- [!] Status - status-updated:: half-done by 2021-08-07 Note: Chronologically, _Vulpine_ takes place before [Furtive](https://newsletter.eleanorkonik.com/furtive/) %% ( [[2021-08-04 Furtive]] ) %%. The history of marriage often focuses on the political marriages of elites, but if you dig enough you can learn some interesting tidbits about ancient relationships—most if it depressing, if I’m to be honest. _Vulpine_ is a twist on the classic story of soldiers taking women from captured populations as “wives,” which happened so often in history that evidently most people considered it more a fact of life than a source of trauma. In the Classical world, we have the early Roman [Abduction of the Sabine Women](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Sabine_Women) as well as Alexander’s army making off with captured Scythian women, who later fought alongside the Greek men against other Scythians. As a wild oversimplification, there are generally three kinds of ways to man an army. First are the citizen-levies, such as those seen in ancient Greece, where armies consisted of the male citizen body mobilizing during the summer, between planting time and harvest. Then there’s the kind of army where it’s basically a bunch of guys mostly between the ages of let’s say 14 and 26 who are going out raiding and pillaging because they don’t have a ton of prospects back at home and the lure of women and loot is stronger than the idea of starving at home on an overpopulated farm. The Viking armies were pretty close to this model. The US Army kind of splits the difference. Vietnam was the first American war that disproportionately impacted the impoverished; [Appalachia has lost a higher percentage of its young men to war than any other region of the United States](https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1991-11-11-1991315046-story.html), but there were times when the military was staffed by functionally every able-bodied man. Furthermore, the [demographics of the US Army are changing](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01402390.2019.1692660?journalCode=fjss20), and these days the US military is a pretty elite institution. Soldiers aren’t my focus here, though; war _brides_ are. At the end of WWII, [over 60,000 foreign-born wives of American servicemen fought to be allowed into the United States](https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/war-brides-act-1945), ultimately resulting in the War Brides act. The phenomenon of soldiers fighting on foreign soil and marrying the women they find there is definitely not exclusive to any particular time period. The major point of divergence between _Vulpine_ and most of the “war bride” stories I read about when studying history is that in _Vulpine,_ the mercenaries are not the empowered party. It’s a bit of a subversion of _Succulent_, in which a conqueror surveys a fractious group of captive warrior-women, because here, soldiers are essentially throwing themselves on the mercy of the women they encounter—not something that many ancient historians told tales of. Of all those writing about the founding of Carthage, the ancient historian Justin is the only one to touch on how Dido’s followers found wives: > The refugees were received hospitably on Cyprus, where a priest of [Astarte] and his family joined the group and eighty young girls were taken along as wives for the colonists. With the caveat that this tale is perhaps not historically accurate, it’s still useful as a sampling of how those historians wrote. Note how there’s no discussion of how this “taking” looked. Were they kidnapped? Purchased? Wooed? Recruited? Most writers of the time probably didn’t care even if they knew. I like to image that at least some of the time, women got a choice in whether they married the traveling soldiers who showed up on their metaphorical doorstep. ## Further Reading - [[Scott Alexander]] has a really interesting literature review of the book [Crazy Like Us](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us) that touches on how different cultures really _do_ experience mental illness and traumatic events differently.