She must have been a powerful swimmer. Her name was Hydna and she grew up in the port town of Scione on the northern coast of the Aegean. It was 480 BC, and the Graeco-Persian Wars were raging. The Persian fleet was anchored off Thessaly in eastern Greece, waiting for a great storm to blow through.
Hydna and her father were waiting too. When night fell they dived off the harbour wall and into the dark, cold sea. For hours, the two of them swam towards the Persian ships. No one saw them approaching. No one saw them cut, one by one, the anchor ropes. Untethered, the ships were at the mercy of the storm. They smashed into one another, wrecking hulls and rowing decks. By the time calm returned, some 300 lay on the sea floor.
Little more is known about Hydna, but her story reveals much about the experience of women in antiquity: great labours invisibly undertaken, lives little recorded and less remembered. It is an entirely appropriate tale for Daisy Dunn’s new book, The Missing Thread, whichaims to be not so much a women’s history as ‘a history of antiquity written through women’. The distinction is important and its effect revelatory: you might call the book an epic act of noticing.
Dunn’s narrative stretches roughly from the Bronze Age of Minoan Crete to Boudica’s rebellion in AD 60, and the breadth allows us to see continuities. Boudica, for example, emerges as merely the latest in a long line of women, typically from the margins of the classical world, who led armies into battle. Among them were Pheretime, the 6th century BC queen of Cyrene, on the coast of north Africa, who besieged the Libyan city of Barca; and Tomyris, queen of the nomadic Massagetae people on the shores of the Caspian, who defeated the Persian emperor Cyrus.
But if women’s roles were more usually domestic – weaving and baking dominate – that didn’t sequester them from the outside world. Women’s influence was rarely formally constructed, but it was real nonetheless. Those private places away from the public gaze were where intimate conversation took place – in bedrooms, ante chambers and temple precincts. Again and again, Dunn shows us women guiding and shaping their world. There is Atossa, the wife of the Persian emperor Darius and mother of his successor Xerxes, nudging imperial ambitions westward towards Greece. And there is Servilia, the mistress of Julius Caesar and the mother of the Brutus, who helped kill him, manipulating the Senate to support her son in the immediate aftermath of the murder. The Pythia, the oracular priestess at Delphi, was sought out for counsel by all and sundry for centuries.
Dunn moves deftly in out and of myth, allowing us to see women as antiquity itself saw them. ‘Whether Lucretia was based in history… or rather in myth,’ she writes of the woman whose rape by Tarquinius Sextus presaged the founding of the Roman republic, ‘she remained a central figure in historical accounts’. In Sicily, meanwhile, Syracuse was a city ‘steeped in myths of women in flight’: it harboured springs said to derive from two nymphs, Arethusa and Cyane, who in different ways fought to prevent abductions and were metamorphosed, one to a stream, one to tears, as a result. Sappho came here, fleeing strife in Lesbos. The book is steeped in such terrors: forced migrations, enslavements, exiles.
Reading Sappho, Dunn writes, ‘can make you feel like you are entering the space between two people caught in the middle of something’. That is often the experience of reading The Missing Thread, too: narratives of political and military ambition – the bloody internecine battles of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, for example – become more clearly explorations of intense familial and inter-personal dynamics, laced with division and rancour, rage and loathing – but also grief and longing, loyalty and love. It is all so utterly and desperately human.
Ultimately, the book asks the question: what does it mean to participate in history? The battlefield may have been a male domain – exceptions notwithstanding – but was war not also a female experience, a female reality? Women had to pay for it, sometimes literally. When Rome was faring badly in the Punic Wars, the Senate passed a law requiring women to surrender part of their wealth, to wear simpler clothes and behave with more propriety. They paid for it in sorrow, too, and there are many examples of that.
Throughout, Dunn makes deft use of archaeological discoveries and other material remains. One in particular sticks in the mind. She writes about a bronze Etruscan mirror bearing an image of a young man and a young woman. Both are naked from the waist up. They play a table game somewhat like backgammon. ‘I’m going to win,’ the woman says. The man agrees – but it is her you remember. In the midst of this wholly compelling, often tragic history, her self-belief seems a kind of courage. Somehow it endures.
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