Telesilla of Argos, Warrior-Poetess

Telesilla of Argos, who flourished around 510-490 BC, was a noted poet, numbered by the Greeks among the so-called “Nine Lyric Muses.”  In his Moralia Plutarch (c. AD 46-120) tells us “It is said that she was the daughter of a famous house, but sickly in body, and so she sent to the god to ask about health; and when an oracle was given her to cultivate the Muses, she followed the god's advice, and by devoting herself to poetry and music she was quickly relieved of her trouble, and was greatly admired by women for her poetic art.”

But her poetry was not the only reason Telesilla was famous in the ancient world. She was also a warrior of some note, as Plutarch continues,

Of all the deeds performed by women for the community none is more famous than the struggle against Cleomenes for Argos, which the women carried out at the instigation of Telesilla the poet. . . .

When Cleomenes, king of the Spartans, having slain many Argives . . . proceeded against the city, an impulsive daring, divinely inspired, came to the younger women to try, for their country's sake, to hold off the enemy.  Under the lead of Telesilla, they took up arms, and, taking their stand by the battlements, manned the walls all round, so that the enemy were amazed. The result was that they repulsed Cleomenes with great loss, and the Spartans’ other king, Demaratus, who managed to get inside, as Socrates says, and gained possession of the Pamphyliacum district of the city, they drove out.  In this way the city was saved.  The women who fell in the battle they buried close by the Argive Road, and to the survivors they granted the privilege of erecting a statue of Ares as a memorial of their surpassing valor.  

Plutarch goes on to note that to commemorate the courage of Telesilla and the other women of Argos, the Argives instituted “the 'Festival of Impudence', at which they clothe the women in men's tunics and cloaks, and the men in women's robes and veils,” a custom still practiced in his times.  The travel writer Pausanius (fl. c. 120-180) adds the detail that Telesilla’s heroism was commemorated by a statue in the temple of Aphrodite at Argos showing her in the act of putting on a helmet, her books lying discarded at her feet.

Oddly, although Telesilla’s odes, war songs, hymns, choruses, and other works were widely celebrated in ancient times, and are mentioned by many authors, only two of her lines actually survive, in the Handbook of Meter, by one Hephaestion of Alexandria, a rough contemporary of Pausanias.  Seeking to illustrate the “Ionic meter” (a poetic form that has two long/stressed syllables followed by two short/unstressed syllables), Hephaestion quoted from a song Telesilla wrote for a Parthenion, a chorus of young maidens, about the river god Alpheus’ lustful pursuit of Artemis, virgin goddess of the hunt;

Here Artemis, O maidens,
fleeing from Alpheus . . .

Bundles for Britain

On May 26, 1940, with Germany’s blitzkrieg across northern France having isolated Allied armies in northwestern Europe, the Royal Navy initiated a rescue of British and French troops from the port of Dunkirk.  By the time the operation ended on June 4^th, heroic action by British seamen and a desperate rear-guard fight by British and French troops had resulted in successfully evacuating some 338,226 men (about a third French),  to be joined by a further 150,000 from other ports over the next two weeks. 

The French troops were promptly returned to their homeland to rejoin the fight.  But France soon surrendered, and Britain had to fight on alone.  Although (as a result of Dunkirk) the British still had a substantial number of troops available, they were desperately short of equipment, having abandoned much of it on the beaches.  So despite over two dozen divisions supposedly in Britain, apparently only two were fully armed and equipped.

Even before the evacuation had been completed, The U.S. had begun to quietly ship “surplus” arms and equipment, such as World War I Enfield rifles, to Britain.  The figures were impressive.

In addition to this equipment, the U.S. committed to sending over 130 million rounds of rifle and machine gun ammunition, about a million artillery rounds, plus side arms and ammunition. Shipments were largely completed by September, which was when Hitler’s planned invasion was initially scheduled to take place. This American materiél, plus the ramped-up production by British defense plants, produced 29 divisions (plus several independent brigades) largely ready for duty.