Shields of the defeated, from southern Italy

The shields of my last blog post were hung in temples as dedications by the men who owned them, on the occasion of their retirement from successful careers as mercenaries. The shields in the poems below might have hung alongside them, but are there for a very different reason -- they were taken as spoils by the victors in battle. The first of these epigrams is in the book, as is a companion poem (6.129) by the same author; the second is freshly translated for this blog post. Both of them celebrate the victories of Greek city-states over non-Greek peoples in southern Italy in the third century BC.

Shields are cumbersome objects and very heavy. Anyone trying to run from a battlefield would need to throw theirs away; hence the famous injunction of Spartan women to their menfolk to come back either with their shields (victorious), or on them (dead).

Leonidas was from Tarentum, the modern Taranto in Apulia, just at the instep of the heel of Italy's boot. Nossis was from Epizephyrian Locris, right down in the toe. These were major and long-established cities in what the Romans called Magna Graecia, the Greek presence in coastal southern Italy.

The Lucanians were a native Italic people, and the Bruttii were close relatives who lived just to the south of them in what is now Calabria.

6.131

LEONIDAS <OF TARENTUM>

These long shields taken from Lucanians,

This row of bridles, and the polished spears

Hung on each side, bereft of horse and man: 

To Pallas. Man and horse, black death devours.

Nossis is a woman poet but seems every bit as keen on war as Leonidas, at least when their own cities are winning at it. The adjective that I translate as 'keen fighters', ōkumakhos, is found only in this poem and may be her own coinage.

6.132

NOSSIS (on YouTube)

Bruttian soldiers cast these arms away

From shoulders fated to a sorry end,

Falling beneath the blows of Locrians — 

Keen fighters, of whose courage they now sing,

Hanging within the temples of the gods,

And do not miss the forearms of those men,

The cowards they forsook and left behind.