8/8: 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
🗓️ 19 October 2024
⏱️ 11 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.
2022 Sappho
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Turning an idea into a small business doesn't happen by accident. |
| 0:03.6 | You need to be all in. |
| 0:05.3 | At constant contact, we have the digital marketing tools you need to get the word out, |
| 0:09.2 | close the sale, raise the funds, and gather a community around this thing you've built. |
| 0:13.4 | So let's do this together. |
| 0:15.0 | Let's send this, share this and shout this from the rooftops. |
| 0:18.2 | Let's segment this, automate this, and AI this for real results fast. |
| 0:22.8 | Let's get out of this what we put into this. |
| 0:24.5 | Let's build this, let's grow this, let's win this. |
| 0:27.3 | Get started today at constant contact.com. |
| 0:30.8 | I'm John Bachelors with Daisy Dunn, a classicist who's done us the great favor of putting together the classical world, |
| 0:38.0 | historically, chronologically, but the women are emphasized and there are parts in it, some spoken, most not. |
| 0:45.0 | But certainly after reading Daisy's work, it's impossible to go back and just tell the story of Caesar. |
| 0:52.0 | That is totally inadequate. Motivation, drama. Now we come to Augustus, |
| 0:58.7 | formerly Octavian. Not a warrior-looking young man. man however a man who is Roman in the fashion that his wife has a child and he |
| 1:09.6 | announces her on the on the birthbed I divorce you and he takes up with a married |
| 1:15.9 | woman or the woman who was married she might be widowed I don't remember her name |
| 1:20.3 | is Olivia and he takes up with her and stays with her the rest of his life. |
| 1:25.4 | What do we need to know about Livia? |
| 1:27.6 | Because Robert Graves turned her into a poisoner. |
| 1:30.4 | No, I reject that. |
| 1:31.4 | But what was she, Daisy? |
... |
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.