The Missing Thread: A Women’s History of the Ancient World

Award-winning classicist Dunn (The Shadow of Vesuvius) offers a history of antiquity with women rendered as full protagonists, providing examples both broad and specific. Her book shows that Minoan women were essential to the performance and perpetuation of ritual, as depicted in sculpture. Homer’s world, circa the 7th century BCE, was a mixed bag. Women experienced abandonment and sexual assault. They were also free to compete for the first time. The royal wives of Persia learned to negotiate a complicated hierarchy of women, tolerating concubines who, in turn, showed them respect. Scythian women were the progenitors of the Amazons; they excelled on horseback and cut imposing figures, with shaved heads, wigs of horsehair, and elaborate tattoos. While Athenian women were restricted in their movements and deprived of political participation, the women of dynastic Egypt were unguarded and free to own property. Dunn profiles women such as Sappho, Artemisia, Cleopatra, and Lucretia, all of whom navigated their circumstances with talent, shrewdness, and breathtaking cunning. Dunn observes that women in Nero’s Rome were held to rules that placed them in a bygone era. Readers today may find chilling parallels.