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 480BC, and the Graeco-Persian Wars were raging. The Persians had amassed a vast fleet and it was anchored off Thessaly in eastern Greece, waiting for a great storm to blow through.
Hydna and her father were waiting too. Then 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 fleet. No-one saw them approach the ships. No-one saw them cut, one by one, the anchor ropes. Untethered, the ships were at the mercy of the wild winds racing down from Mount Pelion. It was the winds that did the damage. The ships smashed into one another, wrecking hulls and rowing decks. By the time the storm, and Hydna’s work, was done, it is said some 300 lay on the sea floor.
Not much else is known about Hydna, but her story speaks to much about the experience of women in antiquity: great labours invisibly undertaken, lives little recorded and less remembered. But it is entirely apt for Daisy Dunn’s new book The Missing Thread, which, as its subtitle suggests, aims to be not so much a women’s history as a “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 range is vast, roughly stretching from the Bronze Age and Minoan Crete to Boudica’s rebellion in AD 60; it is packed with forgotten or neglected women like Hydna. And while the title may be singular, this is in fact a story with many threads.
Some connect women across distances. The thirteenth-century BC Hittite queen Pudahepa corresponded with Nefertiti in Egypt and received jewellery and clothes in return. Salome, sister of Herod the Great, wrote to Livia, wife of Augustus Caesar, for marital advice; when Salome died, her bequest to Livia included several cities.
But more often threads connect women across time. 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, sixth-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.
If women’s roles were much more typically domestic – weaving and baking dominate – that didn’t sequester them from the outside world. Far from it: the resulting narrative emphasis on interior spaces opens up the classical world in fresh and suggestive ways. Women’s influence was rarely formally constructed, but it was real nonetheless. Those private places away from the public gaze were where intimate conversation happens: bedrooms, ante chambers, temple precincts. Again and again Dunn shows us women guiding and shaping their world, from Atossa, wife of the Persian emperor Darius and mother of his successor Xerxes, nudging imperial ambitions westward towards Greece, to Servilia, mistress to Julius Caesar and mother of the Brutus who helped kill him, manipulating the Senate to help her son in the immediate aftermath. We should note too the role of the Pythia, the oracular priestess at Delphi sought out for counsel by all and sundry for centuries.
Dunn moves deftly in out and of myth, particularly in the early centuries of her account, allowing us to see women in history 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 the Roman republic, “she remained a central figure in historical accounts.” And when myth and history intersect, the effect is powerful indeed.
Rome itself was built on not one, but two rape myths: the city’s very foundation was cemented by the seizure of the Sabine women to help Roman men populate their new city. It is said that Romulus divided the tribes of Rome into thirty curiae, or wards, each of which bore the names of Sabine women. “Most of these, too, have been lost,” Dunn writes. “But one, devastatingly, was simply ‘Rapta’ – ‘The Seized Woman’.”
On Sicily, meanwhile, Syracuse was a city “steeped in myths of women in flight”: two of its harbours harboured springs said to derive from two nymphs, Arethusa and Cyane, who in different ways fought to prevent abductions and were metamorphosed, one to water, one to tears, by the gods as a result. Sappho came here, fleeing civil strife in Lesbos. The book itself is steeped in these terrors: forced migrations, enslavements, exile.
This is not just myth and history intersecting, then, but myth articulating a reality of women’s experience. Enheduanna, a Sumerian poet of the third millennium BC and the first named writer in the world, was both a priestess and daughter of a king. She too was raped, and wrote a hymn to her moon god calling down punishment on her assailant. Hers “was a mouth that could no longer speak yet refused to be silenced,” Dunn writes. It is a paradox that runs through these pages: voices struck dumb through every kind of violence that nonetheless demand to be heard.
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 explorations of claustrophobically intense familial and interpersonal dynamics, laced with division and rancour, rage and loathing – but also with grief and longing, fear and love. It is all so utterly and desperately human.
Ultimately, The Missing Thread 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 were often required to pay for it – sometimes literally. When Rome was faring badly in the Punic Wars, the Senate passed the a law requiring women to surrender part of their wealth – and to wear simpler clothes and behave with more propriety. They paid for it in sorrow, too, of course; there are all too many examples of that here.
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, but often tragic, history her resilient self-belief seems a kind of courage. Somehow it endures.
This is an extended version of a review that first appeared in The Spectator.
Mathew Lyons 