Women Who Weave Themselves Into History

‘The Missing Thread: A Women’s History of the Ancient World’By Daisy DunnViking, 480 PagesIn Daisy Dunn’s introduction, she adverts to Philomela in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” who “weaves the story of her rape into a tapestry after her tongue is cut out and she is deprived of the power of speech.” Later Ms. Dunn explains how women did the weaving and baking that kept male armies clothed and fed. “It did not always occur to men,” she observes, “that real women might be up to something just as interesting” as their bloody heroic exploits.In the cases of Olympias, Cleopatra, and Livia, women had political clout and became power brokers that some men (like Tiberius) resented and others (like Darius) welcomed. Women wrote and sometimes even went to war, but most of them did not fight or write — and yet we know they were up to something, as is evident in Ms. Dunn’s quotation of Sappho: “An army of horsemen, some say, or infantry/ Or a fleet of ships is the most beautiful / Thing on black earth, / But I say it’s what one loves.” Ms. Dunn comments: “There is such confidence in Sappho’s poetic voice. Reading her words can make you feel like you are entering the space between two people caught in the middle of something.” Like so many of the women quoted and described in “The Missing Thread,” Sappho exists in fragments, with virtually none of her poems surviving intact, but that is her inadvertent power: She dominates the interstices of our imagination, as if taunting us to complete her thoughts and comment on them. Maybe she had been having an argument, Ms. Dunn proposes, with one of those warring males. What is certain is the poet’s self-assertion. “The Missing Thread” is about how women have woven themselves into history, but the book is not simply an account of remarkable women. Women, in general, Ms. Dunn argues, “helped to make antiquity as we know it. They were creators of history.” That is what Philomela is doing, of course; she makes a story of her rape and transforms what was done to her into what she has accomplished.Ms. Dunn does not ignore the wars and battles and the politics of ancient empires, but she asks us to look askance at them: “Push them to the borders slightly, and light may fall upon the clearing to reveal women in their shadow.” Here’s an example: It’s 776 B.C. at the Olympic Games, and women are now allowed to travel to the events, breaking the tradition of secluding them at home. Watch out, though, there are repercussions.A ruling excludes women from participating in athletic contests — not to protect them but to preserve the virtue of men competing in the nude. But a widow, “eager to see her son compete,” disguises herself as a male coach, so that she can enter the arena. As he “stormed to victory, she boldly exposed herself, prompting new measures to be introduced to strip-search all future ‘coaches’ at the games.” The story ends well for the widow. She was “forgiven out of respect for her family and her son’s success.”Look what happens when women leave home: “in the fourth century BC, a Spartan princess named Cynisca would become the first woman to win a victory—in fact two consecutive victories—in the equestrian events at the Olympic Games as owner of the winning steeds.” She was about 50, and sculptures of her horses and chariot “were erected at Olympia.” Sappho, no surprise, gets her own chapter, and aggressive Scythian women get a lot of attention. They went into battle like mythical Amazons, with “jazzy, highly patterned sleeves and trousers,” with one of them discovered in Ukraine with an arrowhead “lodged in her spine.” Ms. Dunn tells lots of stories about what has been dug up about women in the ancient world — the digging done by some pioneering female archeologists. There’s a chapter titled “Atossa’s War,” in which you will read about “viciously fought battles of the fifth century BC, in which men dominated but a number of exceptional women and girls demonstrated both fortitude and ingenuity,” rather like the author of “The Missing Thread.”Mr. Rollyson’s work in progress is “Sappho’s Fire: Kindling The Modern World.”

Women Who Weave Themselves Into History

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