5/8: The Missing Thread: A Women's History of the Ancient World Hardcover - by Daisy Dunn (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 26 December 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
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.
1700s Sabine Women
Transcript
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| 0:56.1 | slash bandwidth. Visiting with Daisy Dunn, the classicist and author of the new book, |
| 1:02.3 | The Missing Thread, a women's history of the ancient world. Iliad's behind us, the odyssey's behind us. |
| 1:10.3 | Etruscans have become Romans. |
| 1:13.1 | And here we are in the second century BCE. |
| 1:18.3 | Two brothers, known collectively today as the Grakai, |
| 1:22.9 | are convinced that the Roman elite must be challenged, must be challenged by laws that favor |
| 1:30.7 | the plebeians, the common people. Sound familiar? It's called they're reformers. However, |
| 1:37.6 | they come up against a Roman Senate and a Roman elite that is not going to give in. And it turns to tragedy. |
| 1:46.0 | But in this is one character who emerges as behind the scene of these two brothers, the |
| 1:54.0 | crack eye. |
| 1:56.0 | And that is Cornelia, their mother, celebrated by centuries since then. |
| 2:03.0 | Daisy, thank you very much for this. |
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