4/8: 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
⏱️ 7 minutes
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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.
1809 SAPPHO
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Bachelor with Daisy Dunn, the Classicist, and her new book is the women's history of the ancient world. |
| 0:09.0 | It is action-packed, and we don't have much time. There's attention to the Persian Empire, there's |
| 0:16.4 | attention to all the details around getting from one epoch to another. I'm skipping lots. However, I'm attracted to the Dido story because |
| 0:27.4 | again, did she exist? Who knows? It's such a good story, don't care because Dido who has I believe a Carthaginian name is the founder of Carthage |
| 0:39.0 | But the story goes that Anius, in Virgil's telling of the Iliad, |
| 0:47.0 | Anius comes to meet Dido. Where did they meet and what was their what was their fate they meet in Carthage which is this |
| 0:57.2 | new city that diedo has built which is created at having escape from her native city of Tyre. |
| 1:04.3 | And Carthage is in North Africa. |
| 1:07.0 | And Anneas has found himself there after escaping |
| 1:10.0 | from the Trojan War. |
| 1:11.1 | He's brought with him some of the survivors of that conflict and he has a destiny to found a new home for himself, for his son and for the survivors among his people. |
| 1:23.0 | And when Dido meets with him, |
| 1:26.0 | she initially hopes that he might settle with her |
| 1:31.0 | and help her to create this new city which is still developing the city of |
| 1:36.0 | Carthage. But it doesn't quite go to plan. |
| 1:39.7 | It doesn't go to plan, but Venus intervenes. Venus shoots an arrow who's the arrow go? The |
| 1:46.6 | the arrow goes to dido. Venus is lucky because she is the goddess of love but |
| 1:51.6 | she is the mother of a niece and she's also the goddess of love but she is the mother of a neus and she's also the mother of |
| 1:54.8 | eros or cupid who has control of these arrows so she manages to direct an arrow to |
| 2:00.4 | dido so she feels completely hopelessly in love with an ear. |
| 2:05.0 | And Dido is not a victim. |
| 2:08.2 | How do they regard this when you get shot by Cupid? |
... |
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