crucial part for the smooth running of the operations.
For most of them it’s through the religion that they show support to the soldiers, with
prayers, even though this argument is debated by historians, we can assume that in
times of crisis, women with their strong link to religion very possibly did all those
tasks. We have writings from Athanaeus about a Corinthian prostitute participating in
religious matters by supplications to prevent the persian invasion for example.
However, it is certain that they had other great tasks like the financement of the
armies and managed the production of food for them.

It’s during siege that the actions of women can be very welcomed by the community,
like for the siege of Sparta when women did throw tiles from the rooftop to the
soldiers, and even killed the king Pyrrhus who directed the siege.
But are they involved in the battlefield, fighting at the side of men? The author is
pointing the women of the Argeades dynasty during the Hellenistic period that
participated in the battlefields. He mentions the daughter of Philip the 2nd and
Audata named Kynanè, who fought and killed a man according to the writings of
Polyaenus and Athenaeus and taught military skills to her daughter Eurydice.
Years later, Olympias and Eurydice even fought against each other during a battle,
still according to the narrative of Athenaeus and Diodorus.
The final pages explain the involvement of Hellenistic queens in the political area,
through circumstances beyond their control such as the death of their husbands, or
simply polygamy with no hierarchy between the king's wives, which drove them to
commit atrocities in order to survive, their sons being their only guarantee of security.

This article doesn't really have any negative points to highlight, but it's true that the
Amazons are dealt with briefly and therefore the Scythian women who would
possibly be their descendants don't appear at all, which is a pity because it invites
me to argue on another point of the article where the author talks about the fact that
these demonstration of Andreia (courage in ancient Greek, a masculine quality) are
not observable on the scale of everyday women, which can be discussed if we do
the History of the Scythian people.

The article overall is well-written and not hard to follow. It's very comprehensive,
giving a wide-ranging and well-argued panorama with many references to ancient
authors. I would have liked to see some archaeological documents referenced, but
that's all I have to say about the quality of this article.