Women Who Weave Themselves Into History

The book is not simply an account of remarkable women. Women, in general, the author argues, ‘helped to make antiquity as we know it. They were creators of history.’

Tate Britain via Wikimedia Commons
'Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene' (1864), by Simeon Solomon. Tate Britain via Wikimedia Commons

‘The Missing Thread: A Women’s History of the Ancient World’
By Daisy Dunn
Viking, 480 Pages

In 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.

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