In ‘The Missing Thread,’ Author Daisy Dunn Looks at 3,000 Years of Ancient Herstory

The British classicist digs into antiquity

Of course you know of Homer, Claudius and Alexander the Great, but how about Phantasia (the Egyptian poet who actually penned Iliad and Odyssey, later “borrowed” and republished by Homer), Domitia Lepida (Claudius’ wealthy and powerful mother-in-law who transformed her daughter’s husband from sickly and clueless to efficient Emperor of Rome) or Olympias (Alexander the Great’s PR-minded mother, who told everyone who’d listen that her womb was struck by a thunderbolt from Zeus on the evening her son was conceived).

All these women and countless more are historical characters who interested Oxford-educated classicist and cultural critic Daisy Dunn, author of The Missing Thread: A Women’s History of the Ancient World. Not that her previous books, like 2016’s Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet or 2019’s The Shadow of Vesuvius, were leisurely walks in the park, but this one required a serious feat of research. The author spent 15 years rereading everything she possibly could through a female lens: Who were the mothers, sisters and wives? How about the mythical Amazons or brazen Etruscan women? What important roles did all these women play who have been effectively ignored until right now?

Dunn had to look well beyond the usual dusty academic textbooks, travelling throughout Italy and Greece to visit small local museums. “Many of them contain excavations from whatever little town you’re in,” she says. “But there’s no website and nothing’s digitalized or catalogued.” Dunn collected endless names and stories for The Missing Thread, her seventh and most ambitious book to date. Zoomer spoke to Dunn in Wimbledon, London, for a crash course on antiquity and why everything you know is only half-right at absolute best.

Rosemary Counter: I should confess I’m only halfway through your 480-page book! In my defence, it’s huge and dense and covers 3,000 years.

Daisy Dunn: You’re doing great! It is a really big book, and not a novel with one main story, so it’s probably the kind of book that you pick up and read a bit at a time. It took me 15 years to write, so believe me, I get it.

RC: I was a history minor back in the day, so I thought I had a pretty good idea about this stuff, but I’ve since learned I absolutely do not.

DD: Nor did I, actually. I mean, I knew the male side, but not the female side. For that, I had to go back to the beginning and reread everything. I had to look well beyond primary sources at inscriptions, tombstones, messages, poetry, plays, archeology. The synthesis of all the material was the biggest challenge for me. I’d say there are more than 200 female historical characters that I researched for this book.

RC: After 15 years, how does it feel to be done?

DD: Relieved, first of all, and then excited. A book like this hasn’t been done before: A history of the ancient world with women at the forefront. We usually hear about Cleopatra and [ancient British queen] Boudica and maybe a handful of others, but that’s it. Readers are going to learn so many names of hugely influential women that they’ve never even heard of.

RC: Tell me a story of one woman that you never heard of who totally blew your mind?

DD: Just because the Olympic Games are on and I love them, I’ll tell you about the woman who became the first female victor in the Olympic Games. In Ancient Greece, women were barred from competing in the games – married women were barred from even watching the Olympics because the men were naked. In any contest involving horses, however, it wasn’t the rider or the jockeys who won the prize, it was the owner of the horse. So there’s this 50-year-old unmarried Spartan princess called Cynisca who, by virtue of owning the horse, won the medal in chariot racing. I love any woman who circumvents the rules to win.

RC: OK, the flip side of that question: Who’s the most famous “great man” from antiquity who doesn’t deserve the hype they’ve enjoyed for thousands of years?

DD: Oh, there are so many. I’m trying to be nice, so I’ll just say men often get lauded for things they didn’t actually do. If you want a name: Caligula. Why do we have to read so much about Caligula? He was emperor for a very short time, just a few years, during which he mostly went after other people’s wives. There are women that did so much more than Caligula, yet he gets to be immortal. Oh, and Homer. People for a long time thought Homer might actually be a woman, but only because he’d so obviously plagiarized a woman named Phantasia.

RC: We tend to assume it mostly sucked to be a woman back then, but there are places and pockets in time when it’s not so bad. I imagine myself as a fabulous Egyptian land-owning divorcée. If you could choose when and where to live, what would it be?

DD: Oh, I’d like to be among the Etruscans. These are people who lived in central Italy before the Romans became prominent. Etruscan women had some freedom; they could actually dine with men, which wasn’t always the case in the ancient world. The Romans said Etruscan women were so promiscuous that they were rarely sure who the father of their children were, so they raised all the kids in hippie, commune-like arrangements. I think they had a bit more fun, and the rest are just rumours.

RC: When you’re studying people from antiquity, there’s this blurry line between history and mythology. How do you go about deciding what’s real and what’s myth?

DD: The further you go back into ancient history, the more difficult it is to distinguish myth and reality, because a lot of times ancient historians wrote about myths like it was their history. In some cases, it’s pretty obvious: Cyclops, the minotaur, is not real. In others, you just don’t know. The only way to tell the difference is experience. You need years and years of exposure to ancient material to be able to make a conclusion, and even then there’s often no consensus. Nobody knows, for example, whether the Trojan horse is “real.” I believe the story is based on a real war and the horse is a metaphor. Atlantis is such a great story, but I think it’s just a story. I don’t think it’s real.

RC: I do! I don’t think a story lives for thousands of years unless there’s some truth to it. We could open the newspaper tomorrow and learn scientists just found Atlantis at the bottom of the ocean.

DD: You’re very right. Myths have so much longevity, and I think that’s because most of the time they are based on some kind of reality. The Amazons are probably based on these real Scythian tribeswomen who were wonderful fighters and horse-riders. They shaved their heads and had elaborate tattoos. We’re told these things are myths, and then some new discovery changes everything. New things are discovered all of the time. We just found King Richard III buried under a parking lot. In the meantime, you can believe what you want, and you can’t be proven right or wrong. That’s what’s really exciting about ancient history.