This is John Batchelor. Continuing conversation with Daisy Dunn, the author of the new book,

The Missing Thread, a Women's History of the Ancient World. Suicide.

Cliopatra's suicide in specific. Why? How did this gain the people of Egypt? How did this

discharge her responsibilities to her subjects, to Alexandria, to herself.

Octavian was present, according to the historians.

He presented another way of living, a servant for Octavian, for the Roman Empire,

which is what was about to happen.

What did this gain, Cleopatra?

And Daisy Dunn responds very carefully that suicide was profoundly different for the Roman,

for the classical mind than it is for my reasoning.

There's Daisy Dun done to explain.

Suicide, Cleopatra, a mystery.

Much more of this tonight.

I think, I mean, suicide takes on importance,

both for men and for women,

and it's seen in certain situations to be a better course.

I mean, the whole sort of philosophy, we talk about stoicism today.

Stoicism's enjoyed a bit of a kind of revival, but ancient stoicism is quite different.

And you get, sort of a lot of stoic figures basically arguing that, as one of them puts it,

if a room becomes too smoky, it's better to take the easier way out, by which he means

take your own life. And there was a kind of respect, I think, for some of those people who did that.

And this is very difficult because our views of suicide are so different today. The ancient

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