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A dazzlingly ambitious history of the ancient world that places women at the center—from Cleopatra to Boudica, Sappho to Fulvia, and countless other artists, writers, leaders, and creators of history
Around four thousand years ago, the mysterious Minoans sculpted statues of topless women with snakes slithering on their arms. Over one thousand years later, Sappho wrote great poems of longing and desire. For classicist Daisy Dunn, these women—whether they were simply sitting at their looms at home or participating in the highest echelons of power—were up to something much more interesting than other histories would lead us to believe. Together, these women helped to make antiquity as we know it.
In this monumental work, Dunn reconceives our understanding of the ancient world by emphasizing women's roles within it. The Missing Thread never relegates women to the sidelines and is populated with well-known names such as Cleopatra and Agrippina, as well as the likes of Achaemenid consort Atossa and Olympias, a force in Macedon. Spanning three thousand years, the story moves from Minoan Crete to Mycenaean Greece, from Lesbos to Asia Minor, from the Persian Empire to the royal court of Macedonia, and concludes with Rome and its growing empire. The women of antiquity are undeniably woven throughout the fabric of history, and in The Missing Thread they finally take center stage.
Excerpt
The Missing Thread
Women were invented to make men's lives more difficult. Many men had always known this, but even so, it was comforting to hear it said by someone who had met the Muses, who knew the gods, who knew everything. Hesiod worked as a farmer in Boeotia, central Greece, and the Muses haunted Mount Helicon nearby. They met, in whatever way mortals usually meet divinities, and Hesiod came away a poet words as golden as the grain he sowed and as sharp as the scythe that cut it.
'Let no woman deceive your mind shapely bottom / And wheedling conversation,' he urged, 'it's barn she is seeking.' Women were good for ploughing with the oxen, bearing children, and scoffing the food they were supposed to store away. For everything else they were worse than hopeless. This was not entirely their fault, poor dears, but they paid the price for their descent from what Hesiod described in Greek as kalon kakon – a beautiful evil.
The beautiful evil, Pandora, was the first woman. Zeus, king of the gods, summoned the divine craftsman Hephaestus to sculpt her out of earth and water and give her the face of a goddess. Athena taught her to weave and dressed her in silver-white clothes and a finely wrought veil. The Seasons crowned her with flowers and the Graces placed gold around her neck. Aphrodite imbued her with sexual desire and Hermes gave her the mind of a treacherous dog. Each of the immortals had something to bestow – Pandora was 'all-gifted' and 'all-giving' – but she was above all Zeus' creation.
Pandora was intended as a punishment for men, the unfortunate pawns in an argument between the king of the gods and a Titan. Zeus was offended because Prometheus had tricked him by serving him a dinner of bones wrapped in fat instead of the finest cut of meat. In the heat of their dispute, gigantic Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans so that they could fend for themselves. Prometheus' act triggered the end of the Golden Age, an Edenic era in which men (there were only men) lived off the land without work or disease or the need or even desire to travel overseas. With fire they acquired the means to build ships and cook and live faithlessly. And then Zeus sent Pandora down to earth. All man's troubles originated in her and the jar she carried with her.
There were variations on the myth (sometimes Prometheus rather than the gods was the sculptor and animator of the clay that created man), but the fundamental idea established by Hesiod in the seventh century BC persisted. Woman was a figment of the male imagination, formed between his fingers as a scapegoat for his woes. She could come in many forms: a poet named Semonides of Amorgos working in same period as Hesiod described pig-like women who cleaned neither their houses nor their bodies but spent all day fattening themselves; fox-like women, who noticed everything; donkey-like women, sex with everyone; disobedient dog-women; tempestuous sea-women; gluttonous earthwomen; thieving weasel-women; idle horse-women; ugly ape-women; and bee-women, industrious and brilliant, only good kind in existence. Pandora, like her Christian counterpart Eve, lingered in men's minds as the raw essence of femininity. wove as she wove, deceived as she deceived and, if they seemed lascivious, which any who enjoyed themselves in the bedroom loved as she had loved.
It was only in Byzantine period that more enlightened writers began to realise Pandora was more than a hideous objet d'art. She represented was possible after Prometheus cleverly hid fire in the stem of a fennel plant and gave it to mortals to play with. She was creative potential, art object and allegory of art rolled into one.
The transformation of Pandora began long before men were even aware of it. All through antiquity women were engaged in acts of making, writing, politicking and engineering that passed many men by. Male writers were quite happy to imagine mythological women turning their daily chores ...
Excerpted from The Missing Thread by Daisy Dunn. Copyright © 2024 by Daisy Dunn. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
The fabric of ancient history is stitched heavily with stories of dramatic politics, conquest, and war, all with men firmly at the center of action. But women played just as vital and central a role in antiquity's most consequential events, as classicist Daisy Dunn (The Shadow of Vesuvius) elegantly details in The Missing Thread.
Dunn observes that countless histories of the ancient world are "ineluctably male" and shares her vision of the classical world as one that is not so much about women as "a history of antiquity written through women." Mining a wealth of archaeological and literary sources, Dunn also includes previously undiscovered material to present 3,000 years of ancient history with women doing more than just weaving or baking: many possessed property, ran businesses, oversaw estates, wrote poetry, and even went to war.
Beginning in Minoan Crete and concluding with the collapse of the Roman Julian-Claudian dynasty, Dunn's story is a global one that moves through Greece, Italy, Asia Minor, Macedon, and North Africa, while also staying true to its classicist focus (the worlds of Greece and Rome [see Beyond the Book]). Throughout, Dunn refuses to ignore the intrinsic contribution of women even though the majority of surviving male sources "simply wrote them out."
In ancient Minoa, Dunn claims, women were often more prominent than men, as the society's rich artwork and architecture can attest. The Minoan religion included a cult of "Snake Goddesses" who mastered snakes the same way Minoan Crete men mastered bulls. The quantity of Minoan artworks with women as the central focus has led some historians to suggest Minoan society was matriarchal or matrilineal, and Dunn agrees to the extent that there is no evidence to indicate women were secondary to men in Minoan Crete.
Although Dunn acknowledges men's primacy in the arenas of power, she underscores the myriad ways women influenced the course of history through their actions. During the epic Greco-Persian Wars, Dunn argues, "exceptional women and girls demonstrated both fortitude and ingenuity." She tells the fascinating story of Gorgo, a Spartan princess and future wife of King Leonidas, whose "quick thinking as an early code-breaker" deciphered a cleverly concealed warning on wax tablets about the invasion of Xerxes' Persian forces in 490 BCE that alerted Sparta and other communities to imminent danger. Women also engaged in violence…and ferociously, too.
A case in point was Queen Tomyris of the nomadic Massagetae tribe on the eastern borders of the Caspian Sea. When Tomyris turned down his marriage proposal in 530/29 BCE, Cyrus of Persia invaded her lands and targeted her people. When Tomyris's son, Spargapises, was captured by Cyrus and died by suicide rather than be held hostage, Tomyris sought vengeance. After massacring Cyrus's forces in battle, Tomyris was reported to have filled an animal skin with human blood and deposited Cyrus's head inside, to fulfill her earlier threat that he would have his "glut of blood" for stealing away Spargapises. No mere hidden sidenote of history, Dunn says Roman writers of the period considered it "one of the most memorable deeds ever performed by a woman in ancient history."
From Artemisia, the sole female commander on either side of the Greco-Persian Wars, to the equally fierce women behind Roman senators and emperors, Dunn's range is sweeping yet sharply focused on her subjects' often-overlooked contributions. In a chapter entitled "This One's for Fulvia," Dunn resuscitates the character of Fulvia, Mark Antony's second wife, who not only warned Cicero about a plot to assassinate him (the infamous Catiline Conspiracy) but also organized a war to protect Antony's reputation. The Perusine War of 41-40 BCE was "truly Fulvia's war," Dunn argues, and recent excavations reveal how close Fulvia was to the action. Lead bullets hurled over the city walls by Octavian's besieging forces were inscribed with vulgar messages to Fulvia. Dunn shares Fulvia's troops' response with her own witty riposte: "'I'm aiming for Octavian's bumhole,' read a counter missile, which was of such a size as to make the threat feasible, though extremely unlikely to be fulfilled."
Fulvia was just one among Dunn's broad cast of exceptional women whose "loyalty and fortitude" was disregarded by their male counterparts, "as women's so often were." Dunn ably brings to the fore women's roles in antiquity—whether writing poetry like Sappho, fighting like Tomyris, or acting as "mistresses of guile" in the palace halls—without pandering to ideology or distorting the reality of patriarchy in ancient cultures.
Dunn answers the many male-centric histories of antiquity with this shimmering volume that celebrates women as true "creators of history" instead of passive bystanders. The Missing Thread, with its rich erudition and sprightly narrative, is an engrossing addition to antiquity studies that readers will want on their shelves for years to come.
Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski
Anne Sebba, author of Ethel Rosenberg
Lucy Worsley, author of Agatha Christie
Professor Paul Cartledge, University of Cambridge, author of The Spartans
When you hear the word "classics," what jumps to mind? Literature over the centuries? Famous authors? For people entering university to study "classics," it means something quite specific. Classics is typically defined as the interdisciplinary study of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, their interactions and exchanges with other ancient cultures, and their resonance to contemporary times. The curriculum for aspiring classicists is academically rigorous, with study in languages (Greek and Latin), literature, history, material culture, archaeology, philosophy, and more. Greek and Roman culture bequeathed an intellectual, political, and artistic heritage to the Western world that historians still glory in studying.
In an Intercollegiate Studies Institute article, Bruce S. Thornton, a classicist at California State University, Fresno, expands on the important role the discipline plays in Western education and culture, since "a familiarity with classics provided an understanding of the roots of Western culture, the key ideals, ideas, characters, stories, images, categories, and concepts that in turn made up a liberal education, or the training of the mind to exercise the independent, critical awareness necessary for a free citizen in a free republic."
One example of the demands of a degree in Classics is the foundational requirement to learn to read Greek and Latin, including mastering their vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and morphology. Students learn to master the languages through selected readings of ancient Greek and Roman authors, thereby exposing their minds to some of the greatest ideas, literature, and writers in history. Fidelity to the Greek and Roman languages provides an "empirical, concrete procedure [that] makes it difficult to get away with fuzzy or interested readings" on the part of the student, Thornton writes.
Apart from its application to several humanities and social science disciplines (like history, philosophy, literary criticism, architecture, and politics), more technical concentrations within classics include epigraphy (the study of inscriptions), papyrology (study of writing on papyrus), and textual criticism (examining all surviving versions of an ancient text with the goal of establishing the most definitive one).
Although the classics might seem like a fusty discipline resistant to change, this stereotype has been challenged in recent years. According to an Inside Higher Ed opinion piece by Max L. Goldman and Rebecca Futo Kennedy, "The real story is that classics departments and programs in the United States have been undergoing a steady transformation for many years, often changing the focus of our curricula and scholarship to incorporate the ancient Greco-Roman world more broadly, to expand the varieties of evidence and methodologies, and to emphasize modern receptions."
Even the name of the discipline could evolve, moving from Classics to more specific titles like Greek and Roman studies or ancient Mediterranean studies, thereby contextualizing Greek and Roman cultures alongside others in ancient Africa, West/Central Asia and the Levant. Other suggestions to broaden the classics model to include premodern people could also help "alleviate some of the historic racial and class exclusions" that the discipline has been accused of in the past, Goldman and Kennedy write. This evolving perspective feels especially urgent in light of some white nationalist groups' appropriation of Hellenic culture to promote racist ideologies.
Whether the discipline goes by Classics or another name, few could deny the importance of understanding ancient peoples and their history, which, even millennia later, still has so much to say to our society.
Marble portrait bust of the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula, Roman, 37-41 CE, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Filed under Cultural Curiosities
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