I'm John Batchel with Daisy Dunn, her new book, The Missing Thread, a Women's History of the Ancient

World. Daisy is a classicist. She has the Greek, she has Latin, my understanding is she's going

to conquer linear A, and she has linear B, all these languages. We're going past the Minoans, although that's a wonderful chapter.

The Minoans favored cosmetics.

Others favored cosmetics, too.

We're now going to a part of the story that is well known if I say it takes place on the island of Lesbos.

It's also well known if I say it takes place on the island of Lesbos. It's also well known if I say it takes place through the person of Sappho, the poetess.

However, what it was not well known to me is that of the reputation of Lesbos,

it was that it was women, beautiful women, everywhere, the beauties ofbos, except Saffo was said to be short and

dark. Was she considered homely, Daisy? She is very unfair, I have to say on poor Saffo,

because we don't have any representations to be able to judge what she actually looked like.

Most of the people who have described her as being very unattractive and short and dark,

as you say, are people living hundreds of years after she survived,

so they could not possibly have seen her.

But the thing with Sappho is that because she comes from this island,

which in the 7th century BC when she was living, had long been established

as a place where beautiful women resided.

Because she wasn't known for her beauty.

She was known for something else.

I think that kind of gave rise to this rumor that, okay, she was a poet because she wasn't

one of the winners of one of the great beauty contests that was being held there.

She wrote or she composed and

...