Athena is the goddess of war and wisdom. How common were female soldiers in the Delian League?

by imaginethecave
Deirdre_Rose

Nonexistent. Athena is a goddess of war, kind of, but she's more a goddess of invention, strategy, and a protector of the city of Athens - not an actual fighter. The ancients had a conflicted attitude towards war, the standard god of war, Ares, was recognized in myth, but had almost no cult (I'm hedging my bets with that almost, I'm tempted to just flat out say no).

Women were not warriors. You can see the attitude towards that idea in the Parthenon metopes where the amazonomachy is depicted (and treated with equal truth value to the centuaromachy) and in Herodotus' account of the Persian War where the Carian queen Artemisia is depicted as one of the barbarian leaders.

Iphikrates

Despite the warlike aspects of certain Greek goddesses (like Athena, Artemis, and Hera), female warriors are altogether unknown in the Greek world. There were no female warriors in the Delian League, or in any other Greek force.

This is not to say that women never fought. Famous stories like Telesilla's defence of Argos against the Spartans, or Artemisia's service in the Persian fleet, show that there were certainly occasions when women participated in battle. Women were also usually present in places that were fought over by men, such as cities and army camps; needless to say they generally weren't inclined to just stand idly by and passively accept whatever would befall them after the battle was decided. There are several known examples of women taking part in the defence of their hometown by throwing rooftiles and stones from the tops of their houses. They also supported the fighting men by bringing them ammunition and food. However, there is no known case of the deliberate use of women as warriors. No Greek community ever drafted or funded a military force composed of women.

This has everything to do with the gender roles that crystallised in Greek culture in the course of the Archaic period. By the 5th century BC, the lives of men and women were expected to be almost completely separated, and women were denied any public role that would give them a voice in the affairs of men. It was the role of male citizens to rule and defend the community; it was the role of women to run the household, manage the slaves, and produce and raise male citizens. As a result, the idea of women warriors became practically unthinkable. Fighting women became a symbol of ultimate un-Greekness, expressed in myths about the barbaric Amazons.

The ideal that women were not warriors soon became self-reinforcing, because women's lack of experience using weapons and confronting enemies meant that they were not particularly useful in a fight. Aineias the Tactician (mid-4th century BC) says that when you're under siege it's a good idea to dress up women like hoplites to deceive your enemy into thinking you have more troops than you do - but you mustn't let the women throw anything at the enemy, because their incompetence at throwing will give them away. Plato notes that Spartan women exercised, making them more fit than the women of other states, but since they did not practice the use of weapons, they were still useless in war:

Even if it should chance to be necessary for them to fight in defence of their city and their children, they will be unable to handle with skill either a bow (like the Amazons) or any other missile, nor could they take spear and shield, after the fashion of the Goddess [Athena], so as to be able nobly to resist the ravaging of their native land, and to strike terror—if nothing more—into the enemy at the sight of them marshalled in battle-array.

-- Plato, Laws 806a-b

This statement was confirmed in practice when the Thebans invaded Lakonia in 370, 369 and 362 BC; the Spartan heartland had remained inviolate for centuries, and the women of Sparta, having never seen an enemy up close, were completely useless in the hastily organised defence of Sparta itself.

In practice, of course, a lot of women could not afford to live the life of the feminine ideal, sequestered from public life and freed from the need to work. Others will not have been inclined to submit to such a life. This is why women do occasionally pop up in civic, economic, legal and even military contexts. But there were no female warriors in the Delian League.