8/8: 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
⏱️ 11 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.
1534 British Museum women of Rome
Transcript
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| 0:55.3 | Oracle.com slash bandwidth. I'm John Dachau with Daisy Dunn, a classicist who's done us a great |
| 1:02.0 | favor of putting together the classical world historically, chronologically. But the women are |
| 1:07.9 | emphasized and there are parts in it, some spoken, most not, but certainly after reading Daisy's work, it's impossible to go back and just tell the story of Caesar. |
| 1:18.7 | That is totally inadequate. |
| 1:20.8 | Motivation, drama. |
| 1:22.9 | Now we come to Augustus, formerly Octavian. |
| 1:26.2 | Not a warrior-looking young man. However, a man who is Roman in the fashion |
| 1:33.1 | that his wife has a child, and he announces her on the birthbed, I divorce you. And he takes up with a married woman, or the woman who was married. She might be widower. I don't remember. Her name is Livia. And he takes up with a married woman, or the woman who was married. |
| 1:46.4 | She might be widder, I don't remember. Her name is Livia. |
| 1:49.8 | And he takes up with her and stays with her the rest of his life. |
... |
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