Caveat (oooh thats a fancy word for me go me lol): This is based on research I did for the Royal Armouries’ Forgotten Battles exhibition for Leeds 2023. It is my research based on my view with my biases (as with any researcher). My task was to interpret and present research on the potential gendered history of the object (in this case the Roman Gladius).
The Armouries chose not to use my interpretation of Bellona’s butchness and the artists chose not to use it either so this is my way of rectifying this in a productive and positive way (is this growth??)
Lets start at the very beginning a very good place to start. This is the Roman Gladius I mentioned above
At first I thought there was nothing really interestingly gendered about this until I considered this figure a bit more
The official interpretation is that this is Mars but something about it didn’t feel very Mars-like, so I began to look at what other Roman war deities there are that this could be, and then I found her
Bellona
Roman goddess of war. The OG Roman goddess of war, no less. She pre-dates Mars and is actually a Sabine deity that stuck with the Romans from the start until Christianity became the flavour of the month that just won’t quit
Most goddesses are described in feminine and slightly sexy terms, but not Bellona. There is nothing the cis men writing about her found sexy and thats because she isn’t for cis men - she’s a butch.
I’m not gonna do a dissection of what butchness is cuz i’m not butch and I couldn’t for the life of me tell u but this here classic femme knows a butch when i sees one
And I certainly sees one
I say Bellona wasn’t for cis men, but being a war goddess she naturally had a large cis male following and while the Romans eventually married her to Mars (who was also her cousin?) she is never described as being with a man so the marriage just seems like a weird formality as god forbid a woman ever actually do anything where she isn’t 2nd fiddle to a man
📚 Whats her history? 📚
She had priests known as the Bellonarii with a major temple from at least 296 BCE just outside of Rome where foreign dignitaries were expected to stay and where diplomatic meetings would take place including declarations of war.
Her holy day was the 3rd of June but also was celebrated on the day of blood, 24th March (the same day Cybele was celebrated by the Galli!). Bellona is linked with Cybele and it could be that one was considered an aspect of the other in some areas
She was apparently considered to be quite a volatile and violent goddess (ofc she was cuz we can’t have nice things so ofc the roman decided to demonise the butch) so few people wanted to be seen publicly worshipping her, but that being said it is recorded that numerous rich families would pay for the upkeep of the temple cuz lets face it they wouldn’t want to piss off a volatile goddess of war now would they. Bellona’s temple was also the first in the Roman Empire to have decorative shields dedicated to mortals - doesn’t sound like the will of a volatile butch to me but what do I know i’m only a little femme dyke
Bellona is always depicted in the same fashion - a plumed helmet, a shield and a spear, and often with long hair. In this drawing above from the 1500s she’s even depicted without tits, which is something that is well documented in butch history - having top surgery!
In the UK she was also worshipped, especially by the Emperor Septimius Severus who had spent his life as a soldier and general before climbin that ladder to become the Big Cheese. She would have had a shrine in the Principia, what would eventually become York Minster, where she would have overlooked the treasure as well as soldier’s and worker’s pay. Anyone wanting to steal this would be confronted by a statue of Bellona, and I doubt they would want to piss her off!
In the UK she was also worshipped, especially by the Emperor Septimius Severus who had spent his life as a soldier and general before climbin that ladder to become the Big Cheese. She would have had a shrine in the Principia, what would eventually become York Minster, where she would have overlooked the treasure as well as soldier’s and worker’s pay. Anyone wanting to steal this would be confronted by a statue of Bellona, and I doubt they would want to piss her off!
🖼️ Depictions of Bellona 🖼️
On the gladius scabbard she is not the only figure and is put next to Winged Victory, which again is a common motif of her not actually being depicted with men beyond that marriage of convenience to her cousin.
Winged Victory is shown with a globe in one section showing the Roman’s plan to conquer and colonise the world, and in the next panel she is shown with a palm tree which was a symbol of the Roman’s victory (oppression) of Jewish people from 63 BCE. It would have continued to be a recognised and relevant symbol around the time the sword would have been made (potentially around 70 CE in Pompeii) as Judea was rebelling against Roman occupation and was the time of the first Roman-Jewish war. As Roman soldiers often had to pay for their own equipment they could get what they like on it, so it could be that it is a reference to the swords first owner Caius Valerius Primus fighting in where 1 million Jewish people were killed and 90,000 were enslaved (that seems like quite a large figure but thats what I could find 🤷♀️)
ASIDE: Please don’t misconstrue this as some sort of support for Israel cuz thats a stretch and I am literally just stating historical events
In Shakespeare’s time and she was considered a byword for war in his work and was also depicted by Rodin and Rembrandt
My personal favourite i found was a scan of a photo of a missing painting:
