‘The Missing Thread: A Women’s History of the Ancient World’ by Daisy Dunn

The ancient world was largely a man’s world in terms of who governed or misgoverned—and who wrote the history. In recent decades scholars have tried to recover the stories of women in the past. Daisy Dunn’s The Missing Thread is another effort to turn the page on centuries of historical neglect, but much of her work amounts to reading between the lines than men have left behind. 

The “Ancient World” of her subtitle is almost entirely Graeco-Roman, with digressions into Greece’s greatest foe, Persia. Dunn is a classicist, and the history of those regions is her specialty. It would have been interesting to publish The Missing Thread as one volume in a series about overlooked women throughout the world, but such decisions are made elsewhere. Dunn has done good work in her area of focus.

Some of her findings will be of no surprise. Sappho wrote remarkable poetry. Noble women were often the subject of dynastic marriage intrigue. Smart ambitious queens became respected advisors to their husbands. The plight of ordinary women was largely unrecorded by chroniclers in that epoch, except to note the victims of wars usually led by men including the gang rape or enslavement of women from defeated states.  

However, Dunn finds that women occasionally took a leading role in combat, including Artemisa, an ethnic Greek who commanded Persian ships in the empire’s attack on Greece. Archeology shows that the legendary Amazons had a basis in reality among the nomadic tribes that clashed with Persia. A Spartan queen, Gorgo, proved an expert codebreaker during the Persian wars. And then there is the Olympian feat of Hydra, a young Greek woman who swam with her father through rough waters, under cover of night, to cut the anchors of the Persian fleet. 

Of course, Cleopatra was a woman who ruled in ancient times, and she had to fight hard to keep the throne. Dunn describes her as impressive, fluent in nine languages, alert and determined. “As historians we are always at the mercy of the material that has come down to us and the gaps and biases it contains,” Dunn concludes. She has done good work finding the missing threads left behind by women of the ancient world.

Get The Missing Thread at Amazon here.

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