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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20957 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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Sure, but doesn't Aeneas encounter a young Carthaginian huntress (who is actually his mom Aphrodite in disguise)?

His mother met him herself, among the trees, with the face

and appearance of a virgin, and a virgin’s weapons,

a Spartan girl, or such as Harpalyce of Thrace,

who wearies horses, and outdoes winged Hebrus in flight.

For she’d slung her bow from her shoulders, at the ready,

like a huntress, and loosed her hair for the wind to scatter,

her knees bare, and her flowing tunic gathered up in a knot.

And she cried first: ‘Hello, you young men, tell me,

if you’ve seen my sister wandering here by any chance,

wearing a quiver, and the hide of a dappled lynx,

or shouting, hot on the track of a slavering boar?’

And later

Then Venus said: ‘I don’t think myself worthy of such honours:

it’s the custom of Tyrian girls to carry a quiver,

and lace our calves high up, over red hunting boots.

While this could be a fantastical detail imagined by Virgil, I don't find it hard to believe at all that some places around the Mediterranean might have had a tradition of women hunting, and this potentially contributing to Artemis being a huntress.

Hunting wasn’t particularly gendered in medieval Europe, either. But Greco-Roman depictions of hunting invariably show men doing it, and it’s gendered at least a bit in modern cultures.

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