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

By Daisy Dunn

 Viking 2024

At the beginning of her new book The Missing Thread: A Women’s History of the Ancient World, historian Daisy Dunn writes a bit about the process of researching a book about the often-shadowy women in the ancient historical records, and she mentions that the process “reinforced my belief that, in order to find something, you should search for it rather than wait for it to filter through to you.” 

It’s a bit alarming, of course, to hear a well-received historian quite so baldly consenting to the kind of pre-set agenda that’s anathema to good history-writing. “This is not a book about women, but a history of antiquity written through women as far as this is possible,” she writes. “It aims to bring women to the fore without distorting the reality of events by pretending that men were not usually in charge.” But the ‘as far as this is possible’ in such a construction is ‘not at all,’ and the ‘usually’ was 99.9%. The kind of “women’s history of the ancient world” that’s promised in this book’s subtitle is impossible to write when covering fifteen centuries in which the overwhelming majority of women were helpless, uneducated, often unnamed beasts of burden and chattels for the birthing chamber. Dunn can and does cite mythology, folklore, and a tiny handful of exceptions, but she’s utterly barred from doing the kinds of hands-on working of the ancient sources that made her 2019 book The Shadow of Vesuvius so captivating. 

Fortunately, aside from a few minor bits of flag-planting, she doesn’t really try to tell that unguessable story. Instead, what readers get in these pages is the latest variation on that staple of the Victorian book-presses: notable women of ancient times. Readers get Dido from Virgil’s Aeneid; they get the fragments of Sappho, here beautifully and intelligently parsed; they get the terrifying Olympias, mother of Alexander the Great; they get the scandalous Clodia, setting tongues wagging in ancient Rome.

Of course they get Cleopatra, who became, Dunn bizarrely claims, “an example to the women of the imperial household” and a symbol of feminine defiance in the face of concerted male Roman power, which leads to downright strange passages like this:

Cleopatra had shown that it was possible to influence the action of even the staunchest of Rome’s leaders. First Julius Caesar, then Mark Antony had bowed to her commands, and in her final moments, she had eluded Octavian, a man who thought he understood women, but was incontrovertibly proven wrong. 

The staunchest of Rome’s leaders turn up often in Dunn’s chapters, as they’d all but have to. She writes with energy and a good deal of insight about AD 69, the so-called Year of the Four Emperors, and the subsequent more-or-less stable stretch culminating in the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian. “These years would be characterised as a time of High Empire and, for imperial women, high hair but comparatively low expectations,” she writes, “as the letters of Pliny the Younger will attest.”

Whether she’s writing about high hair or high affairs of state, her engaging prose style is everywhere brightened by the fact that she herself provides all the translations from ancient sources. More often than not, this can lead to little yips of surprised, pleased laughter. “Claudius’ family were increasingly surprised by how comprehensive he could be both on and off the page,” readers are told at one point. “‘How one who speaks so ineloquently can possibly declaim so eloquently in public, and say all the things that needed to be said,’ August had once written to Livia, ‘beats me.’” 

Dunn rightly observes that the ability to understand women as actual human beings remained weak or underdeveloped “in even the most celebrated classical and contemporary historians,” which is about half-right (contemporary historians have studied women in the ancient world rather extensively), but her contention that for most of classical history things were all downhill from Homer is as thought-provoking as it is possibly true: “The Trojan War marked symbolically the death of one age and the birth of another that would prove far less progressive for women,” she writes. “Even if the narrative was broadly fictional, so much of what Homer described – the mindset of the soldiers; the feuds; the unpredictability of conflict, swinging one way and then the other, as if two camps of gods were playing a game; the armour; the horror; the enslavement of women – was only too true to life.”

The Missing Thread makes for such fun and interesting reading that history fans will love it even though the thread remains mostly missing. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News