To understand the ancient world you need to understand one saying: Vae victis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vae_victis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vae_victi

To understand the ancient world you need to understand one saying: Vae victis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vae_victis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vae_victis Once you understand that you will understand that the gender of the losers didn't matter one bit once the fighting was done, they were killed, enslaved, conquered, raped or whatever else the victors felt like at the time. This isn't about men and women, this is about winners and losers. Or to quote Rosa Luxembourg about the same phenomenon a couple of millennia later: >Most of those bourgeois women who act like lionesses in the struggle against “male prerogatives” would trot like docile lambs in the camp of conservative and clerical reaction if they had suffrage. Indeed, they would certainly be a good deal more reactionary than the male part of their class. Aside from the few who have jobs or professions, the women of the bourgeoisie do not take part in social production. They are nothing but co-consumers of the surplus value their men extort from the proletariat. They are parasites of the parasites of the social body. And consumers are usually even more rabid and cruel in defending their “right” to a parasite’s life than the direct agents of class rule and exploitation. One of the many writings she was raped with a saber for, but for some reason isn't popular today.