Vestal virgins and wandering wombs: women’s lives in Greece and Rome

“Women were invented to make men’s lives more difficult.” With characteristic style and wit, Daisy Dunn opens her new book by quoting Hesiod. As this misogynistic Greek farmer-poet put it in his Works and Days, some time around 700BC, “let no woman deceive your mind with her shapely bottom and wheedling conversation – it’s your barn she is seeking.” Avarice was only part of the problem, apparently, along with gluttony, drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, superstition, lack of foresight and irrationality. Women were descended from Pandora, and she had the mind of a treacherous dog, because Zeus had created her as a punishment for men.

Women, gender and sexuality in the Classical world have been the subjects of much scholarly endeavour in recent years. Many of the results have been turgidly unreadable, sometimes driven more by contemporary Western concerns rather than a desire to illuminate the past; a few exhibit an insane evangelistic fervour, as if studying ancient sexuality will somehow lead to a modern bedroom utopia. In The Missing Thread, Dunn wisely avoids being drawn into this strange looking-glass world. “This is not a book about women,” she writes, “but a history of antiquity written through women.”

As such, this is mainstream history – political, social, economic and cultural – that doesn’t pretend that men weren’t almost always in charge, but rather pushes the Alexanders and Caesars slightly to the sides, so that “light may fall on the clearing to reveal the women in their shadow”. So Dunn’s telling of the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome (218-201BC) focuses on Imilce, Hannibal’s wife; Busa, who provided aid to the Romans defeated at Cannae; the Oppian Law that limited the freedom of Roman women; the condemnation of two vestal virgins for lapsed vows; Claudia Quinta, who proved her chastity by miraculously towing the ship bringing the Great Goddess Cybele to Rome; Sophonisba, the Carthaginian woman who brought the Numidians into the war; and the female protests that led to the Oppian Law’s repeal.

The Missing Thread is a bold and ambitious book. Although centred on the Greeks and Romans, it looks at many other peoples, including the Etruscans and Persians, occasionally stretching even to the Chinese, and reaches back as far as the Sumerians, Hittites and Minoans. (The latter, Dunn writes, are “the best candidate for a matriarchy – if one ever existed”.) Being the author of In the Shadow of Vesuvius, which made even the bookish life of Pliny the Younger exciting, it’s unsurprising that Dunn fills The Missing Thread with brilliantly drawn pen-portraits. Alongside a sensitive reading of her poetry, Sappho of Lesbos emerges as proud, snobbish, jealous, affectionate and utterly brilliant. It’s good to be told that no one could have taken seriously the later (male) tradition that gave the original lesbian a husband called Kerkulas of Andros – literally, “C-ck from the Isle of Man”.

Everyone who has read about the ancient world knows that most women spent most of their time weaving. It is a brilliant insight that, as the Fates weaved the life of mortals, this was a constant reminder of the inescapability of death. Similarly, the advice of male doctors that women should have penetrative sex regularly – if not “watered” by semen, the womb was liable to wander about inside a woman’s body seeking moisture, leading to madness or death – is described drily as “opportunistic”.

Women in Greece and Rome seem to have received a worse deal than their peers in other ancient cultures. Etruscan girls were given a personal name, and mothers were named on the tombs of men. The latter never happened in Rome, and daughters all carried the family name, with a number if there was more than one: Claudia, Claudia Secunda, Claudia Tertia and so on. Persian women, although categorised by Western writers as living the ultimate secluded life, actually could own property, trade, and travel on their own, unlike female Greeks.

Paradoxically, in regimes where more men had more freedom, like the Athenian democracy, women were subject to more restrictions. Only in monarchies, and to a lesser extent oligarchies, did some Greek and Roman women have a public profile and political influence. (Although it must be noted that this applied to only a very few women of the elite, only existed because of their relationships with the men of their families, and was thoroughly resented by other men.)

The Missing Thread is a wonderful book: informative, thought provoking, and a pleasure to read. The only regret is that it stops with Acte, the mistress of Nero, gathering his ashes in AD 68. It would have been good to see Dunn take on the women of later antiquity. Did Faustina, the wife of Marcus Aurelius, have sex with a gladiator, or was she the paragon of modesty portrayed by her husband’s propaganda? And did the terrifying Syrian women from Emesa (modern Homs) rule the empire over the heads of their absent or inadequate menfolk? Another book to answer these questions would be welcome indeed.

Harry Sidebottom’s books include The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome. The Missing Thread is published by W&N at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books