This is John Batchel, speaking with Daisy Dunn, the author of the new book, The Missing Thread,

a Women's History of the Ancient World. Here, the metaphor of weaving, the fabric of society,

women participating right with the men, the daughters, the wives, the lovers, the mothers,

and certainly the thinkers and schemers of the history of the classical world

inherited in the poems of Sappho and the history of Caesar and the civil wars and his women

and how they influenced him, especially the mother of Brutus.

Daisy Dunn on the metaphor of weaving in the ancient world.

It served for them and served for us.

More of this tonight.

I think so very much so.

Weaving and ancient women go hand in hand. They do it for thousands of years through our history. We know in the Bronze Age women were weaving, making extraordinary clothes. And then in the Roman period, likewise, they're all weaving. They're making their husband's clothes. They're doing all sorts of things. But it went beyond the kind of practical use of weaving. There are stories we

know in the myths people talk of at that time of the fates. And the fates were these sort of

spinners who would spin out in the same way that women were weaving, the kind of course of people's

lives. And there was certainly a parallel between these spinners and

the sort of everyday spinning that people were, the mortals were engaged in.