Who She Is
Camilla is the queen of the Volscians, a virgin consecrated to Diana and the great warrior of the Aeneid, who fights surrounded by armed companions. She runs faster than the wind, commands cavalry, and refuses the spinning and weaving that the poem assigns to women's hands. She enters at the end of the catalog of the allies of Turnus and dies in the book that bears her name: she is born and dies within a single arc, and yet she receives a full biography, a long aristeia, and divine vengeance, treatment the poem reserves for very few figures. What she wants is combat, and her role is twofold: she gives the Italian war its most brilliant feat of cavalry, and shows that war also takes its toll from those who refused every bond.
Trajectory
In Book VII the introduction already defines her by her refusal: she does not spin, does not weave, does not take up the work that the poem assigns to women's hands.
Hos super advenit Volsca de gente Camilla, / Agmen agens equitum et florentes aere catervas, / Bellatrix: non illa colo calathisve Minervae / Femineas assueta manus, sed praelia virgo / Dura pati, cursuque pedum praevertere ventos, along with them comes Camilla, from the Volscian people, leading a squadron of horsemen and companies gleaming with bronze, a warrior: not used to putting feminine hands to the distaff or to the baskets of Minerva, but a virgin able to endure harsh battles and to outrun the winds in the race.
The catalog lists the other chiefs by genealogy or by armor, and only for her does it describe a body in motion: she would fly over the wheat without bending the ears and over the sea without wetting her feet.
Illa vel intactae segetis per summa volaret / Gramina, nec teneras cursu laesisset aristas; / Vel mare per medium, fluctu suspensa tumenti, / Ferret iter, celeres nec tingeret aequore plantas, she would fly over the grasses of an untouched field, and in her run she would not harm the tender ears of grain; or, poised above the swelling wave, she would make her way through the middle of the sea, and would not wet her swift feet in the water.
In Book XI she arrives at Laurentum at the head of the Volscian cavalry, dismounts before Turnus, and offers to face the Etruscan horsemen alone, leaving him the defense of the walls. Her courage is what makes possible the ambush he prepares in the gorge.
Turne, sui merito si qua est fiducia forti, / Audeo, et Aeneadum promitto occurere turmae / Solaque Tyrrhenos equites ire obvia contra. / Me sine prima manu tentare pericula belli: / Tu pedes ad muros subsiste et moenia serva., Turnus, if a brave man has any right to trust in himself, I dare, and I promise to meet the squadron of the Aeneadae and to go alone against the Tyrrhenian horsemen. Let me first try the perils of war: you, on foot, stay by the walls and guard the city.
The poem then returns to her childhood, told only now, in retrospect. Her father, Metabus, the deposed king of Privernum, fled with the girl while she was still a baby, and, on reaching a river in flood, tied her to a spear, dedicated her to Diana, and threw her across the water. It is this vow, not an adult choice, that organizes her whole life: raised in the mountains on mare's milk, a huntress, a virgin.
Alma, tibi hanc, nemorum cultrix, Latonia virgo, / Ipse pater famulam voveo: tua prima per auras / Tela tenens supplex hostem fugit, virgin daughter of Latona, worshiper of the groves, I, her father, vow this girl to you as your servant: holding your first weapons, she flees the enemy, a suppliant through the air.
On Olympus, Diana knows that her death is marked and says what she would have preferred.
Vellem haud correpta fuisset / Militia tali, conata lacessere Teucros; / Cara mihi comitumque foret nunc una mearum., I would have wished she had not been swept into such a war, having tried to attack the Teucrians: she would now be dear to me and one of my companions.
What follows is the longest aristeia of any female figure in the poem, with a line of named dead, until the moment she pursues the golden armor of Chloreus, priest of Cybele, and stops seeing the rest of the field. The narrator gives two reasons, to dedicate the spoils in a temple or to display herself as a huntress, and does not choose between them.
Hunc virgo, sive ut templis praefigeret arma / Troia, captivo sive ut se ferret in auro / Venatrix, unum ex omni certamine pugnae / Caeca sequebatur, totumque incauta per agmen / Femineo praedae et spoliorum ardebat amore., the maiden, whether to fix the Trojan arms in the temples or to display herself, a huntress, in captured gold, followed only him from the whole contest, blind, and, reckless through the whole army, burned with a woman's love of prey and spoils.
Aruns, who was stalking her without the courage to face her, takes advantage of the distraction and wounds her with a dart, thrown from a distance, under the breast. His prayer to Apollo is the opposite of a hero's speech: he asks neither glory nor spoils, only to be rid of his disgrace and to return to his homeland without a name.
Da, pater, hoc nostris aboleri dedecus armis, / Omnipotens. Non exuvias, pulsaeve tropaeum / Virginis aut spolia ulla peto; mihi cetera laudem / Facta ferent: haec dira meo dum vulnere pestis / Pulsa cadat, patrias remeabo inglorius urbes., grant, Father, Almighty one, that this disgrace be wiped away by our arms. I seek no spoils, no trophy of a defeated maiden, nor any plunder; other deeds will bring me praise: provided that this dreadful plague falls, struck by my blow, I will return without glory to the cities of my homeland.
Dying, she does not lament her own death: she passes command to Turnus and sends her last military message through her companion Acca, before the farewell.
Hactenus, Acca soror, potui; nunc vulnus acerbum / Conficit et tenebris nigrescunt omnia circum. / Effuge et haec Turno mandata novissima perfer: / Succedat pugnae Trojanosque arceat urbe., so far I could go, sister Acca; now the bitter wound finishes me and everything around me darkens. Flee, and carry this last order to Turnus: let him take up the fight and keep the Trojans away from the city.
The nymph Opis, sent by Diana, fulfills the promise made before the battle and kills Aruns with the goddess's arrow, without him noticing where the blow came from.
Heu! nimium, virgo, nimium crudele luisti / Supplicium, Teucros conata lacessere bello! [...] Nam quicumque tuum violavit vulnere corpus, / Morte luet merita., alas! Too much, maiden, too cruel a punishment you paid for trying to attack the Teucrians in war! [...] For whoever wounded your body will pay with a death he has earned.
Themes Embodied
Camilla touches on War, because she is the woman whose aristeia the poem narrates and the only case in which war takes a young woman out of the world that raised her; on Fate and Free Will, because her life was decided by a vow before she had any will of her own, and her death by fates that Diana laments but does not prevent; and on Duty, in the command she carries out until her last breath.
The poem does not kill her for being a woman in arms; it kills her at the exact moment she behaves like any ordinary soldier, coveting showy spoils. It is this choice by Virgil that separates Camilla from the stock Amazon of the catalogs: the flaw that brings her down is her love of spoils, which the narrator calls feminine and which the scene shows to be the same as that of any warrior faced with a showy prey.
Camilla is the third great victim of the cost of the founding, after Dido and before Turnus, and the series is only fully read when the three are set side by side: the poem first claims a foreign queen, then an Italic queen, and finally the rightful suitor of the land, and none of the three deaths is presented as deserved. Dido dies from excess of attachment, in passion, destroyed by abandonment, and the sword that kills her is that of Aeneas. Camilla dies from the refusal of every attachment, without home, husband, or son, and the weapon that kills her comes from afar, from a man who flees right after the blow. Neither of the two women meets Aeneas in combat, and this is no accident of plot: the poem kills both women outside the duel.
Relationships
- Turnus: the Rutulian chief to whom she offers to fight first and to whom she passes command as she dies.
- Dido: the other woman the poem sacrifices, by the opposite path: Dido through excess of attachment, Camilla through its refusal.
- Aeneas: the hero she never gets to face.
Camilla in the Homeric Parallel and in Dante
The internal parallel with Patroclus is left open and worth keeping in mind: brilliant aristeia, death by an unworthy blow, and the vengeance that follows. The difference is that in the Iliad the divine promise is fulfilled only by half, while here Diana pays the entire debt, which gives Camilla a posthumous justice that the poem grants neither to Dido nor to Turnus. Likewise, Apollo grants Aruns only half of his prayer.
Dante Alighieri names her right in Canto I of the Inferno, among those who died for Italy, and this is how she reaches the modern reader even before the Aeneid: as the name in a list of founding dead, and not as a character.
Di quella umile Italia fia salute / per cui morì la vergine Cammilla, / Eurialo e Turno e Niso di ferute., from that humble Italy salvation will come, for which the maiden Camilla died, Euryalus and Turnus and Nisus, of their wounds.
Dante calls her vergine, the same attribute with which Virgil defines her, and she is the only one of the four names in that line to receive a qualifier.
That Dante places her in the same line as Turnus and the two companions of Book IX, Nisus and Euryalus, confirms the role she has in the Latin poem: for tradition, Camilla is not the curiosity of a woman warrior but one of the losses that found Italy, read alongside the men who died for the same cause.