"In another rare piece of reportage on women, Thucydides tells us about the brave and resourceful womenfolk of Corcyra, modern Corfu, who made a perfect nuisance of themselves around 427 BCE hurling down roof tiles onto the heads of the besieging enemy. Contemporary Greek men would have it that such behaviour could not be more unseemly for a woman, and for a Greek woman at that. But it demonstrates again that, given the need and opportunity, women were quite able and prepared to fight valiantly for their city(...).
Pausanias leaves us an account of Marpessa (or Choira, Sow), who was ‘braver than the rest’, in the defence of Tegea against the Spartans under King Charillus in the seventh century. The battle was inconclusive until Marpessa rallied her fellow women to take up arms. Marpessa’s contingent made all the difference and the Tegeans won the day, taking many prisoners including the prize catch that was the King of Sparta. The jubilant women marked the occasion with a celebration in honour of Ares in which Marpessa’s weapon rather than an effigy of Marpessa was displayed; at the same time the women denied the men any share of the meat from the sacrifices. These women were not just being mean to their men or greedy with their meat: they were reinforcing the role reversal implicit in taking up arms – traditionally men’s business – with a further reversal of roles when they sacrificed and ate sacrificial meat – an action which was, in this context, normally the exclusive preserve of men.
Thucydides’ belligerent Corcyran women were not the only women to pick up and aggressively hurl a roof tile in anger. Four years before this episode in 431 BCE, roof tiles were also the weapon of choice for the Plataeans when attacked by the Thebans. The Plataean women and slaves repaired to the roof tops and orchestrated a fusillade of tiles, setting the scene for an eventual rout of the attackers. Indeed, Diodorus insists that it was the intervention of the women that tipped the balance in favour of the defenders. When the Thebans panicked, they left a number of their men behind who were taken prisoner.
Bombardment by tile, though, was no guarantee of military success for the women slingers: Polyaenus recalls the story of the female inhabitants of an unspecified Acarnanian town who made a rooftop assault on the Aitoleans attacking them. The defence failed and men and Acarnanian men and women died clinging together as one; significantly, the women gave up their resistance once their menfolk had perished or were captured.
The biggest defeat in this situation, though, was suffered by the Selinuntians in 409 BCE at the hands of a 100,000-strong Carthaginian force, equipped with siege equipment, rampaging through Sicily. The whole town of Selinus was mobilised including elderly men, children and women, the latter providing missiles and provisions. But the wall was breached and the subsequent hand-to-hand fighting involved not only the Selinuntian soldiers but the women too; according to Diodorus: ‘many gathered to the aid of the defenders’. The Carthaginians retreated and messages were sent out from Selinus to Acragas, Gela and Syracuse requesting relief. The following day saw a repeat with the inhabitants fighting to the last roof tile until they ran out of ammunition. The Carthaginians razed the town killing 16,000 citizens and capturing 5,000; only 2,600 escaped.
A report by Pausanias would suggest that roof-top tile-slinging by women defenders was typical behaviour and roof tiles unleashed by women were raining down on besiegers all the time. Apparently, at the beginning of the Second Messenian War at the start of the seventh century BCE a bad storm prevented the women of Eira from taking to the rooftops for a tile barrage on the attacking Spartans below.
Plutarch reports on the unusual, almost comic, death of Pyrrhus in 272 BCE after he was wounded by an Argive – not a hero of any kind, simply ‘the son of a poor old woman’ who was viewing the action in a teichoscopy:
His mother, like the rest of the women, was at this moment watching the battle from the roof, and when she saw that her son was fighting with Pyrrhus she was distressed by the danger he was in, so, picking up a tile with both hands hurled it at Pyrrhus. It hit his head just below his helmet and crushed the vertebrae at the base of his neck, making his sight blurred and his hands drop the reins. Then he sank down from his horse…
Plutarch continues to describe how the old mother’s well-aimed tile was followed by a very messy decapitation of the dazed and injured Pyrrhus. Her missile has been called ‘the most historically significant roof tile’.
Other instances include the Messenian women who repulsed an army of Macedonians in 214 BC. Women took up arms in 278 BCE when Aetolians fought 40,000 invading Galatians. Pausanias describes how the women were lined up alongside the men and shot missiles at the Galatians with some considerable accuracy; he notes that the women showed greater bravery than men in the action, adding that the enormity of the situation made it necessary for the women to be enlisted to help: earlier the Galatians had captured the Aetolian city of Callion, massacring its inhabitants: ‘the fate of the Callions is the most wicked ever heard of, and is without a parallel in the crimes of men’."
Women at War in the Classical World, Paul Chrystal
Wait… Idas was Perseus’s great grandson, Marpessa is Pelops niece (not even grandniece) how did that work?
Perhaps there’s a massive age gap between Hippodamia and Alcippe (Marpessa’s mother) and she’s a baby by the time Hippodamia got married and with further stenches of age gaps that I don’t care to get into then Marpessa and Idas would be around the same age? Perhaps Alcippe had Marpessa when she was older?
I headcanon that Marpessa was in her late 20s to further justify why she’s worried and even angry over her father forcing her to remain unwed, and Idas is in his early 20s.
