When the Roman and Celtic forces clashed at Aque Sextiae in 102 B.C., Plutarch wrote the fight had been no less fierce with the women than with the men themselves the women charged with swords and axes and fell upon their opponents uttering a hideous outcry. The records of Dio Cassius tell of the armor-clad bodies of female warriors found among the dead on the battlefields along the Danube River after the Romans engaged two of the Germanic tribes, the Quadi and the Marcomanni.


The Romans again faced female warriors when dealing with invading European tribes like the Teutons, Ambrones, Cimbrians, and Gauls. The centuries of invasion finally culminated in A.D. 410 with the sacking of Rome by Alaric, king of the Visigoths. During the first century B.C., the Cimbrians attacked the northern borders of Roman territory. Caius Marius, a Roman general, recorded details of the campaign and the methods of the Cimbrians. Their most formidable weapon was the wagon castle,a large wooden enclosure set on two huge wheels. The Cimbrian women and children hid inside as the men and the wagon castle advanced toward the Roman lines.


The women would fire bows from the top of the enclosure and on occasion would make short forays out of the structure and engage the enemy with swords. In one such battle in 101 B.C., Marius recounts that as the Cimbrian men were driven into retreat at Vercellae, the women emerged from the wagon castle with swords and vowed to attack their own men if they did not fight hard enough. When the Romans were reinforced, the Cimbrian men were destroyed, but the women continued to fight. When the women finally realized that defeat was imminent, they killed their children and then themselves either by the hands of friends or by nooses twisted of their own hair.Of the Romans clashes with the Teutonic Ambrones, Plutarch states:


The Teuton women met them with swords and axes, and making a terrible outcry, drove the fugitives as well as the pursuers back, the first as traitors, the others as enemies, and mixing among the warriors, with their bare arms pulling away the shields of the Romans and laying hold on their swords, endured the wounds and slashing of their bodies - invincible unto death - with undaunted resolution.