This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

For The Missing Thread, her seventh book, classicist Dr Daisy Dunn directs her attention to the women of the ancient world. Yet this is not a book about women; rather, it is “a history of antiquity written through women”. Covering three millennia and thousands of miles, it begins with the (possibly matriarchal) Minoan civilisation of Bronze Age Crete and ends in imperial Rome of the second century AD, with frequent ventures eastwards into Persia, Lydia, Egypt and even China.

Dunn chooses to push the familiar male stars of the ancient world “to the borders slightly”, in order to shed light on the women who were there too — moving and shaking in influential ways, as this book seeks to convince us — but whose contributions to politics, art, literature, their states’ economies and warfare (in some cases even fighting themselves) have often gone underappreciated. 

Along the way, we learn of the brilliance and bitterness of Sappho, the legacy-obsessed lyric poet of Lesbos. Famed for her erotic odes addressed to women, Sappho leaves us a rare account of female same-sex attraction in antiquity — and the sexual practices of the women of Lesbos (Lesbians) in turn became a fixation of later male writers. 

But more interesting than this are the hints of Sappho’s obsessiveness that we find in her poetry: she developed intense attachments to her female students and wrote vitriolic poetry insulting a former pupil who had left to establish a rival literary school. 

We also hear about the Persian queen Atossa, one of Darius’ six wives. Although she was not the king’s romantic favourite, Greek historians described her as holding complete sway at court; she is said to have received foreign delegations herself and (less plausibly) to have been the first person ever to write her own letters without a scribe. 

Atossa petitioned Darius to launch a military campaign in Greece instead of Scythia, reportedly because she wanted some Greek women as servants. Darius appeased his wife by sending a small detachment to Greece, whilst proceeding with his Scythian campaign. It would be another two decades before he launched a full invasion against Greece, which ultimately spiralled to his defeat in the Greco-Persian Wars.

This is an ambitious and extensively researched project, but its title gives an early premonition of where it falls down. “Missing Thread” comes from the realm of weaving, an important practice in the lives of women across the ancient world: spindle whorls have been discovered at the Bronze Age palace at Mycenae; Tanaquil, a legendary wife of one of the early kings of Rome, is said to have inspired the tradition of Roman brides carrying a distaff and threaded spindle during their weddings. Weaving also carried symbolic importance as a metaphor for destiny; the Fates were three goddesses said to spin threads which determined the length and happiness of mortals’ lives.

For Dunn, too, weaving is a metaphor — or perhaps synecdoche — for the female experience; weaving is the common “thread” that unites ancient women, transcending time, place and status. It represents the female contribution to the “fabric” of life. Dunn argues that weaving was more than menial housework, but could be an act of creativity and cultural influence; if weaving symbolises the female experience in toto, then the bigger point here is that women contributed more colour and interest to the fabric of history than merely staying at home and modestly attending their loom. 

Yet to speak of a singular “thread” presupposes an answer to the book’s central question, since it assumes there is one common element connecting women, qua women, across thousands of years and thousands of miles. Although the book is free from a teleological narrative — and does not chart a linear progression of female autonomy through time — it aims to be a synthesis, as far as possible, of a unitary female experience. “It feels only right to think of [the women of antiquity] in this collective sense,” Dunn claims, “given how many died without being able to leave their own mark upon the world.”

However, this synthesising project downplays the variety of experience amongst ancient women. This single, flattened narrative has to reconcile two distinct goals: showing that women were more influential than traditionally appreciated and emphasising the victimhood of women, who bore the brunt of conflict and social upheaval. 

These can both be true at once, of course. Women’s experiences varied depending on when and where they lived and on social status. Some operated cleverly, asserting influence in spite of their subjugation. But this is stating the obvious.

We do not even know whether women were permitted inside the theatre to watch the plays

Dunn’s single-thread approach is her attempt to find a more interesting and conclusive through-line on the subject, innovating on Sarah Pomeroy’s definitive 1975 work, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves. But this focus on synthesis and cohesion prevents a full account of the complexity inherent in such a large category of people. The plural nouns in the title of Pomeroy’s work, by contrast, reflect her more tentative approach to the subject matter: in the face of large evidentiary gaps, she often declines to reach a conclusion.

The problem of insufficient evidence affects all historians of the ancient world — there is so much we do not know. Dunn suggests that the plays staged in Athens by Euripides and Aristophanes during the Peloponnesian War, which highlighted the particular hardships suffered by women during wartime, were evidence of female influence on the conflict. But we do not even know whether women were permitted inside the theatre to watch these plays. As Pomeroy reminds us, “the dramatic importance and emotional influence of women should not at all be mistaken for evidence of their equality”.

Dunn supplements these gaps in the historical record with creative storytelling. In doing so, she is perhaps hoping to imitate the success of the recent spate of fictionalised retellings of mythology from the so-called “female perspective” by the likes of Pat Barker and Madeline Miller. Such storytelling risks devolving into meaninglessness: the female bakers of Greece and Asia Minor are described as enthusiastically rolling their dough “as if they feared being swallowed up by a pocket of air”. How much does this really add?

Despite the difficulties, this is an enjoyable work of popular history, likely to leave the reader with a fresh appreciation for some previously unfamiliar figures, such as Enheduanna, a Sumerian poet of the third millennium BC and the earliest named author in the world or Fulvia, who helped to foil Catiline’s conspiracy to overthrow the Roman Republic by informing against her lover, one of the conspiracists. 

But since it begins from a faulty premise, that the women of the ancient world can be understood as a single collective, it cannot hope to do more than that.