2/8: The Missing Thread: A Women's History of the Ancient World Hardcover – July 30, 2024 by Daisy Dunn (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 18 October 2024
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
by Daisy Dunn (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Missing-Thread-Womens-History-Ancient/dp/0593299663
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.
1800 SAPPHO
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This message comes from Better Help. |
| 0:02.4 | Can you think of a time when you didn't feel like you could be yourself, |
| 0:05.8 | like you were hiding behind a mask? |
| 0:07.9 | Better Help online therapy is convenient, flexible |
| 0:11.1 | and can help you learn to be your authentic self, so you can stop hiding. |
| 0:16.2 | Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. |
| 0:20.5 | Take off the mask with better help. Visit better help.com today to get 10% off your first month. |
| 0:27.0 | That's Better Help H-E-L-P.com. |
| 0:30.0 | I'm John Batcha with Daisy Dot, her new book The Missing Thread, a women's history of the ancient world. |
| 0:40.0 | Daisy is a classicist. She has the Greek, she has Latin, my understanding is she's going to |
| 0:46.0 | conquer linear A and she has linear B. All these languages. We're going past the |
| 0:50.6 | Minoans, although that's a wonderful chapter. The Minoans favored |
| 0:54.6 | cosmetics, others favored cosmetics too. We're now going to a part of the story that |
| 1:01.3 | is well known if I say it takes place on the island of Lesbos. |
| 1:05.9 | It's also well known if I say it takes place through the person of Sappho, the poetess. However, what it was not well known to me is that of the of the |
| 1:17.6 | reputation of Lesbos it was that it was women, beautiful women everywhere |
| 1:22.1 | the beauties of Lesbos except |
| 1:24.8 | Safo was said to be short and dark was she considered homely Daisy. |
| 1:30.3 | She is very unfair I have to say on poor safford, |
| 1:35.0 | because we don't have any representations to be able to judge what she actually looked like. |
| 1:39.0 | Most of the people who have described her as being very unattractive and short and dark, |
| 1:44.6 | because you say are people living hundreds of years after she survived, so they could not possibly have seen her. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.