Camilla
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Camilla. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
ka-mil'a, in Roman fable, a virgin huntress, daughter of Metabus, king of the Volscians in Italy. Camilla was a favorite of Diana. She had learned to endure the toils of war, to use the bow, and throw the javelin. When an infant her father had been driven from his city by civil discord. With his daughter in his arms he had fled through the woods to the river Amazenus. His enemies were in hot pursuit. Metabus hesitated only a moment, then he tied the child to his lance, protecting her as much as possible with pieces of bark. He poised the weapon in his hand and exclaiming, "Goddess of the woods! I consecrate this maid to you," hurled it toward the opposite bank of the stream. He then plunged into the water and swam across, where he found his daughter uninjured. In the seventh book of the Aeneid, Virgil represents Camilla as leading a band of mounted followers, some of them of her own sex. In the war which Aeneas carries on with Turnus, king of the Rutuli, Camilla arrays herself with Turnus against Aeneas. Aeneas is successful, Camilla is slain. In describing Camilla Virgil says she was so swift a runner that she could make her way over the sea without wetting her feet, over a field of corn without bending a single blade. Pope alludes to this lightness of foot in the lines he employs to illustrate the rule that "the sound should be an echo to the sense." When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, The line too labors and the words move slow. Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o'er th' unbending corn or skims along the main.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a famous queen of the land- Volsci, who opposed Æneas on his ing in Italy.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Camilla exists only in Virgil, and the text of the Aeneid has not altered since Aiton's Encyclopedia set out her story in 1910: Metabus' flight to the Amasenus, the child lashed to a lance and vowed to Diana, the warrior queen who rides with Turnus and is killed in Book XI. What has moved is the attention paid to her. Where the older account treats her chiefly as a figure of speed, and reaches for Pope's couplet from the Essay on Criticism to prove it, classicists since the later twentieth century have read Camilla closely as a study in gender and violence, set beside Homer's Penthesilea and Virgil's own Dido, and she is now among the most discussed characters in the poem rather than a decorative simile. The garbled state of the 1921 Collier's stub "a famous queen of the land- Volsci" is a printing accident, not a difference of opinion.
Written for this edition, 2026.