In Praise of Antiquity’s Grande Dames
Daisy Dunn’s new book argues that the great female poets, heroines, and martyrs of the ancient world tied history together with a ‘missing thread.’
The world’s earliest named author, we’re told, was a Sumerian high priestess called Enheduanna, who lived during the 23rd century BC, writing hymns and poems in praise of a warlike female deity called Inanna. In her newly published book, The Missing Thread: A Women’s History of the Ancient World, British classicist Daisy Dunn tells us that Enheduanna even “had the forethought to sign [her compositions] with her name,” and sometimes included disturbing biographical details. In one of her hymns, Enheduanna recorded that a brutish man called Lugal-anne—leader of a rebellion against her father, the Akkadian ruler Sargon the Great (r. 2334-2279 BC)—spat on his hand and placed it over her mouth, waved a dagger in her face, and dragged her from the temple. Then he raped her. “My talent for lifting spirits has turned to dust,” Enheduanna wrote.
She pleaded with Inanna to punish her assailant, and her nephew duly put down the rebellion. Enheduanna, “bruised but defiant,” according to Dunn, found her voice again and was able to return to her temple. “The art of writing, associated with women from the Trojans to the Hittites and the verses of Homer, preserved Enheduanna from the common fate of anonymity,” Dunn observes.
Most women in the ancient world lived and died without leaving any trace. So did many men, of course. Conflict plagued the ancient world, and combatants would die in horrible ways, leaving behind wives and daughters who faced a bleak future without a husband or father to support them. But their struggles to survive were of no interest to ancient authors, which is why Dunn calls women “the missing thread”—a somewhat understated title for what is in fact an ambitious book.
Ancient poets and historians were more inspired by the mythical Amazons, who defied ancient ideas about the proper behaviour of women and did suitably heroic things. This archetype was probably based on the nomadic Scythians, who inhabited the area around modern-day Ukraine and southern Russia from around 900 BC. (The precise boundaries are unknowable, in part because Graeco-Roman historians used the term Scythia in reference to all manner of steppe tribes throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia.)
Men and women lived in covered wagons, wore bright colours, and covered their bodies in tattoos. Skeletal remains show that Scythian women were experienced riders and appear to have even taken part in war, their bones exhibiting wounds that could only have been sustained in battle. They are a rare example of the lives of ancient women and men converging at a time when female existence was constrained by differences in physical strength, and by the inability to prevent unwanted conception, even after rape.
Sexual violence and abduction were ever-present risks for women, even for that privileged and literate elite that might set their thoughts down in writing. The Archaic Greek poet Sappho (630-570 BC) is probably the best-known example of an ancient female writer (even if only fragments of the work attributed to her have survived). The proposition that it was the much lesser known Enheduanna, born almost two millennia before Sappho, who’d earned the title of history’s first known writer is irresistible: That Enheduanna was a victim of rape, like so many unnamed women in the ancient world, is almost too neat, confirming the antique origins of misogyny.
Unlike some popular authors and academics, who seek to portray ancient societies as matriarchal (and thereby cast sexism as an artefact of modernity), Dunn doesn’t deny that women played not just a subordinate but a painfully vulnerable role in the civilisations she writes about. Rather, her book “aims to bring women to the fore without distorting the reality of events by pretending that men were not usually in charge.”
“Remove the Ptolemys and Caesars, Pericles and Alexander, Xerxes, and Juba entirely, and one ploughs a spartan field,” she writes. “Push them to the borders slightly, and light may fall upon the clearing to reveal the women in their shadow.“ By this metaphor, she is describing her exhaustive attempt to rescue women from the nooks and crannies of history.
By the time of the early Roman Empire in the first century AD, historians had access to the official records maintained by proto-bureaucrats, as well as unofficial court gossip. (The late antique historian Procopius of Caesarea, writing in the sixth century AD, famously left us with both—authoring not only the definitive military history of his era, but also his lurid Secret History.) These accounts allow biographies of wives, daughters, and mothers of emperors to be glimpsed—and indeed reconstructed, as in my own book on the leading women of imperial Rome. But for earlier periods, while there are significant exceptions such as the female pharaoh Hatshepsut (r. 1479-1458 BC), there is usually little for modern historians to go on apart from a few words of a poem or a female name carved on surviving monuments.
Joan Smith
Dunn assures us that “actively looking for women in the literary and archaeological sources” has led her to uncover fresh material and new insights. But how much of the past can we truly reconstruct from these fragments? And how far are modern interpretations, such as those offered by Dunn, influenced by the understandable urge to centre women in ancient history?
How far are modern interpretations, such as those offered by Dunn, influenced by the understandable urge to centre women in ancient history?
Enheduanna is a case in point. Her existence was unknown until 1927, when the British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley found an alabaster disk bearing the image of a priestess while he was searching ruins from the ancient capital city of Ur, near the mouth of the Euphrates River. The disk’s reverse side does bear what appears to be a woman’s name—but the clay tablets supposedly preserving Enheduanna’s poetic works were created six centuries after she lived (and seem to have been written down by Babylonian scribes in a Sumerian dialect that Enheduanna could not have spoken.)
I’m not sure what this says about Dunn’s assertion that Enheduanna was canny enough to “sign” her creations. And it should also be said that some experts on ancient Mespotanian languages dispute whether Enheduanna is a woman’s name at all, even if the first syllable would seem to signify a priestess. A leading expert on the Sumerian language, University of Chicago Assyriologist Miguel Civil (1926-2019), estimated there was less than an even probability that Enheduanna wrote the poems attributed to her. This is not a dispute that many of Dunn’s readers will feel qualified to have an opinion on. But it’s surprising that a historian such as Dunn, who’s done extensive research on related subjects, doesn’t mention the contested nature of her assertions.
Perhaps Enheduanna’s story is just too good to give up. Certainly, that might understandably be the view of, say, publishers seeking mass-market commercial success for a newly released book. (On this score, it’s worth remembering that the blockbuster status of Dan Brown’s 2003 mystery thriller novel The Da Vinci Code was owed, at least in part, to an appealing but completely ahistorical feminist Christian subplot centered on Mary Magdalene.) In any event, it raises more general questions about how to handle imperfect historical sources and contested material.
Some of the names in Dunn’s book are well-known from myth, epic poems, and Athenian drama: Hecuba, Andromache, Cassandra, Clytemnestra and Ariadne. But many more are not—Adea, Coesyra and Hipparete, for example. The associated place names will also be obscure to lay readers. It helps to know, for instance, that Illyria (or Illyricum, as the Romans called their roughly co-located province) describes the area known to us as the western Balkans; and that an ancient people called the Lydians inhabited the western coast of what we now call Turkey.
The Minoans will be an easier proposition for modern readers, as their civilization on the island of Crete survives in recognizable form thanks to well-excavated archaeological sites and iconic museum artefacts. Ancient Minoans built a magnificent palace at Knossos, whose ruins sit on the outskirts of modern Heraklion, Crete’s modern administrative capital. In April 1900, British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans discovered a carved gypsum chair in the area, and jokingly named it the “throne of Ariadne,” after the mythical daughter of the (equally mythical) Cretan king Minos (famous for dispatching 14 young Athenians into the labyrinth every nine years so they might be consumed by the Minotaur). But deciding that the seat was too narrow for a woman’s hips, Evans subsequently changed his mind, and claimed he’d found the throne room of a king—possibly Minos himself. In this instance, and others sadly, modern archaeologists colluded with myth, a common enough practice in the ancient world and one that, then and now, has done a particular disservice to women.
Queens and princesses emerge badly from epic poems, often being portrayed as disloyal, weak-willed, and unable to resist temptation. In some cases, these women not only didn’t exist, but were invented as external constructs on which to project the vices or deficiencies of (male) rulers. It’s unlikely, for instance, that Minos ever had a bride called Pasiphaë, any more than Helen of Troy was a real woman. Both these (fictional) women stand accused of bringing their respective civilizations to ruin. In Helen’s well-known case, her peerless beauty sparked the war that would destroy Troy. The lustful Pasiphaë, on the other hand, was apparently so consumed with desire that no mortal man could satisfy her; and so she had sex with a bull, thereby conceiving the aforementioned Minotaur. Ancient history is full of these (supposedly) sexually incontinent females, an accusation that reflected deep-seated male fears about real-life women.
Ancient history is full of these (supposedly) sexually incontinent females—an accusation that reflected deep-seated male fears about real-life women.
What’s paradoxical about the Minotaur’s shamelessly misogynist (some might say pornographic) origin story is that the Minoans accorded an unusually high status to women, at least by ancient standards. “Their surviving art and architecture...gives the impression that, in their richly creative society, women were often more prominent than men,” Dunn writes.
The Minoans, who flourished on Crete for around 1,500 years, from roughly 3,000 BC onward, left behind no literature. But they did produce vivid images that depict women participating in Minoan civic life, such as the acrobatic game of bull leaping. Even so, studies of bones from the island suggest that women had a shorter life expectancy than men (twenty-seven or twenty-eight, as compared to thirty-five), almost certainly due to complications associated with childbirth.
The enormous risk that women faced when giving birth was an unavoidable biological constant in all ancient societies, as reflected in the sheer number of women and girls who died during or following pregnancy. Noble lineage provided scant protection—as exemplified by Tullia (79-45 BC), daughter of the Roman orator Cicero, who died at age thirty-three after giving birth to a son. Nor did Cicero’s celebrity status protect Tullia from an abusive marriage—another common curse for women in the ancient world—and one that led Tullia to take the desperate step of divorcing her husband even while pregnant with his child.
Cicero cared deeply for his daughter, and was grief-stricken upon her passing. Yet he behaved appallingly to other women. Shortly before Tullia’s death, in fact, he divorced his wife of more than thirty years, Terentia, to marry his ward, Publilia, a girl of thirteen or fourteen. She was an heiress, which is why Cicero married her; but once sunk in grief for Tullia, he couldn’t wait to be rid of the teenager. (Cicero was at least obliged to repay Publilia’s dowry after their divorce, however—a rare instance of Roman law protecting a teenage girl’s assets, if not her body.)
It’s quite something to think that ancient Rome, notwithstanding its toleration of child (forced) marriage and other practices harmful to women, was less misogynistic in some respects than Athens, where adult women were treated like naughty children. Shockingly, in a city-state known to us as the “cradle of democracy,” women could not even leave the house unless accompanied by a man—the type of restriction we now associate with the most retrograde of Islamist theocracies.
The fifth-century BC general Alcibiades offers a sort of one-man case study in Athenian misogyny: He married an heiress called Hipparete, who brought a substantial fortune to the marriage (you will notice a theme here), and they had two children. But Alcibiades preferred sex with prostituted women to sleeping with his wife, and Hipparete (understandably) ran out of patience.
Though divorce was uncommon, it was not impossible. And she took the bold step of appealing to the city’s top administrator in person, instead of asking an influential male relative to plead the case on her behalf. But Alcibiades discovered her plan (which of course had required her to leave their house without his permission), burst into the meeting, and dragged Hipparete back home. “She would remain living under Alcibiades’ roof and rules until her early death,” Dunn records, an epilogue that barely hints at the misery—and, in fact, what we would now surely characterise as abuse—suffered by this spirited woman.
‘Little more is recorded of Coesyra,’ Dunn notes, adding her to the long list of women from the ancient world whose names were recorded only because something dreadful happened to them.
Domestic abuse is an underlying theme of this book, even if Dunn rarely identifies it as such. Another infamous example we learn about involved Peisistratus, who ruled Athens as a tyrant during three separate periods during the mid-sixth century BC. He took his second wife, Coesyra, in a marriage of convenience designed to gain favour with her influential father, Megacles. But Peisistrstus already had children, and didn’t want more, so refused to have anything but anal sex with Coesyra, denying her the opportunity to become pregnant. When she overcame her feelings of shame and confided in her mother, all hell broke loose: Megacles confronted his son-in-law, rejected his excuses, and drove him out of Athens. “Little more is recorded of Coesyra,” Dunn notes, adding her to the long list of women from the ancient world whose names were recorded only because something dreadful happened to them.
One of the most common forms of domestic abuse was polygamy, more accurately polygyny—men having multiple wives—an inherently inequitable institution since these were not cultures in which women were allowed to have multiple husbands. Olympias, wife of Philip of Macedon and mother of Alexander the Great, put up with her husband’s serial marriages until he took wife number seven, by which time she’d had enough. Olympias returned home to Epirus in northwestern Greece, prompting her son’s biographer, Plutarch, to sneer that she’d obviously had a jealous temperament.
Alexander himself would later go to war with the Persians, whose king, Darius III (r. 336-330 BC), was said to travel with 300 “concubines”—women we would now call sex slaves, though their existence in the entourage of powerful men was taken for granted in the ancient world. Alexander is credited with protecting the king’s mother, Sisygambis, and her daughters after defeating Darius in battle; but the “concubines” received no such mercy. Alexander’s soldiers rampaged through the enemy camp, dragging the women away as captives and raping them.
Following Alexander’s death at a young age, his mother Olympias came roaring back from Epirus, dismayed to see his potential heirs squaring up to fight over her late son’s conquests. At the time, Alexander’s half-sister, Cynane of Illyria, was determined to marry her daughter Adea to Alexander’s half-brother Philip Arrhidaeus, who’d been chosen as figurehead king despite having what we’d now call learning difficulties. But after arriving in Asia with an army to force the issue, Cynane was killed by Alcetas, one of the late king’s generals—at which point, horrified army officers stepped in to ensure that the marriage took place, thus turning Adea (now named Eurydice) into Olympias’ step-daughter-in-law. A formidable woman trained in the arts of war by her equally formidable mother, Eurydice battled with Olympias for political control, eventually sparking a full-scale civil war, said by one historian to be the first in history waged by two women.
In time, Eurydice’s soldiers changed sides, and the younger woman was captured along with her husband. Olympias showed no mercy: She had the husband killed, and then sent a parcel containing a noose, a sword, and poison to his imprisoned widow. Eurydice got the message and chose the noose as her instrument of suicide. But Olympias’s triumph was short-lived: Dismayed by the carnage she’d caused, a political assembly condemned her to death, and she was duly captured by a band of soldiers who hacked her to pieces. Historian Diodorus Siculus praised Olympias for refusing to plead for her life, claiming that the mother of Alexander had attained the highest possible dignity by dying as she did. Like a man, in other words.
It is fascinating to analyze the reputations and legacies of women, such as this pair, who challenged sex roles in the ancient world. But in The Missing Thread, Dunn has little to say about it. Her book is stronger on anecdote than analysis, expressing a sort of generalised sympathy for the women she discusses, but without offering much in the way of deeper thoughts. One must read between the lines to recognise the pattern that emerges from the isolated examples she documents—whereby the small handful of elite women who effectively gained the stature and privileges of men thereby earned the right to be judged and treated according to male standards (sometimes to their peril). Diodorus’s approving remark about the death of Olympias offers a case in point. The quest for power was evidently worthy of admiration in its own right, even when exercised on the public stage by a woman.
Indeed, there was a pre-existing template for women who involved themselves in politics and conflict, in the form of goddesses and other mythic figures. In the Iliad, for instance, Hector’s wife Andromache behaves like a tactician: observing the Greek encampment, working out which sections of the Trojan walls are vulnerable to assault, and warning her husband to increase the guard in those places. (He took no notice, but that wasn’t her fault.) Even Athens, a city that secluded women in their homes, had Athena, goddess of war, as its patron, and decorated her temple, the Parthenon, with images of Amazons.
In the modern world, it’s recognised that women are sometimes complicit in the abuse of other women, especially in cultures that practise forced marriage and genital mutilation. One of the most shocking ancient examples in Dunn’s book involves Darius’s son, Xerxes, who took a fancy to his sister-in-law, and planned to marry one of his sons to her daughter, Artaynte. When the girl’s mother rejected his advances, he turned his attentions to Artaynte, offering any present she wanted to persuade her to sleep with him. She responded with a challenge, demanding a valuable cloak woven by his wife, Amestris. Xerxes gave in, and when Amestris discovered what had happened, she set her heart on revenge.
She demanded a present for herself, in the form of Artaynte’s mother, knowing that she’d been the original object of her husband’s passions. When Xerxes handed the woman over, Amestris had her breasts, nose, lips and tongue cut off and thrown to the dogs.
Dunn inexplicably refers to these dreadful events as a “domestic tragedy,” as opposed to a savage form of torture imposed on one woman by another. As with Olympias’s brutal treatment of Eurydice, it illustrates the dire consequences of pitting women against one another in patriarchal societies. When women derive whatever power and influence they have from men—fathers, sons, husbands—some will go to extremes to destroy rivals for male affections.
More about Daisy Dunn
Male violence against women was far more common, of course. In the fifth century BC, Euripides’ play The Trojan Women portrayed the anguish of female members of the royal house after they were enslaved and raped by the victorious Greeks. Perhaps Euripides was inspired by real events that took place sixty-five years earlier, following the Persian victory at Thermopylae, when Greek women fleeing the area around Delphi were captured, turned into sex slaves, and in some instances gang-raped to death. “They are the forgotten victims of the Graeco-Persian Wars,” Dunn rightly observes, “not the men who fought and fell in the field, destined to become the subject of glorious poetic verse.”
But it’s telling that Euripides chose to write about women who never existed rather than the flesh-and-blood victims of war. Perhaps he assumed that audiences would make the connection. To draw a modern analogy: Pat Barker’s unsparing novels set amid the mythical world of the Iliad—The Silence of the Girls (2018) and The Women of Troy (2021)—don’t mention the abduction of Yazidi women by ISIS in Iraq in 2014, but the parallels are hard to miss in both books. It’s unsettling to remind ourselves of the persistence of officially licensed sexual violence in some societies, and the continuing vulnerability of women trapped on battlefields.
In the middle of the first century BC, the rigid distinction between public and private life that had formerly characterized Roman society began to break down, as the late Republic became dominated by conflicts among ambitious men. The prominence of generals such as Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Octavian—the future emperor Augustus—placed a spotlight on their relations with women (whose hoped for loyalty and fecundity would ensure dynastic integrity), leading to an exponential shift in the quantity of information we have about them.
Prior to this, women had almost never been portrayed in public art. (A statue of a second century BC woman called Cornelia, mother of two populist politicians known as the Gracchi brothers, offers a rare exception). Suddenly, women began to appear on coins and in public places, a process that accelerated when Augustus became princeps.
Anxious to divert attention from the fact that he’d effectively made himself a dictator (or, worse yet, a king—whom the Romans had sworn would never again be allowed to rule the city), the Emperor created a cult around his family that had no precedent in Roman politics. That’s why museums all over the world have busts and statues of his sister Octavia, his niece Antonia, and his wife Livia—although not his daughter Julia the Elder, who fell out of favour and was treated brutally by her father. Most of the Emperor’s female relatives appear in a graceful procession on Rome’s Ara Pacis Augustae, a monument constructed between 13 and 9 BC to celebrate Augustus’s victories in Gaul and Hispania.
But all this was for show. In surviving texts, Roman authors characterised one woman after another as ambitious, disloyal, murderous, and either sex-mad or frigid. Modern authors might be expected to treat such sources with a reasonable degree of scepticism, but it’s a sad fact that they’ve been all too ready to repeat such ancient slurs (and sometimes, as with the BBC’s 1970s-era adaptation of I, Claudius and the Robert Graves novel upon which it was based, invent new fictions of their own).
Dunn’s judgments of Roman women are on the whole sympathetic, but even she slips into language tinged with pejorative connotations
It should be said that Dunn’s judgments of Roman women are on the whole sympathetic, but even she slips into language tinged with pejorative connotations. Julia the Elder had a “brazen spirit,” while her much-maligned mother, Scribonia, was supposedly “frosty.” In fact, Scribonia had good reason to resent her treatment by Octavian, who was flagrantly unfaithful while she was pregnant, and divorced her on the very day she gave birth to their daughter. The only evidence against Scribonia that Dunn offers is a remark by the philosopher Seneca, who was all of four years old when the spurned ex-wife courageously volunteered to accompany her daughter into exile.
Dunn’s tendency to go beyond the facts contained in surviving sources surfaces in a curious passage about Julia’s daughter, known to history as Julia the Younger, who was also banished to a remote island. “The younger Julia, it seems, had been plotting to rescue her mother and brother from exile,” Dunn writes. But there is no evidence for this proposition, which links a half-baked conspiracy mentioned by the historian Suetonius to the severe punishment imposed by the Emperor on his grand-daughter.
The two putative conspirators, described as a feeble old man who was being prosecuted for forgery and a half-Parthian accomplice (whom Suetonius rudely describes as ibrida, translating roughly as hybrid or half-blood) weren’t taken seriously by the historian, and he certainly never connected them to Julia’s exile, which was much more likely due to Augustus’s rage about an affair that had resulted in an extra-marital pregnancy; so angry was the Emperor, in fact, that he ordered the murder of his own great-grandchild. We’re back in the factually shaky territory of Enheduanna, who may have been the earliest named poet—or may not even have existed.
Dunn’s massive project, the culmination of fifteen years’ research, is laudable in intent, and fills in gaps in histories written by and about men. But no historian can escape the bounds set by the available sources. And it’s impossible to change the fact that, with scattered exceptions, the women of the ancient world typically lived and died without leaving much of a trace. Certainly, the author’s claim that women “are the authors of our history” is an unfulfilled wish, not an arguable thesis. This is but one reason why the true extent of the abuse that women have suffered in every age—including our own—is only beginning to be recognised.
