Hell Hath No Fury by Rosalind Miles Read Free Book Online Page B

samurai tradition in Japan. Gozen is not a surname but an honorific applied principally to women.
    The sources differ on the details of her life. She was either the wife, concubine, or female attendant of the Japanese commander Minamoto no Yoshinaka. Skilled in the martial arts and fearless in battle, she was one of Yoshinaka’s senior officers in the struggle for the control of Japan between the Taira and Minamoto clans.
    Tomoe Gozen’s beauty and prowess are described in the
Heike Monogatari
(Tales of the Monogatari):

    Tomoe was especially beautiful, with white skin, long hair and charming features. She was also a remarkably strong archer, and as a swordswoman she was a warrior worth a thousand, ready to confront a demon or a god, mounted or on foot. She handled unbroken horses with superb skill; she rode unscathed down perilous descents. Whenever a battle was imminent, Yoshinaka sent her out as his first captain, equipped with strong armour, an oversized sword, and a mighty bow; and she performed more deeds of valour than any of his other warriors.

    Minamoto no Yoshinaka’s ambition to head the Minamoto clan eventually led to his downfall. The clan chieftain, Minamoto no Yoritomo, decided to nip his cousin’s designs in the bud and dispatched his brothers to kill him. Yoshinaka did battle with Yoritomo’s forces at Awazu in February 1184, where it was said that Tomeo Gozen decapitated at least one of the enemy. With only a few of his soldiers left standing, Yoshinaka ordered Tomoe Gozen to quit the field. One account has her remaining and meeting death at Yoshinaka’s side. Another has her surviving to become a member of a religious order. In yet another she casts herself into the sea, clutching Yoshinaka’s severed head.
    Reference: Helen Craig McCullough, trans.,
The Tale of the Heike,
1988.
    WOMEN WARRIORS IN ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME
    Pre-Christian Era
    Like the tribes of women warriors, fearless individual female fighters crop up so often in the poetry and history of the ancient Greek and Roman world that their existence cannot be dismissed simply as myth (see Amazons, Chapter 1). In the early classical period, young girls led a free, open-air life and were given athletic and gymnastic training to promote both fitness and beauty. In Crete, chosen young women trained as
toreras
to take part in the Minoan ritual of bull leaping, while Ionian women joined in boar hunts, nets and spears at the ready.
    The freedom of the young, unmarried women in the military city-state of Sparta was so marked that it scandalized others, as the Athenian playwright Euripides records:

    The daughters of Sparta are never at home!
    They mingle with the young men in wrestling matches,
    Their clothes cast off, their hips all naked,
    It’s shameful!

    The hardening of these young women’s bodies by sport and the regular practice of nudity had a deliberate aim: to foster their strength, physical ability, and endurance for military service. Both the Spartans and Athenians trained their girls in the art of war and encouraged their participation in competitive war games. Plato stated in his
Republic
that women should become soldiers if they wished, though he later modified that in his
Laws.
    Rome followed Greece in this, as it so often did. Musonius Rufus (30-101 CE ) advocated that women and men should receive the same education and training and that any differences should be based on ability and strength, not gender. The Roman heroine Cloelia, taken hostage by the Etruscan king Lars Porsena during an attack on Rome in the sixth century BCE , escaped, stole a horse, and swam the Tiber River to get back to Rome to fight.
    The Romans promptly handed her back as proof of
Romana fides
(the unwavering truth of a Roman pledge). But Lars Porsena was more impressed by Cloelia’s valor than he was by her compatriots’ rigid view of honor, and he freed her and all her fellow hostages. Throughout the ancient world