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The John Batchelor Show

4/8: The Missing Thread: A Women's History of the Ancient World Hardcover - by Daisy Dunn (Author)

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

News, Arts, Books, Society & Culture

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 26 December 2024

⏱️ 9 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

4/8: The Missing Thread: A Women's History of the Ancient World Hardcover - 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 womenwhether they were simply sitting at their looms at home or participating in the highest echelons of powerwere 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.
1621 Handball women of Rome

Transcript

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1:01.0

I'm John Batchel with Daisy Dunn, the classicist. And her new book is the women's history

1:05.8

of the ancient world. It is action-packed. And we don't have much time. There's attention to the Persian Empire.

1:13.6

There's attention to all the details around getting from one epoch to another.

1:19.2

I'm skipping lots.

1:21.6

However, I'm attracted to the Dido story, because again, did she exist?

1:26.5

Who knows?

1:30.0

It's such a good story. You don't care because Dido story because again, did she exist? Who knows? It's such a good story. You don't care.

1:38.7

Because Dido, who has, I believe, a Carthaginian name, is the founder of Carthage. But the story goes that Aeneas, in Virgil's telling of the Iliad, Annius comes to meet Dido. Where did they meet and what was their,

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