1040s Me: Fill & Download for Free

That is a very complex decision. Donald Trump is in politics, just like Hillary Clinton. Pretty much all the politicians are doubtful people, where you cannot 100% trust them. He says he defends the US labor while I'm here in Argentina preparing 1040s for a living.Now it's the time to say it: You are lucky to be an US citizen, because you know you aren't going to be kicked out soon. For people like me, who would want a slice of the pie, it's impossible. I do the same job as people in US, but I only get paid 20% of an annual salary. It's kinda unfair that the differences are because of distance and language, right?This explains the origin of the Mexican stuff. Yes, there are some bad people who want to have an easy life, but there are others who are willing to do the extra mile.Lastly, Donald Trump is a very vocal guy, but he misses the point on important stuff. Contamination can kill more people than the most dangerous Mexicans. He still haven't changed anything about lobbying, and that it's something that everyone would want. For these kind of things, you may regret voting him in a few years.If I were you, I would like to know more about what is important to her. It's useless to hate something if you can't defend your main idea. Try to find a constructive opinion, learn to accept that Trump has it's flaws, it's a human after all!Your girlfriend is surely not an anarchist nor a hippie, not even a Greenpeace activist. Those "can be" red flags for you.

Someone on Quora recently asked the question “Is there a real reason why ancient armies didn't have female soldiers, or was it just sexism?” This question immediately triggered a whole flurry of defensive replies from various male military history buffs proclaiming all the reasons why women are supposedly naturally unsuited for ancient warfare and why it was supposedly perfectly logical for ancient militaries to exclude women.The most upvoted answer to the question is this one, written by a man named Alex Mann, arguing that women are naturally physically shorter, weaker, and smaller than men, that pregnancy and menstruation would hinder them from fighting, and that they would be an overall detriment to any ancient army. The answer currently has 2,722 upvotes and hundreds of comments, many of them showering praise on the author for his supposed clarity and perceptiveness.Other men have provided answers drawing similar conclusions. The arguments that these men present, however, are demonstrably quite shoddy. In this essay, I intend to demonstrate that there is, in fact, no logical reason for an army to have a rule categorically excluding all women and that the real reason why women were excluded from ancient militaries is indeed simply sexism.An important caveat about warBefore I explain why the putative justifications given by Alex Mann and others for why women were not allowed to fight in the ancient world don’t hold up to scrutiny, I want to make an important caveat. Much of the conversation concerning ancient warfare is, unfortunately, intertwined with notions of “great warriors” and “glory in battle.” That’s not what I’m here to talk about.I personally believe that all wars are inherently destructive, unjust, and harmful, especially to the people who are the most vulnerable. Practically speaking, though, if there are going to be wars, there are going to be people fighting those wars. My purpose in this essay is not to argue that war is good or that it brings any kind of glory to those who partake in it. My purpose is merely to argue that the prevailing notion that all women were naturally unsuited to participate in ancient warfare for inherent physical and biological reasons doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.ABOVE: The Apotheosis of War, painted in 1871 by the Russian painter Vasily Vasilyevich VereshchaginEvidence for the existence of female warriors in the pre-modern worldWith that important caveat out of the way, I want to take a moment to note that female warriors actually did exist in the pre-modern world. It’s true that, in most pre-modern cultures, women were generally forbidden from fighting in battle. For instance, as far as I am currently aware, apart from a few notable cases of female leaders like Artemisia I of Karia, Kratesipolis of Makedonia, and Cleopatra VII of Egypt commanding their own forces, there is essentially no evidence that women ever physically went into battle as combatants in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, or Rome. Even in cultures where women were allowed to fight, the vast majority of those who fought were still men.Nonetheless, in some cultures during some periods of pre-modern history, female warriors were actually a real thing; they are not entirely a product of modern fantasy. Perhaps most famously, as I discuss in this article I wrote back in June 2019, there is fairly extensive evidence for the existence of female warriors among the various Skythian and Sauromatian tribes, who lived in the steppe lands north of the Black Sea between roughly the sixth century BCE and the second century CE.The Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) records in his Histories 4.116 that Sauromatian women sometimes fought in battle like Amazons. The archaeological evidence only seems to confirm this. Since the late nineteenth century, archaeologists have unearthed countless examples of ancient Skythian and Sauromatian women who were buried with the kinds of weapons and rich grave goods that one would normally expect from a male chieftain.It’s true that, even among the Sauromatians, burials identified as belonging to male warriors outnumber burials identified as belonging to female warriors by a considerable margin. Nonetheless, the number of female warrior burials is significant.ABOVE: Detail from an Attic red-figure lekythos dating to around c. 420 BC depicting Amazons fightingThere is also evidence that, during the High Middle Ages, some women may have fought in battle for the Kievan Rus'. The Roman historian Ioannes Skylitzes (lived c. 1040s – after c. 1101 CE) records in his Synopsis of Roman History 15.14 that, after the Romans defeated the Kievan Rus' in the Siege of Dorostolon in 971 CE, Roman soldiers stripped the corpses of the Rus' soldiers who had perished in the battle. He says that they were shocked to discover that, underneath their armor, a few of these warriors were female. Ioannes writes, as translated by John Wortley:“When the Romans were robbing the corpses of the barbarians of their spoils, they found women lying among the fallen, equipped like men; women who had fought against the Romans together with the men.”Meanwhile, as I discuss in this article from November 2020, during this same time period, there is compelling evidence that female warriors may have existed in some Scandinavian societies. The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus (lived c. 1160 – c. 1220 CE) famously writes in his Gesta Danorum 7.6, as translated by Peter Fisher:“In case anyone is marveling that this sex should have sweated in warfare, let me digress briefly to explain the character and behavior of such females. There were once women in Denmark who dressed themselves to look like men and spent almost every minute cultivating soldiers’ skills; they did not want the sinews of their valour to lose tautness and be infected by self-indulgence.”“Loathing a dainty style of living, they would harden body and mind with toil and endurance, spirits to act with a virile ruthlessness. They courted military celebrity so earnestly that you would have guessed they had unsexed themselves. Those especially who had forceful personalities or were tall and elegant embarked on this way of life.”“As if they were forgetful of their true selves they put toughness before allure, aimed at conflicts instead of kisses, tasted blood, not lips, sought the clash of arms rather than the arm’s embrace, fitted to weapons hands which should have been weaving, desired not the couch but the kill, and those they could have appeased with looks they attacked with lances.”For centuries, scholars dismissed reports like this one of female warriors in medieval Scandinavia as nothing more than implausible fables told by gullible medieval writers, but now archaeological evidence seems to support the argument that there may very well have been female Norse warriors.In 1889, archaeologists in Birka, Sweden, excavated a grave dating to the tenth century CE belonging to a person whom the archaeologists initially identified as an elite male warrior. The grave goods included a battle knife, a sword, a spear, a battle ax, two shields, a set of arrows designed for piercing armor, and the skeletal remains of two horses. Whoever the owner of this burial was, they clearly intended to go into the afterlife armed to the teeth. The archaeologists numbered this grave Bj 581.Then, nearly a hundred years after the grave was originally excavated, in the 1970s, anatomists re-analyzed the bones and concluded that the Birka warrior may have actually been biologically a woman. In 2017, researchers conducted a series of comprehensive osteological and genetic analyses of the skeleton. All the tests indicated that the Birka warrior was indeed biologically female. This predictably set off an enormous controversy among scholars who study medieval Scandinavia.Some scholars are convinced that the woman whose skeleton was discovered in Bj 581 was, in fact, a female warrior like the ones described by Ioannes Skylitzes in his Synopsis of Roman History and Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum. Other scholars maintain that women couldn’t have possibly been warriors in medieval Scandinavia. These scholars argue that the weapons found in Bj 581 may have belonged to the woman’s family and that she may have been buried with them simply as a marker of status. Personally, I think that the most parsimonious interpretation is that the woman buried in Bj 581 was a warrior, but I recognize that other interpretations are possible.ABOVE: Illustration of the grave of the Birka female warrior, published in 1889Height, strength, and bulk?Now that we’ve clearly established that female warriors did exist in some pre-modern cultures, let’s look at the first three reasons Alex Mann gives for why women are supposedly naturally unfit for pre-modern warfare:“Men on average are taller than women”“Men on average are stronger than women, having more muscle mass and the ability to more easily gain muscle mass”“Men are wider than woman- having shoulders that are broader”This is really more like one explanation divided into three parts. All the same, this is by far the most common explanation that people give for why women were supposedly not allowed to take part in ancient warfare. The explanation, however, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.For one thing, men may be taller, stronger, and bulkier than women on average, but that doesn’t mean that all men are taller, stronger, and bulkier than all women. There are some women who are taller, stronger, and bulkier than most men and there are some men who are shorter, weaker, and thinner than most women.I’m more than happy to use myself as an example here. I am a twenty-one-year-old biological man, but I am extremely tiny. When I last measured and weighed myself a couple weeks ago, I was only five feet and 2.5 inches (i.e., 158.75 centimeters) and I only weighed 110 pounds (i.e., 50 kilograms). I’m also almost comically physically weak, all things considered. Sometimes I honestly struggle just to open apple sauce jars. I’m certain that a woman of even average height and strength would easily beat me in a fight.Meanwhile, there are some women who are extremely large and physically imposing. For instance, the character Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones was played by the English actress Gwendoline Christie, who is six feet and three inches tall (i.e., 191 centimeters) in real life. That means she is more than a whole foot taller than I am!If a hypothetical ancient state were merely interested in ensuring that the people serving in its army were the tallest, strongest, and bulkiest, they wouldn’t make a rule that only men are allowed to serve; instead, they would make a more efficient rule that only people above a certain height and weight who have a certain level of strength are allowed to serve. Mostly men would qualify, but some women would qualify as well.That’s not what ancient states usually did, though. In fact, although most ancient states categorically banned women from joining their armies, they did not ban physically weaker men (such as myself) from joining those armies. On the contrary, in most ancient societies, physically weaker men were routinely drafted to fight in armed combat. Ancient states generally had very few qualms about doing this.ABOVE: Screenshot of Gwendoline Christie as Brienne of Tarth in the HBO television series Game of ThronesFurthermore, while it is true that, on average, women generally tend to be at a significant disadvantage when fighting against men in any kind of combat, armor and weapons actually act as equalizers, making it possible for smaller, physically weaker people to overcome their deficiencies in size and strength through proficiencies in skill.It is a proven fact that women can defeat men in armed combat. It’s true that, in many modern sports, women struggle to compete successfully with men, but one sport in which some women have managed to successfully compete with men is Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA). There are HEMA tournaments that are open to both men and women. Women have competed in these tournaments and, in many cases, managed to hold their own against male opponents.In fact, there are cases where women have outright won entire HEMA tournaments. For instance, in 2016, HEMA United announced that a woman named Lauren Hanson had won the open steel longsword tournament at Fechtschule Frisbee. According to the announcement, it was a very competitive, medium-sized tournament and she had to fight a large number of male opponents, but she still managed to win. That’s pretty significant, and it really goes against the idea that women are physically incapable of winning in combat against men.ABOVE: Photograph retrieved from Wikimedia Commons showing a fencing match between a man and a woman in Berlin in May 1930“All swords, shields, spears, and armor”?If we leave that whole matter aside, it is important to emphasize that ancient militaries included more people than just heavy infantry fighters. There were other positions in ancient militaries that involved attacking from a distance. Unfortunately, Alex Mann doesn’t seem to realize this; he says in his answer:“In ancient warfare, is [sic] was all swords, shields, spears, and armor. It was extremely physical. You would need to swing heavy chunks of metal in desperate fights for your life while wearing tons of metal armor.”“It was brutal, violent, aggressive, and long. Many battles would last days.”“A female facing a male would be a quick fight. This always is a quick fight. That’s why women are overwhelmingly the victims of sexual assault and domestic violence- men can physically overpower them at all.”“An army of women facing an army of men would be a very quick and very violent battle.”This characterization of ancient warfare has some basis in truth, but it is not entirely accurate. Ancient warfare virtually always involved a lot more than just a bunch of extremely burly men wearing heavy armor fighting with spears and shields at close range.For instance, it’s often forgotten that ancient armies normally included archers, sling-throwers, and javelin-throwers, who generally wore light armor and attacked enemy troops from a distance. It is certainly true that it requires some degree of strength to pull back a bowstring, sling a stone, or throw a javelin, but you don’t generally need to be a burly, six-foot-tall man to do it. There’s no reason why a strong woman couldn’t be a successful archer, sling-thrower, or javelin-thrower. In modern times, there are highly skilled female archers and javelin-throwers who are far better at what they do than the vast majority of men.Now, it’s true that archers, sling-throwers, and javelin-throwers didn’t always get quite as much respect as the people who fought with spears and shields, but these kinds of long-distance projectile fighters were still an essential part of just about any ancient army. As I mention in this article from May 2020, in ancient Greece, these kinds of fighters were known as ψιλοί (psiloí), which means “light troops,” and they were quite a force to be reckoned with. In 391 BCE, in the Battle of Lechaion, an Athenian force composed almost entirely of light troops utterly vanquished a Spartan force of roughly six hundred hoplites.ABOVE: Roman mosaic from Spain depicting Herakles driving off the Stymphalian birds with his bow and arrowsSome people in the ancient world also had crossbows. The earliest known crossbow in Europe was the gastraphetes, or “belly-releaser,” a kind of handheld crossbow that was invented in Greece in around the fifth century BCE. A description of the gastraphetes by the Greek inventor Heron of Alexandria (lived c. 10 – c. 70 CE), based on an earlier description by the Greek engineer Ktesibios of Alexandria (lived c. 285 – c. 222 BCE), has survived in Heron’s Belopoeika, a treatise on military devices.The gastraphetes had a partially mechanized draw-back process that allowed the user to pull the string back using their body weight by pressing it against their stomach. You can watch a video of a man loading and firing a gastraphetes here. It is highly unlikely that it would taken more than ninety pounds of pressure to pull an ancient Greek gastraphetes back to its maximum extent, meaning pretty much anyone with any level of strength could use one, as long as they had two good arms and they weighed more than ninety pounds. Most women weigh significantly more than that. It’s fair to say that even I could probably use one.I don’t see how anyone could argue that a woman couldn’t be effective with such a weapon. It’s true that we have no record of ancient Greek or Roman women fighting in battle using bows or crossbows, but there’s really no inherent physical reason why they couldn’t have. All that prevented them from using these weapons was social convention.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a modern reconstruction of an ancient Greek gastraphetes, a kind of early crossbowPregnancyAlex Mann goes on in his answer to argue that women are additionally naturally less suitable for ancient warfare than men because women can get pregnant, while men cannot. Mann writes:“Say you have an army of 50,000. These people live together, eat together, and fight together. Imagine now half are men and half are women- what do you think happens? That’s right, lots of sex.”“Lots of sex means lots of babies. Women who are pregnant cannot do much active- they certainly cannot fight in battle. It’s not that this lasts a few days or hours, it lasts for months.”This assumption that any women fighting in an ancient military would necessarily have sexual relations with their male comrades and thereby become pregnant is most likely incorrect.Women are intelligent enough to realize that sex often leads to pregnancy and that being pregnant would most likely prevent them from fighting. Therefore, it stands to reason that any women who are really determined to fight would most likely avoid sex altogether. It’s probably no accident that Saxo Grammaticus explicitly tells us that warrior women in Scandinavia shunned all sexual relations with men.Moreover, a highly organized military could hypothetically impose strict rules prohibiting sexual relations among soldiers. They could say that anyone—male or female—who is determined to have engaged in sexual conduct with a fellow soldier will be immediately expelled from the military without pay. I’m sure that a few women would probably still become pregnant, but I don’t think that this would be an especially common occurrence. I certainly don’t think that the majority of women would become pregnant, as Mann seems to assume.MenstruationMann goes on to argue that the fact that women menstruate makes them additionally inherently less suitable for combat than men. He writes:“Then you have periods. Periods can last about 5 days a month meaning for 60 days of the year women are struggling with health issues like cramps, irritability, and there are sanitary issues.”“Do periods make women unfunctional? Not at all. It’s actually a really minor thing. But in warfare, even a minor thing can have serious consequences. If this factor slows or weakens your army even 1% why would you bother with it?”I cannot say that I have ever personally experienced a period, but I am reasonably confident that Alex Mann has never experienced one either and I happen to be aware that many women are capable of doing all kinds of things perfectly well while they are menstruating. Mann’s whole contention that menstruation makes women inferior at fighting is really just based on his own assumption from a position of inexperience about what menstruation is like and what menstruating women are capable of doing.Would menstruation be a handicap for women fighting in the ancient world? Maybe it would be for some. Maybe it wouldn’t be for others. The women themselves are ones who are in the best position to judge their own capabilities in this regard. If a woman who is menstruating feels like she can’t fight as well as she would be able to do otherwise, that should be her own decision—not a decision that a man makes for her. It certainly doesn’t make sense to preemptively ban all women just because menstruation might be an impediment for some.They’re just “unnecessary”?Mann concludes his answer with one final argument, which is that women are just “unnecessary.” He writes:“This all compounds when you again realize you don’t need women. It’s unnecessary. Since you can only mobilize a small part of your population you have more than enough men so why add women? Why add people that are shorter and weaker and who get pregnant and have persistent constant health issues (even though they are minor).”I have already pointed out that, although it is true that women generally tend to be physically shorter and weaker than men, this doesn’t mean that all women are shorter and weaker than all men. I have likewise already pointed out that women do not become pregnant if they aren’t having sex and that it is most reasonable for women to decide for themselves on an individual basis whether their menstruation is an impediment to their fighting abilities. All of the reasons Mann gives in his answer for why women are supposedly unsuited for ancient warfare are rooted far more in his own assumptions about women than in demonstrable facts or logic.Mann’s argument that women are simply “unnecessary” is therefore almost a case study in missing the point. Yes, it’s true that it is possible to create a sizeable army that is entirely composed of men, but does the mere possibility of making such an army actually justify having a rule that women are categorically not allowed to join under any circumstances?Someone might just as well point out that it is possible to create a sizeable army that is entirely composed of women. After all, men aren’t militarily necessary and they have those soft dangly things between their legs that are just so easy for them to injure and that need special protection. Plus, all that icky testosterone makes men prone to engage in reckless glory-seeking, which might put themselves and their comrades in unnecessary danger, which might put the fighting force’s mission into jeopardy.I think that most people will recognize that this argument I have just made is based on nothing but a bunch of sexist assumptions about men. For some reason, though, most people don’t seem to mind the fact that Alex Mann’s original argument is based on exactly the same kinds of sexist assumptions about women. All I’ve done is apply the exact same line of argumentation in reverse.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Roman soldiers depicted on the Column of Marcus Aurelius, dating to the late second century CE. They’re all men, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t make an army of all women.“Replenishing the population”?Now, of course, Alex Mann is far from the only man on Quora who has tried to come up with a “rational” justification for why most ancient cultures did not allow women to fight. Another man named Michael Bass argues in his own answer that women weren’t allowed to fight in ancient societies because they are “the limiting factor on how fast you can replenish your population.”Essentially, to paraphrase a little bit, Bass’s argument goes that, if nearly all the men die in warfare except for a few and there is still a large number of fertile women left at home, then the few men who survive can impregnate all those women and thereby produce a full new generation for the society.If, on the other hand, nearly all the women die in warfare except for a few and there is still a large number of fertile men left at home, then the society is doomed, because each woman can only produce a small number of offspring, meaning the next generation will be tiny, if it exists at all. Thus, according to Bass, from a population perspective, men are more expendable than women.At first this argument sounds fairly reasonable, but it doesn’t take long to spot the holes in it. One fairly obvious flaw in Bass’s argument is that allowing some women who have a desire to fight and who are especially well-suited for the task of fighting to fight in your military doesn’t mean sacrificing your entire female population—or even necessarily a significantly large portion of it.Furthermore, Bass’s argument is not practically applicable for the vast majority of ancient societies. Bass’s argument only applies to a society in which all male citizens are legally and practically capable of producing offspring with an unlimited number of women and all offspring those male citizens produce with those women automatically inherit full citizenship.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Sumerian terra-cotta plaque depicting a marriage between a man and a womanMost ancient societies were at least de facto monogamous, since, even in societies where it was legal for a man to marry more than one woman, wives and offspring were very expensive. Consequently, only a tiny segment of extremely wealthy, elite men could actually afford to take more than one wife. Even most of the men who did take more than one wife did not take more than two or three wives.Many ancient societies, including most ancient Greek and Roman societies, were monogamous by law. In most ancient Greek and Roman societies, a male citizen might have sexual relations with many women—including prostitutes and enslaved concubines—but he was only permitted to have one wife and only the offspring he produced with his legal wife could inherit his status.As I discuss in this article I wrote about Athenian democracy in January 2021, in 451 BCE, the Athenian Assembly passed a law restricting Athenian citizenship to only those individuals who could prove that all their ancestors on both sides of their family had been citizens. This means that, in classical Athens, in order for a male citizen’s offspring to qualify as citizens, not only did they need to be offspring of his sole legal wife, but that wife also specifically needed to be a citizen herself. It is likely that other Greek poleis had similar laws.ABOVE: Detail from a late fourth-century CE Roman marble sarcophagus depicting a husband and wife holding handsIn cases where ancient societies actually faced problems of depopulation, the problem wasn’t simply that the number of people overall was too small, but rather that the number of people of a certain status was too small. The classic example of this is ancient Sparta. Sparta’s decline over the course of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE is usually attributed in part to the drastic decline in the number of Spartiates (i.e., full Spartan citizens).There were, however, plenty of people living in Sparta who were not Spartiates. The vast majority of people living in Spartan territory were helots (i.e., members of a class of brutally enslaved serfs). In addition to the helots, there were also perioikoi (i.e., free people whose families had never held Spartan citizenship), hypomeiones (i.e., free people whose families had once held Spartan citizenship, but who had lost that citizenship because they couldn’t afford to maintain it), and mothakes (i.e., free people who had Spartiate fathers and helot mothers who therefore lacked Spartan citizenship).A major contributing factor in the decline of Sparta was the fact that, once a Spartiate family lost so much wealth that they could no longer contribute satisfactorily to the syssitia (i.e., mess halls), they were permanently stripped of their citizenship status and became hypomeiones. There was no way for them to regain citizenship. To make matters worse, kleroi (i.e., familial plots of land) were usually divided up between siblings, meaning that, when Spartiates who were not extremely wealthy had large families, the number of Spartiates paradoxically declined, due to the land and wealth being divided up among more people, resulting in fewer people being able to contribute satisfactorily to the syssitia.Thus, the decrease in the number of Spartiates was partly caused by Spartiates dying in battle and partly caused by former Spartiates being stripped of their Spartiate status. Sparta arguably could have fixed its problem of population decline simply by granting Spartan citizenship to all the perioikoi, hypomeiones, and mothakes, or even just a fraction of the helots, but they evidently decided that maintaining their rigid caste system was more important.I should note that, according to some ancient sources, Sparta had a very unusual system in which Spartiate men were allowed to “loan” their wives to other Spartiate men for the purpose of procreation. This system did not exist in any other ancient Greek polis and there is very little information about how it worked in Sparta. It’s even quite possible that the system never actually existed and that it was simply made up by the non-Spartan romanticists who are our main sources of information. If the system did exist, I’m not convinced that it was widely used and it certainly did very little to avert Sparta’s decline.In any case, the bottom line here is that, while the number of women may seem like a more important factor than the number of men in theory, in practice, in most real-life ancient societies, the number of men and the number of women were both almost equally important factors in determining how quickly the society could replenish its population. There were also always other hugely important factors at play, usually including land, wealth, and status.ABOVE: Detail from Wikimedia Commons of a depiction of a hoplite on the Vix Krater, dating to around 500 BCEConclusionThe real reason why women were generally prohibited from joining organized militaries in most ancient societies is not because women are inherently naturally unsuited for ancient warfare or because women are incapable of fighting, but rather because social norms and gender roles in the ancient world dictated that women were not supposed to fight. Women who potentially could have fought if they had been trained to fight were not usually trained to fight; instead, they were taught to weave and manage households.For better or worse, the vast majority of ancient men—and probably most ancient women—believed the exact same kinds of sexist assumptions about women that the men answering that question on Quora believe and, even when they were confronted with evidence to the contrary, they clung to their assumptions.The Greek historian Diodoros Sikeliotes (lived c. 90 – c. 30 BCE) describes in his Library of History 19.67.1–2 how the woman Kratesipolis of Makedonia managed to hold her husband’s army together after his assassination in 314 BCE and lead his troops to victory over a group of Sikyonian rebels. Quite revealingly, though, he appends this comment to his narrative:“ἦν δὲ περὶ αὐτὴν καὶ σύνεσις πραγματικὴ καὶ τόλμα μείζων ἢ κατὰ γυναῖκα:”This means:“And there was about her both practical intelligence and courage greater than that of a woman.”In other words, even when Diodoros Sikeliotes was directly confronted with a clear example of a woman succeeding in warfare, he could find no other way to explain it than to say that she wasn’t really a woman after all.ABOVE: Nineteenth-century fresco depicting how the artist imagined Diodoros Sikeliotes might have looked(NOTE: I have also published a version of this article on my website titled “Why Were Women Prohibited from Fighting in Most Ancient Societies?” Here is a link to the version of the article on my website.)

How would I know? Honestly, I’m just one of countless users/content developers here offering my takes on what I think are interesting or important questions.It wouldn't surprise me if people conclude that there are far more Clinton than Trump supporters here. Here’s why I think this:Donald Trump was a rich kid whose daddy sent him to Wharton while he groomed the kid to take over his empire, and that’s what happened. Even though he proved that he was no intellectual giant by running gambling casinos into bankruptcy and demanding that the first viable black presidential candidate (Barack Obama) prove his citizenship with his Hawaii birth certificate, claiming that Obama was really not a citizen of the U.S. (which he clearly was by birth), despite Obama’s remarkable Harvard Law School pedigree (he edited the Harvard Law Review) and public background as an Illinois senator (non-citizens are prohibited from holding such office). Getting his for himself was Trump’s clarion call, not working with coalitions and teams of experts to form sophisticated policies for bureaucracies and international relations. The most one could glean from his writings: how to trump your opposites in deals.Trump was and is all about business and building his personal billionaire empire. I’ve noticed that is what he constantly accuses the Clintons of doing by having been paid big speaking fees. Apparently none of the big companies and schools were never interested in hiring Trump to offer his Art of the Deal speeches to graduates or executives. But clearly they were interested in what the Clintons could discuss at length.Trump came from great privilege and to my knowledge only authored that one 1988 book, which he co-wrote with a ghost writer (truth be told: Hillary Clinton’s book was also written with a ghost writer). Trump’s focus was and is making lucrative deals. It’s been his thing exclusively for several decades. Not a robust discussion of social services or public trusts. In short, Trump is no intellectual. Nor does he have any background in or really even near public service, except as a campaign donor.Hillary Clinton was very active in politics from age 13 in Chicago. She (also somewhat privileged) went to Wellesley majoring in poli-sci and Yale Law, where she specialized in child rights advocacy. Her focus was on public service, not empire building.Although her home life was in a conservative bent, her college life put her in certain circles of liberal-intellectual luminaries associated with social movements like civil rights and child advocacy law. She must’ve been in some very spirited meetings, protests and debates. In fact she was featured as an emerging political force in Time magazine prior to marrying her only husband.Getting the outcomes she wanted involved persuading the electorate to see the value in raising the level of opportunity for those she cared for as part of her husband’s family while he was governor of Arkansas and when he was elected as U.S. president (she must’ve helped, given her background), so just as in college, she made it her business to delve deeply into politics, and because she had moved from conservative to liberal politics, that caused her to associate abundantly with many intellectual and academic figures of the 1960s-90s.The Clintons amassed a fortune mainly from their speaking fees and donated most of it to their non-profit foundation to do social betterment. Not into profit-making enterprises. In short, the Clintons (Bill was also a Rhodes scholar who also studied in London) are intellectuals.You’ll find a lot of intellectuals here. I hope that answers your question.PS: Yes, there are conservative intellectuals. Like Newt “Religion Test” Gingrich (who apparently never read the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution), Bill O’Reilly (oh yeah; he’s written dozens of books that in total allegedly sold nearly 7 million copies) and Dennis Miller (the snarkiest right-winger ever?). Fascinating intellectuals they. Read their writings if you disagree. Nothing I’ve read in any of the aforementioned figures’ works nor from any of the so-called conservative think tanks has impressed me, either. The Koch Brothers? Very rich; also not intellectuals. Businessmen.Where I come from, populists are regarded as neither conservative nor intellectual. They’re generally viewed as opportunistic snake-oil salesmen. Selling books isn’t the same as actually doing public service that one can be credited with as having made real inroads in addressing American society’s many ills. That’s why I’m putting my money on HRC. I trust her.By the way, because her steadfast sincerity is her stock in trade, Trump has been attacking her mercilessly with unsubstantiated false accusations claims of exactly the opposite, as the right wing has done to the Clintons for the duration of their political careers, because the Clintons want the super-rich to pay their fair share of taxes! Trump for one never has (or he would prove it by releasing his 1040s). At least Trump continues to show who he is.Don’t look behind the curtain at Trump Tower. You’ll see the puppet master/deal-wizard pulling strings, but you’ll also see how his ultra-thin veneer of gentility cannot cover his nasty, megalomaniacal moods. I wouldn't even be interested in discussing his properties with him. All I could learn is how monumental his ego is. He is the last rich boy I’d trust with nuke codes.